Are Romeo and Juliet really supposed to be seen as in love?

Cafe Society
41

That whooshing sound you hear is the question itself flying over the head of a guy who never had to learn how to read to get an engineering degree[sup]1[/sup].

I just saw Romeo & Juliet last week, but it was Prokofiev’s ballet. It really loses something without the dialog; you don’t get any sense of the subtleties and ambiguities that are being discussed in this thread. Been too long since I actually read the play.

  1. The literature requirements for the engineering school were much less challenging than my junior year of high school.
42

I cannot agree. The fulcrum is in the tragedy of the idiots behaving like idiots and getting themselves and others killed for it. Indeed, I think that the play has less impact if you are correct – we feel sorry that the kids were thinking with their loins, but that’s it – pity. Whereas when we know it was all about the couple being in love with the notion of love, it’s agonizing that they could throw their lives away. (YMMV, of course.) When else has Shakespeare written a hero as heroic as you would have Romeo be, fighting the good fight?

I think that it’s implausible to think that Shaespeare would have such an uncritical view of romantic love. I’m getting pretty far from the text, but it’s easy to believe his marriage was not a happy one (or at least not passionately so), and if he was romantically in love with anyone, the mores of the time, I wager, made it a painful relationship nonetheless given the sneaking about and guilt which would accompany it.

–Cliffy

43

I’d call it sordid and pointless rather than agonizing, myself. Anyway, he wrote that play too; it’s called Troilus and Cressida, and it is not precisely a tragedy (though nobody has ever really been able to work out what it is – does “satirical-romantical-historical” count as a genre?) And it worked, more or less, but mostly because the byplay among the secondary characters carries the play.

In Romeo and Juliet, the poetry carries the play, most of it spoken by the two young lovers. If there are no genuine feelings behind it, there’s a huge vacuum at the play’s core.

44

Hijack, of a slight nature: it’s lumped in with the other problem plays, and they’re either called “romances” or tacked onto the comedies, depending on who’s editor.

Some problem plays, like The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, really do deserve to belong to the comedies, but Troilus and Cressida really is a problem. It’s not a comedy, because it doesn’t end happily, it doesn’t fit into the history cycle of English kings Shakespeare wrote about, and it’s not a tragedy because neither of the main protagonists dies.

45

That’s my point. It certainly is pointless. And yet they are dead of it.

–Cliffy

46

I couldn’t agree more. If it isn’t love, what’s the point of the whole thing? That rash action and poor choices lead to a bad end. Please! That is, and I don’t mean to offend, just not worthy of Willie. This show is somewhat about that, but it is about finding love and being true to it in spite of a world that won’t value it. Friar Lawence values it (I agree that the reconciliation of the two houses is in his mind) but that isn’t the be all and end all for him. It is a rare love that fights against all odds to be. It stuggles and ultimately fails, but is always true to itself.

It may not be his best work, but it is certainly more than a moral about bad choices and hot headedness.

47

I don’t think it’s either-or, actually. While the overarching theme of the play is, indeed, about rash, over-emotional choices and actions (as proved by looking at commonalities of behavior between the two leads and the supporting cast, and by the running themes in the poetry), it’s quite possible to see a genuinely loving relationship between R&J. Fretful Porpentine’s note about the quality of the poetry is a good one, especially set against the “O, O, O, O” stuff I observed above.

I think it breaks down like this: At the start of the play, everybody’s blinded by their own emotional overreactions and is stuck inside their own worldviews, R&J included. When they meet, they lunge at one another, but there is a legitimate connection between them (the shared sonnet). They’re not entirely out of their rut; witness Romeo’s suicidal tantrum in Lawrence’s cell.

However, the more time they spend together, the more they realize there’s actually something worthwhile there. The post-coital scene (“the nightingale and not the lark”) is just too playful, too genuine; it’s two people enjoying one another, rather than two disconnected individuals being lovey-dovey at one another.

And yet, they’re still given to rashness, to hotheaded overreaction. Romeo goes to the apothecary for the poison awfully quick, doesn’t he?

The tragedy, to me, centers neither on self-centered teens who stupidly blunder into death, nor on a pure, transcendant love destroyed by family hatred. Rather, it’s about the emergence of something that could rise above the chaos and transform the people involved, but that gets lost because everyone is still too trapped in old patterns and habits, and which winds up backfiring and making the situation dramatically worse.

48

Romeo and Juliet have risen from the grave in search of braiiiins! :smiley:

I’ve always loved this play, and I agree with the points Fretful Porpentine brought up–that this was an age when people believed true love happened at first sight (it may take suspension of disbelief, but if we can see the play through that lens it adds poignancy), that the quality of Romeo’s language when he talks about Rosaline and when he talks about Juliet is a clue to the depth of his feelings, and so on.

