Comparing Treatment of Death During the Renaissance and in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Treatment of Death During the Renaissance and in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is arguably the most well known and well-read play in history. With its passionate and realistic treatment of universal themes of love, fate, war, and death, it’s not difficult to see why. However, most people don’t realize that there are several versions of the play, each with their own unique additions and/or changes to the plot, dialogue, and characters. After thumbing through the texts located here on this website, you can see even at a glance the distinct differences between the versions of Romeo and Juliet. This essay will explore how people dealt with death during the Renaissance in context to Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (Lamentable Tragedie.) More specifically, I will show that the added monologue in act 4, scene 5, regarding the convention of death, is consistent to the social and religious beliefs of the time period.

Act IV, scene V of the Lamentable Tragedie is perhaps the most insightful scene dealing with the coping of death during the Renaissance. Previous to the scene Romeo has been banished for slaying Tybalt, and Juliet’s father has forced her to marry her betrothed Paris. In a desperate attempt to avoid the marriage and reunite Juliet with her love, the Friar gives Juliet a sleeping elixir to stage her death. Convinced that a marriage to Paris would be worse than death, Juliet takes the deathly potion and falls into a coma-like sleep. At the beginning of the scene the house is stirring with excitement in preparation for the wedding and the nurse is sent to wake the sleeping Juliet. After much calling and shaking, the nurse begins to suspect that something is wrong. Could her mistre...

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...ents in such a manner, royalty reigned supreme during Shakespeare’s day and could do and speak as they saw fit. Finally, it is important to understand the historical context for which the characters were written. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was written for an audience that had survived the destructive forces of the Black Death, and shared a different philosophy on death altogether.

Works Cited

Heitsch, Dorothea. “Approaching Death by Writing: Montaigne’s Essays and the Literature of Consolation.” Literature and Medicine 19, Jan. 2000: pp 1-6.

Huizinga, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages. London: Edward Arnold, 1924.

Spinrad, Pheobe. The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987.

Wilcox, Helen. Women and Literature in Britain 1500-1700. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.