I’m taking a Shakespeare course this semester. The first play we had to read was “The Taming of the Shrew.” The second play is “Romeo & Juliet.”
I HATE “Romeo & Juliet”!!!
To pass my professor’s quizzes, I have to read the play at least twice, and watch it at least twice. I have to make sure I know all the characters and how they interact. I have to know any little odd bits of trivia that I can pull out of the play.
I’d rather clean the toilet. I’d rather go to the dentist. I’d rather read “Antony & Cleopatra” (the only other play of his that I dislike).
My sister just got cast as the female lead in “The Water Engine,” and at the end her character dies a most unpleasant death. I told her that before she was mutilated and murdered, she was tortured by having to read R&J. She hit me.
I wonder if I can talk him into dropping our lowest quiz grade, and then I can skip reading it. Nah.
So if anyone has anything illuminating to say that might change my perception, I’d love to hear it.
Romeo’s an idiot and Juliet could have done much better. An appropriate retitling of this play would be “Hormones Run Amuck.” I hate this play and everyone in it, with one exception: Mercutio who was killed in the third act. Great play, Shakepeare. :rolleyes:
Oh wait…you wanted me to change your perception? Sorry. No can do.
I fell for the whole “star crossed lovers” tripe for a long time until I sat down and really thought through this whole play.
Two 13 year olds meet each other and decide they’re madly in love after 5 minutes together. So they decide they’re going to kill themselves rather than be seperated for even one single solitary second.
But they’re 13 year olds. If they had just waited another week, both of them would have been on new crushes and Romeo, when asked about his former wife, would have said “Juliet who?”
But they didn’t. They died. Do you see the tears welling up in my eyes over this tragedy? Do you?
Tell your teacher to read Hamlet. It’s better than this crap.
Damnit, I was supposed to convince you R&J was good, huh?
Actually, I think it’s a great play for exactly the reasons people are knocking it. No, it ain’t about star-crossed lovers; that shallow characterization dogs the play and creates much ill will toward it, because on that level, it doesn’t work at all.
Rather, I think the play is about the stupidity of being governed by fleeting passions, which just about everybody in the story is. The tragedy, to me, is not that these two young lovers were perfect for each other, and the big bad world conspired to destroy them; I think the tragedy is that the town of Verona is populated by hotheads who act rashly before thinking. Sort of the opposite of the Hamlet problem, in other words.
As just one example, let’s look at some excerpts from Act 4, Scene IV.
At this point, the Friar enters and cuts short all the wailing and breast-beating.
Now, call me crazy, but if I ever get the chance to direct this play, I’m going to try the scene above as comedy. Dark comedy, yes, but still comedy. Shakespeare’s characters normally are blessed with extraordinary literary gifts at their moments of highest emotional crisis; but in this scene, they just go on, and on, and on, “Oh, poor us, boo hoo,” and so on. It’s quite atypical for Shakespeare to give his characters over to unbridled lamentation, and it means something.
And note that the tail end of this scene is the mysterious “musician’s argument,” in which the house band, having witnessed the family’s display, bickers about whether or not it would be a good idea to play something happy to cheer people up, and comes close to getting into a fight (“Then will I lay the serving-creature’s dagger on your pate!” / “Pray you, put up your dagger, and put out your wit”). This scene is almost invariably cut when the play is produced, because it’s a bunch of minor characters who don’t do much else in the story, and most people have no idea why it’s even there. For my part, I think it underlines what I see as the major theme of the play: This horrible tragedy just happened, and even the servants can’t help but get into a fistfight over it.
More evidence: Romeo pines for Rosaline at the beginning of the play. Then he sees Juliet, and Rosaline is forgotten. The star-crossed-lovers interpretation says that Rosaline was a fling, and Juliet is the real deal; I say Juliet is just the latest obsession for a 15-year-old gadabout. (When Romeo confesses this to the Friar, the Friar famously responds, “Holy Saint Francis, what a change is here! / Is Rosaline, whom thou didst love so dear, / So soon forsaken? young men’s love then lies / Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.” And later in the scene, he calls Romeo “young waverer.”)
