Greta's Reviews > Romeo and Juliet

“For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

The two teenaged lovers, Romeo and Juliet, fall in love the first time they see each other, but their families’ feud requires they remain mortal enemies. Ultimately, the characters love does resolve the hatred, but at the price of their lives.

Romeo and Juliet in the famous balcony scene

Romeo and Juliet

Juliet is the thirteen year old, beautiful daughter of the aristocratic Capulet‘s. She begins the play as a naïve child who has thought little about love and marriage. As a young woman her role is to obediently wait for her parents to marry her to someone and when her mother announces that Paris will be her future husband, Juliet’s response is obedient, but unenthusiastic. But she grows up quickly upon falling in love with Romeo, the son of her family’s great enemy, the Montaque. Trusting her entire life and future to Romeo shows courage but also desperation, particularly after he killed her cousin and requires her to turn against her family.

Romeo is the young, handsome and intelligent son of the Montague‘s. Though impulsive and immature, he shows idealism and great passion. At the beginning of the play he is madly in love with a woman named Rosaline, but forgets all about her, the instant he lays eyes on Juliet, though daughter of his father’s worst enemy. Romeo goes to extremes to prove the seriousness of his feelings, secretly marries Juliet, kills her cousin in a duel and would rather die than live without his beloved.

Double Suicide

Juliet takes a potion to appear as dead, Romeo believes her to be actually dead and kills himself with poison, Juliet awakes and stabbes herself in the heard

The themes of death and violence permeate Romeo and Juliet, and they are always connected to passion, whether that passion is love or hate. In the play, love is a grand passion, and as such it is blinding; it can overwhelm a person as powerfully and completely as hate can. The passionate love between Romeo and Juliet is linked from the moment of its inception with death. Juliets cousin determines to kill Romeo, just as he catches sight of Juliet and falls instantly in love with her. Romeo and Juliet are plagued with thoughts of suicide, and a willingness to experience it. Romeo brandishes a knife and threatens to kill himself after he has been banished from Verona and his love. Juliet also pulls a knife in order to take her own life. After Capulet decides that Juliet will marry Paris, Juliet says, “If all else fail, myself have power to die”. Finally, each imagines that the other looks dead the morning after their first, and only, sexual experience. This theme continues until its inevitable conclusion: double suicide. This tragic choice is the highest, most potent expression of love that Romeo and Juliet can make. It is only through death that they can preserve their love, and their love is so profound that they are willing to end their lives in its defense. In the play, love emerges as an amoral thing, leading as much to destruction as to happiness. But in its extreme passion, the love that Romeo and Juliet experience also appears so exquisitely beautiful that few would want, or be able, to resist its power.

Social Pressure

A war between two families: The Capulet‘s vs. the Montague‘s

It is possible to see Romeo and Juliet as a battle between the social world and the private desires of the individual. The enmity between their families, coupled with the emphasis placed on loyalty and honor, combine to create a profound conflict for Romeo and Juliet, who must rebel against their heritages and their Christianity. Further, the patriarchal power structure inherent in Renaissance families, wherein the father controls the action of all other family members, particularly women, places Juliet in an extremely vulnerable position. Her heart, in her family’s mind, is not hers to give. Their love gives both lovers a sense of freedom. But no sooner are the lovers happily married than the play shifts from comedy to tragedy.

Romeo, believes himself freed from the feud kills Juliets Capulet cousin, after he killed his Montague friend. Although he was provoked into the murder, and would have been killed had he not killed first, he is no longer an innocent, blameless character. It now seems unlikely that Romeo and Juliet will be able to live happily together. Romeo is banished from Verona. Before he leaves, he and Juliet spend their first—and last—night together. At dawn both try to believe that morning hasn’t come, since the new day brings nothing but grief. Neither character can go back to who they were before they met, but the possibility of them being together is very slim. For Romeo, reality takes the form of his banishment from Verona to Mantua, for Juliet, reality is her impending marriage Paris. The two lovers’ separate fates close in on them. In a desperate attempt to escape her forced marriage, Juliet fakes her own death, using a sleeping potion. But an outbreak of plague in Mantua, prevents Romeo from getting the news that Juliet’s only asleep. Romeo rushes to Juliet’s tomb, where he finds Paris. Romeo kills Paris, then enters Juliet’s tomb and kills himself moments before she wakes because he believes her to be dead. When Juliet finds Romeo dead, she stabs herself with his dagger. By killing themselves, the lovers accept that they are trapped by their fate. At the same time, they are freed from the world that has kept them apart.

Are Romeo and Juliet really in love?

Romeo marries the thirteen year old Juliet in secret, only one day after they have met

The lovers’ haste raises questions about the legitimacy of their affection for one another. Do they truly love each other, or has Romeo merely a teenage crush and Juliet sexual desire, fear of being married to a stranger and a possible way out? If we look, we can find plenty of evidence that Romeo and Juliet’s love for one another is, at least initially, immature. Romeo begins the play claiming to be passionately in love with another woman, Rosaline. When he sees Juliet, he abandons Rosaline before he has even spoken to his new love, which suggests that his feelings for both women are superficial. Juliet, meanwhile, seems to be motivated by defying her parents. She is unenthusiastic about her parents’ choice of husband for her, and at the party where she is supposed to meet Paris, she instead kisses Romeo after exchanging just fourteen lines of dialogue with him. Juliet’s love for Romeo seems at least in part to be a desire to be freed from her parents’ control by a husband who can’t control her either. Yet, while the two characters may have initially fell for each other due to a mixture of convenience, rebellion and lust, Romeo and Juliet’s language shows their passion maturing into real love. When Romeo sees Juliet, the clichés drop away, and he begins to describe his feelings in original terms. When they are together, Romeo and Juliet create a shared vocabulary. As their relationship develops, they use less rhyme, which has the effect of making their language feel less artificial. In their final scene before they part for good, Romeo and Juliet are on the brink of talking about something other than their thwarted love, before being prevented from having their first real conversation by Romeo’s banishment.

“Go wisely and slowly. Those who rush stumble and fall.”

For each part the death of the other means that they are socially ruined and that they have no way of going back. For Romeo finding Juliet dead means that he became a murderer and was banished from his city for no reason. He betrayed his families alliance by marring the daughter of the enemy and thereby lost their sympathies and his home. By marring in secret against the Capulet‘s wishes, Juliet burned all bridges of returning to her family and finding a decent husband who would allow her a happy future. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is not the power of their love, but that the lovers never get the chance to see if their love will grow into a mature, enduring relationship, that would have saved them.