Hate is Louder: Romeo and Juliet

Many people claim that love and hate are the same thing, while others say that the two emotions are complete opposites. William Shakespeare explored the two emotions in his play Romeo and Juliet. In the play, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet are teens who grew up in families that have been feuding longer than either family can remember. However, the two meet out of unforeseen circumstances, and fall irrevocably in “love”. They woo, and within twenty-four hours they are married. Things seem to be going well until Romeo is provoked into killing Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt, and gets himself banished. Juliet is also promised to marry Paris, an eligible bachelor, while she is still mourning Romeo’s banishment. She decides to see one of the two people who know of her and Romeo’s marriage, Friar Laurence, to whom she says that if she cannot find a way out of being alone she will kill herself. The Friar gives her a potion to sleep for forty-two hours and appear dead to help her. The plan is that Romeo is supposed to be there when she wakes up, but Romeo hears that she is dead and kills himself at her feet. She then awakes and kills herself as well, ending the whole brutal affair. The reader is then left to wonder if what they have just experienced is a tragedy of young love or a lesson on the power of hate, a question for which Shakespeare leaves a blurry but definite answer. After a deeper look into the text, it becomes clearly evident that hate has far more power over the characters than their “love” ever could.

The characters in Romeo and Juliet are fully aware of the power of hate and act on the knowledge. They recognize that hatred and anger are much more powerful motivators than love and kindness. For example, when trying to motivate R...

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...ive more information into themselves than into their subjects, and it is presumed that Shakespeare is no exception. At the time he wrote this, Shakespeare clearly felt hopeless to love, which is evident in the themes of the play, the scenes that occur, and the motivations of his characters. His personal interpretation was that hate wins, but that isn’t always true in the real world. People all interpret the world differently, and while Shakespeare’s outlook was negative, not all view it so. Some people would argue that in real life love wins, showing the importance perspective can play, and the fact that the outlook often has more effect than the events themselves, and that interpretation is up to the individual.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. McDougal Littell Literature. Ed. Allen, Janet, et. al. Evanston, IL: McDougal Littell, 2008. 940-1049.