In a subsequent scene, the Friar informs Romeo that he’s been banished, and Romeo, to put it kindly, freaks out. The Friar tries to calm him down, and says, “This is dear mercy, and thou seest it not.” Par for the course for the young hellion, no?
And later in that scene, after the Nurse comes with news of Juliet (note her description: “O, she says nothing, sir, but weeps and weeps; / And now falls on her bed; and then starts up, / And Tybalt calls; and then on Romeo cries, / And then down falls again” – how is that not hilarious?), the Friar yells at Romeo for his inability to pay attention: “Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art: / Thy tears are womanish; thy wild acts denote / The unreasonable fury of a beast: / Unseemly woman in a seeming man! / Or ill-beseeming beast in seeming both! / Thou hast amazed me: by my holy order, / I thought thy disposition better temper’d.”
And what’s the very first line in the play? “Two households, both alike in dignity,” which is to say, with irony, no dignity at all. And the scene that follows, the first actual scene in the play, is about testosterone-fueled thugs attacking each other like animals in the street.
Seriously, I suggest you read the play again, and take note of how many people are incapable of flying off the handle at the least provocation, and cannot master their emotions. If nothing else, I guarantee you a unique angle for the inevitable term paper or class discussion, and there’s nothing a teacher likes more than a new approach to a much-hashed-over subject.
The “star-crossed lovers” angle isn’t, in itself, the tragedy in Romeo and Juliet. The tragedy is the pig-headedness of the Capulet and Montague families, and the suicide of their children is the climax of that tragedy.
Um, and there’s some really cute, if archaic, flirtatious wordplay in the costume party scene.
My 12-year-old daughter, who is still firmly in the “Eww, boys?” stage, is being forced to read R & J as well. I don’t know why teachers are so fond of the thing - because it’s short, maybe?
I think most people get off on the wrong foot with R&J because they think it is a love story. It’s not (as has been stated above). It’s a story of two kids who think they are in love. Try approaching it that way and watch its validity.
Shakespeare does a great job of capturing the reality of a pair of teens (it is especially true today where we let teens think they can be in love before they lose their baby teeth) who are in love with the idea of being in love and are not necessarily in love at all.
Look at Romeo at the beginning of the play. He his wandering around mumbling about this girl he is hopelessly in love with and can’t possibly live without. Is it Juliet? No, of course not. She hasn’t even hit the stage yet. Romeo is ga-ga over Roxanne, a girl who wants nothing to do with him because he is so childishly obsessed with her. His friends and even Friar Lawrence give him grief about this, but does he listens to them? Nope! He’s convinced he knows what love is about, and it’s all about Roxanne - well, at least until he happens across another girl at a badly lit party.
As for Juliet, she is a bit more rational than Romeo at least early on, but in the long run, she too is caught up in Romeo’s pretty words and even prettier ideas. Don’t go at it as a love story. Go at it as an inditement of the stupidity of teens and their posturing so effectively that they convince themselves they know what they are doing, and given the chance will completely screw up any situation (I mean Friar Lawrence’s plan really would have worked if Friar John would have got the word to him - but did Romeo check with Lawrence. Nope, typical teen).
Does Tybalt really have a conflict with the house of Montague, or is he just posturing to show off to his teenage friends? The only person who is mildly together is Mercutio and most agree he’s either mildly mad or pretty drunk (or both).
On second thought Benvolio is pretty together. But of course, absolutely no one listens to him at any time in the play - not Tybalt, not Romeo, not Mercutio, not the servants. I’m amazed he can get a drink at a local tavern. He must feel like Charlie Brown or something.
Really, going at it in this direction can make it down right fun and not half so smarmy.
But it’s not like the adults in the play are any wiser – I mean, who do you think started the feud? Sure, it’s the younger generation that keeps it going (Tybalt does more than anyone to maintain it, and according to the text he’s the son of Lady Capulet’s brother, and hence not a blood relative of the Capulets at all!), but they had to learn it somewhere…
rereads thread Erm, yeah. What Internet Legend said.
