Romeo and Juliet

2016 Re-Read: Just wanted to note that a lot of people here on Goodreads seem to be horribly misinterpreting this work. It's categorized as a "tragedy" not a "romance". True, the two leads fall in love pretty easily, but they are, after all, teenagers. The story is about that heady, impetuous period in all our lives and just how dangerous it can be. It is not meant to be the love story to end all love stories and was never intended to be. Neither is it a satire, making fun of teenage longing. Shakespeare wouldn't have given some of the most beautiful and stirring speeches ever written expounding on love to his two leads if that were the case. Instead, the central focus here is on the hatred between the two families that keeps these show more lovers apart. Shakespeare's play warns us about the horrible alchemy caused when the passion of the teenage years converges with adult hatred and bigotry. Sadly, it's a lesson the world still has not fully learned.

2011 Re-Read: I've read this so many times throughout high school and college and it never gets old. How could you not give R&J five stars? It's pretty much a pinnacle of world literature. show less

This was the first Shakespeare play that I read as a Freshman in a small town Wisconsin high school about fifty years ago (doesn't seem that long). Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written relatively early in his career by playwright William Shakespeare about two young lovers whose deaths ultimately unite their feuding families. But upon rereading the play it seems that there is much more to it than this. Here are some lines from the chorus that opens the play:
"Two households, both alike in dignity
(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene),
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean."
(The Prologue, 1-4)

So it seems that we also have a play about civil disorder and strife in the community of Verona. This show more disorder arose from "ancient grudge" but, as we find in the first scene of Act I, when a street fight breaks out between youths supporting the Capulets versus the Montagues (Verona's version of the Hatfields and the McCoys) we quickly face the strife that is contemporary to the story of the young lovers, though it is doubtful any of the youthful combatants are aware of the source of the "ancient grudge". It will take much more bloodshed before order is restored. The overall arc of this story is reminiscent of The Oresteia of Aeschylus where disorder from the blood feud within the House of Atreus was not ended until the founding of the rule of law by Athena. But the chorus also tells of the lovers' plight:
"From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents' strife."
(The Prologue, 5-8)

These lines remind us that it is best known as a tragedy of a young "pair of star-crossed lovers" and was among Shakespeare's most popular archetypal stories of young, teenage lovers. While they must hide their love and later their marriage (although the later part happens relatively quickly) due to the civil strife their fates seem to be more astral in nature (remember the stars) and would have succumbed to an early death at any rate.

The play belongs to a tradition of tragic romances stretching back to antiquity. Believed written between 1591 and 1595, the play was first published in a quarto version in 1597. While you might quibble, as I do, with the easy-going Friar's willingness to marry the young lovers, the play moves quickly and deftly due to Shakespeare's use of dramatic structure, especially effects such as switching between comedy and tragedy to heighten tension. His expansion of minor characters (Mercutio has some particularly beautiful lines) and his use of sub-plots to embellish the story, has been praised as an early sign of his dramatic skill. The play ascribes different poetic forms to different characters, sometimes changing the form as the character develops. Romeo, for example, grows more adept at the sonnet over the course of the play. I believe because of both these aspects and the great use of language that is already present in early Shakespeare that it is a great place to start reading Shakespeare, especially for those who may have not had the opportunity to the early start that some of us, like myself, had in their own teenage years. show less

Just cultural literacy alone demands you read this play; which I actually think is among Shakespeare's most readable and lyrical, with indelible, lovely lines. It ranks among my favorite of his because of the way he both expresses the beauty of young love as well as the potential destructiveness of adolescent passions in which, unfortunately, Romeo and Juliet are well-matched.

I remember a teacher once explaining how character propels plot through Shakespeare plays. If Othello had been inserted into Hamlet's plot and vice versa there would have been no tragedy. Othello wouldn't have hesitated to destroy Claudius and Hamlet would have thoroughly investigated before killing Desdemona. In this play Romeo and Juliet each pull each other show more towards the tragedy, their immaturity and overwhelmed emotions as much the linchpin as their family's feuds.

Of course, there's nothing like seeing this dramatized. I rather love the 1968 film directed by Franco Zeffirelli. A traditional approach with actors of the right ages to fit their roles. show less

One of William Shakespeare's earlier plays and it shows, lacking some of the nuance of other plays I have read by the Bard. This is more Shakespeare the crowd-pleaser than Shakespeare the artist, with Romeo and Juliet's characters all too readily indulging in cheap jokes and bawdy innuendo like these were the Carry On stories of their time. There were so many lines which seem innocuous to modern ears but which my annotated Wordsworth Classics edition assures me are in all probability not-so-subtle references to penises and vaginas. Well, they don't teach you that at Key Stage 3 English.