And the Asimov interpretation? I’ve read it myself, and although it’s interesting, I can’t ultimately buy into it. Asimov (based on that one scene at the party) concludes that the feud is a non-issue among anyone except servants and one or two malcontents, and wouldn’t be an issue except for Romeo and Juliet’s actions. Except that the prologue (supposedly an “objective” voice), describes “ancient grudge” and “new mutiny” the “fatal loins” of “foes”, not a dying-out feud.

What’s more, during the first brawl, Lords Capulet and Montague, supposedly the older, wiser heads of the family, don’t try to calm things down and talk sense into the young hotheads…they immediately try to get into it themselves, even though their wives try to stop them getting themselves killed. The Prince, a few minutes later, refers to several previous, recent brawls, “bred of an airy word/By thee, old Capulet and Montague.” Capulet later tells Paris that it’s not hard for old men like him to keep the peace, but it seems at odds with his earlier actions, and he might just be blowing smoke to make himself look good to his daughter’s suitor. (As we see later, when he commands Juliet’s marriage to Paris although he said earlier that he would take her wishes into account, he can be expected to say one thing and do another.)

Which leads us to that scene at the party where Capulet seems to have no problem with Romeo being under his roof. So why is that if the feud is so bad? Well, just a few hours ago the Prince told him “one more brawl and it’s your head,” and two kinsmen of the Prince are right there…kinsmen that can pass along word to the Prince that Capulet’s being a good boy and not making any trouble. (That may also help to explain why Capulet is so eager to marry Juliet to Paris once Mercutio, the Prince’s other kinsman, has been killed off in yet another brawl…anything to get back in the ruler’s good graces.)

I agree that it’s a little hard for modern audiences to suspend their disbelief, but if you can, you’re in for a treat. Still, there’s Beatrice and Benedick (from Much Ado) as an example that Shakespeare can do couples that are both romantic AND realistic. Beatrice and Benedick have known each other a long time (and it’s hinted that they had some prior involvement before Benedick got cold feet and backed off), know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, faults and virtues, and love each other deeply anyway.

49

College Shakespeare was a long time ago, but I’ll take a swing.

The first thing that occurs to me is that it depends on which audience you’re referring to. R & J are not adults by contemporary American standards, but they were of marriageable age by Elizabethan. No one in the play objects to their union simply because of their ages.

The second thing that comes to mind is that there are conventions of stagecraft to consider. Even today, romantic loves blossoms far more quickly and easily on stage than in real life; and of course there’s a common theme of love being something that is sent by the gods or by the fates rather than being a consequence of human psychology.

And it’s possible to enjoy the play while thinking R & J were foolish, or to think that despite their folly, they died because of the intransigence and folly of their elders, not their own failings.

50

I thought it was pretty obvious that Romeo instantly fell in love with Juliet because that was when Puck applied the potion to his eyes. He’s just lucky he didn’t look at a donkey in that moment.

51

Worse – he could have been looking at Tybalt. Now there’s some fanfic waiting to be written.

52

Slash with real slashes. Not sure how far I’d want to take that one…

53

It could be really short:

ROMEO: But Tybalt, I love thee, despite thy being a Capulet.

TYBALT: Damn you, Montague faggot! [Cuts Romeo’s throat.]

54

I’ve read several scholars with that take. Had Juliet listened to her parents she’d have had an arranged marriage but with a guy who seems to genuinely care about her and ultimately she and everybody else is happy; instead she and Romeo (who as mentioned was passionately in love the day before with Rosamund) listen only to their hearts and do as their passions dictate and… they and half the people they know wind up dead. You can see the merits of the theory that it’s almost a PSA about the dangers of basing a marriage on romantic love alone.

55

I still think the same thing I did six or seven years ago, but this time I’ll put it this way: the argument that Romeo and Juliet is anti-romance or that the leads are not in love is based on a plot summary of the play, not the play itself.

56

If you were married to Louis VII and Henry II you’d look askance at connubial love, too.

Every night as my young daughters lay sleeping I would whisper two things in their ears, “Elope,” and, “Stay away from Italian guys.” :wink:

57

+1

58

Or to Eleanor.

59

I don’t believe it’s anti-romance, but I can understand the thesis that romance alone is not enough to build a marriage/relationship/alliance on.

Marriage for love was certainly not unknown: Henry VIII made a comment, when he married Anne of Cleves I believe, that at least peasants were able to marry for love, and his sister supposedly was allowed to marry Charles Brandon for love as a reward for having married Louis XII first, BUT peasants didn’t have social obligations and property concerns, and Mary Tudor had done her duty first. And they are products of their class: it’s highly unlikely Romeo would have gone after the Maid’s daughter (had she lived), though he’ll almost certainly go after a peasant girl once Juliet has four kids in five years and loses her adolescent figure and doesn’t feel like reciting on balconies.

60

How about if they both kinda liked Breakfast at Tiffany’s?