I actually love the play – it was the first Shakespeare I read, and you never forget your first – even if I have to admit that I’m now in the middle of studying it for the fourth time and consequently am beginning to tire of it a bit. But there’s some great stuff in it, and some positively beautiful language:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea;
My love as deep: the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.
Incidentally – I don’t think this is the language of teenage infatuation. Although I’ve got a class to go to and can’t go on about that at length.
BTW, Shakespeare’s main source for R&J was a ponderous poem called The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet, translated from the Italian by Arthur Brooke. Brooke’s preface to the poem says something very similar to what Cervaise says – he calls it a cautionary tale. Although the poem itself (what I’ve read of it) doesn’t overtly present itself as such at all, so it may partly be the translator apologizing for his material.
I generally stop reading Romeo and Juliet after Mercutio and Tybalt are killed, being that they are, in my opinion, the most likeable characters in the entire play.
Tybalt is just interesting in terms of his motivations and prejudices. He’s a nice character study.
I always was able to relate fairly easily to Mercutio. He is at once philosophical and witty. He has a full range of emotions. He seems the most real to me, I guess. And the Queen Mab speech kicks ass and takes names. Heh.
But on the opposite end of the scale [quality-wise] . . .
Hamlet is fabulous. It’s definitely one of Shakespeare’s best works. Up there with Titus Andronicus.
Alternatively, you could consider a more psychological interpretation: that Romeo and Juliet is a cautionary tale about trying to reconcile disparate aspects of one’s psyche (male and female, spirit and body, or what have you) before you have achieved spiritual maturity and brought some degree of peace to your internal contradictions.
Although an impulsive union may be exhilarating, it can also be very dangerous. The Latin American folk tale La Llorona has a similar theme, as I’m sure do the folk tales of many other cultures.
You guys rock! Thanks for giving me some other aspects to focus on as I wade my way through it.
Honestly, I recognize and appreciate the beauty of the poetry in this play. But I’ve always been so sickened by the rest of it that it’s been very much a chore for me to get through.
Cervaise, I love your idea about directing it as a comedy! You’ve given me a lot to think about. Thank you.
I’m afraid I must respectfully disagree – the play can come across that way to a modern audience, but that’s because we have fundamentally different ideas about teenagers and love. Shakespeare’s contemporaries were much less suspicious of “love at first sight” than we are now – most Renaissance love poetry treats the idea completely seriously. While teenaged marriages weren’t the norm in Shakespeare’s England, they did happen, and it seems likely that the original audience would have felt that Romeo and Juliet were old enough to know their own minds.
Still, what the play says to us now is at least as important as what it would have said to people then, so I won’t say the interpretations in this thread are wrong; just realize that the Elizabethans wouldn’t necessarily have seen it that way.
Y’know, when you’re trying to be sarcastic, it helps to include a smilie. You were trying to be sarcastic, right? I was about to use Titus to prove that R&J wasn’t, in fact, Shakespeare’s worst play.
Oh come on, Chronos.Titus is sort of fun in a lurching, leering grand guignol sort of way.
If I were to name Shakespeare’s worst play – or, in my mind, the play that scores the lowest on the combined entertainment/importance scale – I’d go for a trifle, like The Merry Wives of Windsor (written at the request of the Queen, who loved Falstaff; and people say the influence of the box office is a new thing :rolleyes: ), or an abandoned train wreck, like Timon of Athens.
According to one of the people who taught this to me, when Romeo is pining for Rosaline, he uses cliche. Cliche after cliche after cliche after cliche after cliche of how people in love are supposed to sound. When you compare it to the words he uses for Juliet which are fresh and extemporaneous and not merely repetitions of what he’s heard before. It supposedly shows the difference between how he felt with Rosaline and how he feels toward Juliet, and this is of course lost to us as his words to Juliet have now, 400 years later, become cliche.
But I’m not sure I buy it and still don’t really like the play.
