Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare is one of the most well known plays (so I'll keep the summary short). Two adolescents from rival families fall in love. Their love is forbidden so they get married undercover. Romeo, albeit trying to keep the peace, ends up killing Juliet's cousin and gets banished from Verona. The friar helps Juliet to reunite with Romeo. He gives Juliet a potion that will make her seem dead, then after her funeral she will wake up and they will be able to elope. The plan goes wrong when the messenger is detained in one of the cities because of fear of spreading the plague and Romeo arrives where Juliet lies and kills himself. Juliet wakes up and and seeing Romeo kills herself.
First of all I apologize at the beginning if I end up just calling Romeo and Juliet a novel instead of a play, it is quite a habit I need to get out of; it is hard since I'm used a play being what I watch and a novel is what I read. This review could easily be one of the longest I write because of the in depth study I did in class on the play. There are so many themes and ideas explored in the play. It isn't just about love but also about hate and how it achieves nothing, it is about people leading lives through emotions instead of reason, adolescent rebellion, the law judging and restoring peace and so much more. Shakespeare's language is also highly regarded, throughout most of his play he uses the iambic pentameter, poetry and uses rhyme to highlight importance of the dialogue. It would be easy to write pages on the topics I just mentioned however this is what everyone will study in school or read on the internet and I'm taking a different spin on this review
If what you are looking for is a synopsis of the novel then I suggest going to Sparknotes, it is really helpful.
If what you are looking for is a synopsis of the novel then I suggest going to Sparknotes, it is really helpful.
A lot of students don't like studying Shakespeare and don't enjoy studying Romeo and Juliet. I found that I didn't really enjoy it either but for other reasons. To me, it seems like this is all one of those scribbled painting found in museum that a child could draw but the passionate spectators try to extract all this passion and hidden meanings as if the painter was thinking about this when painting. Sure, there are lots of themes and ideas in the plot but did Shakespeare really think of this? He was a great writer but once I started analysing for class word by word I felt that Shakespeare really wouldn't have paid this much detail. Although he sometimes performed for nobility, Shakespeare's main crowd were the rowdy, drunken men who would never stop to analyse every single full stop. And what about the iambic pentameter? My teacher was always making little excuses for the iambic pentameter to work; it was the way they spoke at the time, and apostrophes everywhere that were meant to be there just so that the rhythm would stick. I really felt very ignorant when reading the script. My teacher could go on about the beautiful writing, the subtle meaning and the poetic substance, I could never argue because most of the time I was clueless about what the words even meant. It could have been that Shakespeare was a great writer or that it was just the way they spoke at the time, studying this book at school really doesn't fit in because I cannot understand this. It could be that in the future when people speak differently and the present English becomes the old English my words will be hard and my phrases could become 'poetic' or so hard and formal for students that they all will ignorantly think this for a great piece of work. Another thing is, I had mentioned that the majority of the audience were rude drunken people, and if these works were written for audiences as so why is it that now we study it like a classic, why is that it seems something of the upper class to watch the same theatre plays and why is it that in class we learn about this play? Students are much more educated and civilized that the audience in the medieval times but we have to study it as if it is something for people much above us, when really the whole play is written on innuendos and rude innuendos if I might add one last complain, and this one is about the characters. People complain about bells from twilight, however bella is an exact copy of Juliet ( and even the girlish, romantic Romeo ). She is so naive and so young. Really I just wanted to shake some sense into her. Seriously she only met the guy and she killed herself over him, she was young and had her whole life ahead of her.
I never intended to offend anyone with what I wrote and I realise that my opinion is not the most researched, historians and linguistics may say that Shakespeare was truly a remarkable writer and they are most probably correct. However, I could not stand to read analysis of the play and reviews about how great Shakespeare is when it seemed to me that the whole play is piles and piles of innuendos written for an uneducated audience. We study the play as if it was written for the Queen when really the Queen would only watch the play on occasions.
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