Analysis of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

If you are reading this and don't know what Romeo and Juliet is, my condolences. You must not understand the many media and literary references to this story. It is a quintessential work taught in most American English classes as well. Here is where I get to be a stereotypical (not really) teen girl and gush about the importance of Romeo and Juliet, the genius that IS Shakespeare, the analysis and thoughts deeper into the story and connections, and the tragic beauty of the plot itself.

“Romeo and Juliet” was written in 1595 or 1596 and is often called the greatest love story of all time. I always thought it was very strange because the play features 1 off stage sex scene and like 7 on stage fatalities. Knowing that we consider this romance says quite a lot about humans.

To begin I’ll start with my quick review of the plot:

Romeo goes to a party trying to get over a girl he is completely obsessed with but then meets another girl Juliet and becomes obsessed with her. Their families hate each other but despite that (or possibly because of it) they fall madly in love and get married the next day. Immediately after that their families fight resulting in several fatalities, including Juliet’s cousin killed by Romeo. Romeo has to flee. Juliet takes a sleeping potion to avoid another marriage. Romeo returns, finds her sleeping, thinks she’s dead, and proceeds to kill himself via poison. She wakes up and then kills herself after whining that Romeo didn’t leave enough poison to kill her too. She dies in his (dead) arms and then the families end their feud. No wonder Disney hasn’t copied this yet.

Shakespeare set Romeo and Juliet in Verona, Italy and most of his plays were set outside of England. I mean would English lovers act like this? No, they would be too busy being pale and avoiding the rain and eating Sheppard’s pie and whatnot but apparently this is just what those Italians would do… Wink wink. If you're going to talk about morality and values, it’s much safer to set in faraway Italy. The stereotype of Italians as passionate and impulsive goes back a long way to well before Shakespeare and it justifies Romeo and Juliet’s actions.

Romeo and Juliet is a love story but it’s also a political story. The Montague and Capulet’s consistently ignore the proclamations of the prince of Verona. Arguably Romeo’s biggest hurdle to marrying Juliet is that the prince exiles him and promises to execute him should he return. Should you be loyal first to your own feelings or to your family or to your faith or your prince? These are not just questions of will that hot girl go out with me? they are in fact questions that were central to Elizabethan England at that time.

Most people don’t know this but Shakespeare didn’t actually invent the plot of Romeo and Juliet; BUT he made really important changes to it. The immediate source was a 3,000 line narrative poem called The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, Written by Arthur Brook in 1562. Shakespeare changed a lot of the names but more importantly he introduced a lot of narrative complexity. Brook called Romeus and Juliet a ‘couple of unfortunate lovers, thrilling themselves to unhonest desire, neglecting the authority and advice of parents and friends attempting all that the dangers of peril for the attaining of their wished lust… abusing the honourable name of lawful marriage’.

Basically it was an ordinary story about naughty teens receiving the standard punishment for their naughtiness. That punishment of course is death; even now if you live in any contemporary horror movie and you're a woman and you want to live to the end, you better be a virgin. Shakespeare however offers a much more compassionate portrait of Romeo and Juliet and encourages us to empathize with them. I mean Romeo and Juliet are obviously hot for each other but they’re really kind of polite about it. Also Shakespeare’s Juliet is much younger; in other versions she’s 16 or 18 but Shakespeare’s she’s only 13. It’s hard even in a profoundly misogynistic age it’s hard to see a 13 year old stab herself and be like ‘yeah! That floozy totally got what was coming to her!’

I know that the language is difficult but the slow pace of reading allows us to pay attention to the genius of Shakespeare’s language. If you stick with it you find yourself in Shakespeare’s world. Of course it had to be genius and enthralling because the performances were often over packed, hard to hear and see, and the guests often ate and drank and even taunted actors during the scenes. There was nothing to focus attention to the stage except the play itself. Shakespeare knew how to navigate between high and low culture. He knew how to amuse and entertain us while also grappling with big questions about honor and fate and duty and human frailty and the idea that something can be both fun and smart still resonates today. For example: Star-crossed lovers go all the way back in literature and they are very helpful for thinking about faith and free will; but also kind of sexy.

Does real love benefit from or maybe even require these kinds of obstacles to feel real? The play isn’t like a Yolo endorsement of following your heart because following your heart does get Romeo and Juliet killed in the end. The speed of the marriage is critiqued a lot in Romeo and Juliet but Shakespeare indicates that they really are in love at least in his mind. In their first conversation, they speak a total of 14 lines to each other which when combined, form a perfect Shakespearian sonnet.