You know, Harold Bloom would probably agree with you on Merry Wives, since his chapter on it in The Invention of the Human is mostly devoted ranting about “pseudo-Falstaff.” (Though I’ll also mention his point that it can’t be entirely worthless, as it inspired Verdi’s Falstaff, which is a terrific opera. Also, I don’t think the story about the queen’s request to see Falstaff in love is true.)
Now, if you’d mentioned Henry VI among Shakespeare’s worst we’d have an argument brewing. (Although, as those plays were very likely Shakespeare’s first you can’t say they’re not important!)
And count me among those who like Titus Andronicus. It’s a fascinating play. My personal least favorite (not counting the ten or so I haven’t read, of course, and acknowledging that “least favorite” != “worst”) is Julius Caesar, but that’s more a matter of personal taste: I know it’s not a bad play, but I don’t really enjoy it (although I saw a production a few years ago that I really liked).
BTW, the link to the dachschund Timon doesn’t work – I’ve seen it before, and it’s a great site, and I’d rather like to see it again.
Romeo and Juliet is not about lurve. It’s about sword fighting.
Our group of SCA rapier fencers has gone to The Offspring’s school more than once to demo the different fighting styles used in that period, with notes on Shakespeare’s references to same. Each character has a style to fit his personality. Tybalt, cat-like, who “fights by the numbers”, a “slayer of buttons”, apparently uses the cerebral and meticulous Spanish style. (Boo, hiss!) Mercutio, mouthy, spoiling for a fight, uses the low and aggressive Italian style. Romeo, the hero and the Great Lovair, uses the flamboyant and passionate French style. Benvolio, the Voice of Reason, fights like a proper gentleman should, in the English style, of course. It’s great fun.
As to the incidental mushy parts: ‘tis true, as the Porpentine observes, that there was no concept of “teenagers” at the time, but I’m not sure about the attitude to “love”. I’m not familiar enough with Renaissance love poetry to derive an opinion from it, but I do know that the cult of Courtly Love which preceded it concerned itself with very stylized expressions of devotion and did not advocate giving in to ill-considered passion. I wouldn’t be surprised if, while treating the idea of “love at first sight” seriously, it nevertheless expected the expression of it to be “pure and chaste from afar.” So, while R & J would have been considered old enough to know their minds, their passion put them out of their minds. I agree that the general message appears not to be “Ain’t love grand?” but “’Ware passion. ‘Twill kill you.”
Romeo and Juliet is not about lurve. It’s about sword fighting.
Our group of SCA rapier fencers has gone to The Offspring’s school more than once to demo the different fighting styles used in that period, with notes on Shakespeare’s references to same. Each character has a style to fit his personality. Tybalt, cat-like, who “fights by the numbers”, a “slayer of buttons”, apparently uses the cerebral and meticulous Spanish style. (Boo, hiss!) Mercutio, mouthy, spoiling for a fight, uses the low and aggressive Italian style. Romeo, the hero and the Great Lovair, uses the flamboyant and passionate French style. Benvolio, the Voice of Reason, fights like a proper gentleman should, in the English style, of course. It’s great fun.
As to the incidental mushy parts: ‘tis true, as the Porpentine observes, that there was no concept of “teenagers” at the time, but I’m not sure about the attitude to “love”. I’m not familiar enough with Renaissance love poetry to derive an opinion from it, but I do know that the cult of Courtly Love which preceded it concerned itself with very stylized expressions of devotion and did not advocate giving in to ill-considered passion. I wouldn’t be surprised if, while treating the idea of “love at first sight” seriously, it nevertheless expected the expression of it to be “pure and chaste from afar.” So, while R & J would have been considered old enough to know their minds, their passion put them out of their minds. I agree that the general message appears not to be “Ain’t love grand?” but “’Ware passion. ‘Twill kill you.”
Also, I don’t think the story about the queen’s request to see Falstaff in love is true.)
(Although, as those plays were very likely Shakespeare’s first you can’t say they’re not important!)