[QUOTE=olivesmarch4th]
Am I the only person who hopes Shakespeare wrote ‘‘Romeo and Juliet’’ totally tongue-in-cheek? They were a couple starry-eyed horny adolescents in luuuuuurve. I feel like that is what is truly tragic about this drama… the fact that they both died from what was essentially puppy love.
Am I the only one who reads it this way?
[/QUOTE]
No, you’re not the only one who reads it this way, but I think you have to remember a) that Renaissance audiences were a great deal more willing to believe in love at first sight than we are; and b) while the two protagonists marry at a considerably younger age than most non-aristocratic Elizabethans would have done, the play was nevertheless written in a culture that infantilized teenagers much less than we do today.
[QUOTE=ivylass]
*Hamlet * was censored for us. We were reading along in the book while the teacher played a record (yes, it was that long ago) and we all became confused because the book wasn’t matching what was on the record.
I think it was the part where Hamlet told Ophelia to “get thee to a nunnery” or some such thing. Basically, he was telling her to get to a whorehouse.
Shakespeare was pretty raunchy, if you knew what he was saying. “All cats at night are black” indeed.
[/QUOTE]
I now feel it necessary to share the story of the Hamlet with Mel Gibson screening in my high school English class as we read the book. My teacher felt it necessary to fast-forward through a particularly graphic scene of two characters screwing one another’s brains out… which only of course resulted in them screwing even faster which caused the entire class to erupt into hysterical laughter. Ah, to be young again…
[QUOTE=SSG Schwartz]
Wow, I never thought I would see the day a female appreciated Hamlet. That is the ultimate dude story. Guy wants to go to college, has to kill, has a chick that he wants to get it on with and doesn’t know how, kills some people and and in the meantime convinces his GF she is a whore and causes her to kill herself.
I have a new appreciation for you, olivesmarch4th.
[/QUOTE]
Thanks. The only character I really liked in Romeo and Juliet was the priest. In high school we had to perform a portion of the play and I chose the scene between Romeo and the Priest. I thought the Tragedy of Julius Caesar was way better but I really didn’t get why Shakespeare was so great until I read Hamlet. I’ve yet to read MacBeth… but this thread has inspired me to brush up on my Shakespeare.
[QUOTE=olivesmarch4th]
Am I the only person who hopes Shakespeare wrote ‘‘Romeo and Juliet’’ totally tongue-in-cheek? They were a couple starry-eyed horny adolescents in luuuuuurve. I feel like that is what is truly tragic about this drama… the fact that they both died from what was essentially puppy love.
Am I the only one who reads it this way?
Hamlet is so totally better.
[/QUOTE]
That was the point.
To me, the tragedy was that Mercutio & Tybalt had to die, too.
[QUOTE=ivylass]
[I think it was the part where Hamlet told Ophelia to “get thee to a nunnery” or some such thing. Basically, he was telling her to get to a whorehouse.
[/QUOTE]
While that meaning did exist in Shakespeare’s time, the quote is:
That indicates a place where women are not having sex – a convent. Hamlet goes on to say:
Clearly he is telling Ophelia not to have children, so the nunnery = brothel makes no sense in context. (Though bill may have chosen the word for its double meaning.)
More risque is the exchange:
If you missed it (spoiler to keep it PG):
“country matters” = cunt-try matters
But, as the poet said:
course jocosity
captures the crowd
shakespeare and i
are often low browed
[QUOTE=WoodenTaco]
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, of course. Maybe it helped me that my 9th grade English teacher started on the book saying “This is not a sappy love story. It’s a brutal war story about two dumb kids who have no clue what they’re doing, and anyone who uses Romeo and Juliet as an example of perfect love has no clue what they are talking about.”
You just need to take yourself out of the preconceived understanding of the play as a love story.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, I knew it was a tragedy, though I guess that’s not really what I said when I posted! In school, the first three plays I read were Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello. While I’ve read others since, I guess I tend to lump those three together as the “tragedies” (that was the name of the course, too!) and then there’s “all the others”!
Now that I think about it more, I think I dislike R&J because it’s become somewhat of a cliché. On its own, it’s a very good story, but I think I’ve just seen so many movie and book and theatre “adaptations” or “inspired by”'s that I’m sick of the plotline. I think I felt it was predictable when I first read it because I’d already seen the story in other forms.
[QUOTE=Rysto]
Mercutio I’ll give you, but Tybalt? He totally deserved to die.
[/QUOTE]
I think you may have been influence by the many screen adaptations that depict Tybalt as just an insufferable prig. While he didn’t have Mercutio’s rough-hewn charm, he was still a victim a brainless teen-age hormones.
That’s all R&J was, the story of brain-less teenage hormones run amok. Hell, they met because of stupid testosterone inspired prank.
And does anyone remember Romeo’s previous girl-friend? “Well-born” young men still do not just dump women for whom they have demonstrated a publicly recognized partiality; but R just dumped that poor girl, and damaged her reputation [the only thing of value a woman could ‘own’] just for a newer model.
Juliet? Sweet, passionate, and less intelligent than my cat. Or my dog. Or, hell, my patio.
Some one needed to take those kids aside, and talk to them about hormones, lust, true loves, and economic and political stability. That damned fool priest should have tried to arrange a political marriage between the houses.
But then we would not have had such poetry to grace our cynical lives.