It isn’t some random party hook-up. Romeo meets Juliet and they literally create instant poetry.

It’s worth paying attention to the ways Shakespeare messes around with iambic pentameter. The language has this underlying heartbeat and it’s a way of reflecting the natural rhythms of human speech and English while also heightening it. Shakespeare also uses inconsistencies in it to emphasize what he wants. Take for example the famous “Oh Romeo! Romeo where for art thou Romeo”

It should be iambic pentameter but something keeps messing it up: specifically Romeo’s name. If he were not named Romeo Montague there would be no issue in the line OR the play. Shakespeare literally subliminally indicates the issues with Romeo and Juliet’s love every time someone utters his name.

It’s also a tragedy of time. How little there is and how passion drives our youth to its death. In your life are you going to listen to what you want or your parents when they tell you what to want or the government when they tell you what you can't want? Romeo and Juliet ultimately die because they try to please all these forces in their lives. If they just did the nasty without marrying OR if they ran away together they might have survived. Their death is an over the top response to the unjust world in which they live and the patriarchal authority that controls them. They can never fully abandon or reject that authority and this is still a challenge for teenagers. They have to balance the intensity of their feeling against the expectations of the world around them.

If you have ever been young you know that feeling of being pulled in multiple directions while trying to find any kind of stable ground to stand. And you know what it’s like to want to live freely and fearlessly and maybe even a little rushed and foolishly. The really tragic thing is that you are just grown up enough for that kind of thinking to get you killed. Shakespeare’s gift to us gives voice to those embarrassing and maddening feelings and obstacles we all recognize.

(I haven't really edited this so I apologize for the lack of flow and multiple awkwardly worded parts.)

Worldsuck: Adoption pains and those evil enough to cause them

Earlier this week I met up with an old friend that goes to a college near where I live. One of our various topic conversations was her expressing the stress of her friend who is trying to adopt a foreign child. As our discussion progressed I too felt the frustrations and disappointments her friend has as if they were my own. My friend—let’s call her Sally, filled me in on her friend “Mary’s” situation.

Mary already has a toddler adopted from Guatemala a couple of years ago. She recently began the process of adopting another child from Guatemala about a year ago. In that period of time, however, the political situation in Guatemala had sort of declined down a long slope of mud. Sally told me that this type of situation always makes it so much harder to adopt children from that said region.

I asked why this was, because I assumed if a country was struggling like Guatemala, then many would be more motivated getting children out of the line of fire and into safe families. Sally agreed but also told me that if people went by that moral code, there wouldn’t be many wars or many orphans either. She, of course, is right.

We talked more and later that night I called up my dad to catch up as well. I told him the sad news from Sally about Mary. To my surprise, he took it, albeit with a grim demeanor, in his stride. He said it happens all the time.

Adopting children from troubled countries is stressful, risky, and very complicated. With a suspicious government, adoptive parents don’t know if the children they get are child prisoners of war or ones stolen from their families and sold like merchandise (Adopting a child is far from free). Also with untrustworthy supervisors of such adoptions, parents can never be too sure of the health of children. Many children with months to live, missing limbs, cancer, or other disabilities and illnesses are sent over with the intent that they die and parents adopt another doomed little one.

My dad even had an example in our own family. My cousin once removed was adopted during a bad time in North Korea. My dad’s aunt and uncle thought they were getting a young healthy little girl, and although surprised and confused when Kim, a malnourished and abused toddler came into their lives, they loved and cared for her all the same. But as Kim grew up, her adoptive parents realized the extent of the starvation and abuse Kim suffered in the short 18 months in North Korea. Kim couldn’t advance beyond a fourth grade knowledge level. The period of malnourishment and neglect killed her brains capacity to learn beyond that. Because of the messed up situation in North Korea at the time, someone in my family’s brain actually shut down and kept her from moving on completely from those forgotten months in Korean poverty.

All I can think when I remember this is: ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? Why does the world have to be that way! What kind of twisted people would think of doing something like that? Not only neglecting a child to such intensity, but abusing her and then selling her intending her to die? Even though there are good people in the world like my dad’s aunt and uncle, they can't make things all better. Not for Kim, not for anyone.

I can't stand feeling so helpless because I'm only 15 and I can't even get my friends to recycle. I need help. I want to help the world and help people like Kim, but I really can't by myself. And I look at my pile of world-suck that I know about and I feel so dejected. Where do I begin? How do I begin?