Nevertheless, this is still Shakespeare and it still hits hard when it wants to. It is rightly one of his most iconic and influential plays; even if some show more of the lines fall flat, it remains greater than the sum of its parts. It is the classic crowd-pleasing tale of star-crossed lovers (a phrase coined by Shakespeare in this very play) and the codifier of many tropes on doomed love and the impetuous romance of youth. Such tropes have been plundered and bastardized in modern times by zombie trash like Twilight, so if this is what passed for low entertainment in the late 16th century then Tudor English audiences don't know how good they had it.

One of the themes which particularly interested me was one emphasised by Cedric Watts in the introduction to my Wordsworth edition; the idea that Romeo and Juliet was key in changing societal norms on marriage. As Watts says, the dominance of the belief that marriage should be based on the free choice of loving partners [rather than a choice made by one's family or by economic circumstances] is, historically, a relatively recent phenomenon, and more localised geographically than we may at first think." (pg. 16). At the very least, the play backed the winning horse, "eloquently voic[ing] the idea which eventually prevailed." (pg. 16). Considering that the freedom of choice in marriage is still not an option in many parts of the world – including, sadly, amongst some elements of our own society – then this is a salient theme to ponder. As with the other Shakespeare plays I have read, I find it remarkable that so short a piece – Shakespeare refers very early on to "the two hours' traffic of our stage" (pg. 35) – can retain within it such variety and depth. Even accounting for the bawdiness and the prick jokes, Shakespeare is still more than worth our time and effort." show less

The famous quote from Sigmund Freud, while possibly apocryphal, should nonetheless have been a guiding principle for the author of "The Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet: A Frankly Annotated First Folio Edition": "A cigar is sometimes just a cigar!" In the case of this tendentious study of the vulgar in Shakespeare's play, perhaps a fish is just a fish, or a scabbard is just a scabbard, or a - well, you get the point.

In our post-modern, sex-saturated culture, it is inevitable that everything cultural must be put under the psychological microscope in order to divine any and all traces of sexual innuendo, allegory, comparison, representation, symbolism, etc., etc. And the author does a superb job of it. Was Shakespeare "bawdy" in his plays? show more Most certainly. But can and should every other line in major parts of "Romeo and Juliet" be declared not just bawdy, but vulgar, obscene, scatological? That seems to be the preferred reading of Shakespeare by this author. From the (very interesting and instructive) introduction with its arched eyebrow condescension toward "those fun-loving Puritans", to the formulaic but often questionable equivalences with their equal signs (such and such = such and such =such and such: voila! a sexual reference after all!), to the liberal scattering of the words "probable" or "likely" or "possibly" throughout many of the conclusions, leaves one amazed that the author found this forced approach to Elizabethan English necessary to come to the "correct" interpretation.

The accessible rendition of this highly accurate First Folio Edition of the text of the play is worth the price of admission, i.e., the purchase price of the book itself. But the reading of the play can only be made more enjoyable by ignoring to one degree or another, the Author's agenda driven annotations as the "sound and fury" of background noise. show less

As long as you remind yourself that this is teen melodrama and not tragedy the essential vapidity of the central relationship and the frustratingly buried deeper and more complex relationships--actually all Romeo's, with Mercutio but also Benvolio, Tybalt, the priest--don't get in the way of good tawdry enjoyment. Now I think about it, Romeo's like a cryptohomoerotic sixteenth-century Archie.

Esta bela tragédia acontece em Verona e gira, é claro, em torno de Romeo Montague e Julieta Capuleto, dois jovens amantes virtualmente condenados por causa da briga entre suas famílias. Shakespeare, um mestre em prenúncios, faz da Nurse a personagem que primeiramente prenuncia os eventos futuros. Comparações entre luz e escuridão também não faltam. São fundamentais para a peça importantes cenas de amor que acontecem no escuro, longe da desordem que marca o dia. Romeo ama Julieta à noite, mas mata durante a balbúrdia diurna. Há também um forte conflito no uso da prata e do ouro. A prata é invocada como um símbolo do amor e da beleza. O ouro, por outro lado, é usado como um sinal de ganância e desejo. A ereção das show more estátuas douradas, no final, denota o fato de que nem Montague nem Capuleto aprenderam realmente alguma coisa com suas perdas. Tal como os personagens de Richard III sonham com seus destinos, Romeu também tem um sonho que o alerta para o destino: "Sonhei que minha senhora veio e me encontrou morto." Referências sexuais e bíblicas abundam. Há uma estranha referência bíblica quando Benvolio tenta parar a luta: "Embainhem as espadas, vocês não sabem o que fazem." - ecoando as palavras de Cristo quando tentou parar a luta entre os apóstolos e os romanos durante a sua prisão. Frei Lourenço parece brincar de Deus ao convencer Julieta a beber a poção que fará com que aqueles a seu redor acreditem que ela esteja, de fato, morta até que Romeu a venha ressuscitar. Em sua tentativa de brincar de Deus, Frei Lourenço está condenado ao fracasso pela simples arrogância de seus atos - uma conotação com a morte de Cristo que não pode ter escapado aos cristãos que assistiram às primeiras performances desta peça. show less