Romeo and Juliet - A Play About Hate or Passion?

2379 Words5 Pages

‘Romeo and Juliet’ by William Shakespeare is a tragedy set in Verona, Italy in the fifteenth century. The play concerns two families, who from the start show a bitter feudal tradition. The Capulets and the Montagues persistently fight in the streets in the public eye. When the prince comes to break up the ‘fray’ he forebodes the tragic events to follow ‘if ever you disturb our streets again, your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace’. Although the prince refers to the charge of death if the ‘quarrel’ is repeated the audience can sense the uncertainty and that somebody will die before this happens. In the end the ‘starcross’d lovers’ deaths ultimately unite their feuding families. The play is one, which has universal themes such as love, forbidden love across cultures, hate, violence and the principle of fate and chance. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ portrays the chaos and passion of being in love combining images of violence, death and especially family values. For example the idea that men owned their women ‘you be mine and I’ll give you to my friend’ Elizabethan women lived in an extremely patriarchal society, which could be the blame of Romeo and Juliet’s deaths. Some critics say that the responsibility of the feud was the masculine code of violence to put things right. We know that at the time the only power a woman like Juliet had, was over her death. The fact that she refuses to marry Paris would have shown the disobedience, which was rare for an Elizabethan girl. The dramatic irony of this is that the audience knows why she would do such a thing, the audience know she is married already; if she were to enter bigamy, the belief would have been that she would be damned to hell. The sense of foreboding is present form the s... ... middle of paper ... ...rifices needed in any relationship and that if these are not present then the bond is not strong enough to be true love. I feel that the themes of intergenerational conflict violence and love are universal themes that reach the modern audience in a way of understanding and empathy towards Juliet’s refusal to marriage whereas the audience at the time would have thought differently-that she was being a disobedient, ungrateful ‘wretch’. Romeo seems to see through the acts of violence and hate in the very first scene ‘Here's much to do with hate, but more with love.’ The themes in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ are relevant today because you see and hear about love across cultures and different social classes of people of which the love is perfect but for one thing, the parents disapproval which can shape a young persons life, usually for the worse as the audience see in the play.

Open Document