Romeo: I would die for you. Juliette: Okay, well, let’s make sure that doesn’t happen. THIS SUMMER (Begin upbeat/exciting background music) Benvolio: She’s in love with Romeo but her parents want her to marry Royalty. Mercutio: That’s where I come in. SHAKESPEARE’S GREATEST TRAGEDY Romeo (grinning in realization): A marriage of convenience. Juliette (with hopeful laughter in voice): This could actually work! NOW BECOMES Romeo (to Mercutio): What do you get out of it? Mercutio: My inheritance, my parents stop pushing girls on me, and I get to keep doing your cousin. Benvolio: He gets to keep…yeah. THE GREATEST COMEDY (Shot of the four of them running through the streets, hollering, laughing with masquerade masks on) (Shot of Romeo) Romeo: We just have to avoid getting caught for…ever. (Tybalt talking to Paris) Tybalt: I don’t think they’re actually in love. (Mercutio kissing Ben in an alley) (Romeo taking Juliette’s hand as she smiles) (Back to Tybalt and Paris) Tybalt: I’m going to get to the bottom of this. (Shot of Benvolio) Benvolio: They won’t let us be together to we made things so we can be. (Juliette in a courtyard, to Mercutio) Juliette: You need to be more careful, all four of our lives are at stake here. (Tybalt and Mercutio at the wedding’s dessert table) Tybalt: If I ever find out that you were unfaithful to my cousin I will kill you. Mercutio (music stop):………….cool, cool, good to know. THIS TIME (Another shot of a silly action sequence) ROMEO AND JULIETTE (More comedy) HAVE A PLAN (no music for finishing sequence) Benvolio (denying Merc a kiss in public) We can’t… Mercutio: (playfully) Is it because I’m married? Benvolio: I don’t care that you’re married!…You know, in any other situation, that would make me sound so terrible–
What’s In a Name JULY 2018 PG-13
(Spoiler: Tybalt ends up with Paris and helps guard their secret. Everyone lives)
I want to write an alternative version of Romeo and Juliet where instead of being a little ponce and trying to work things out for himself, Romeo asks his smarter friends what to do about the whole thing and Benvolio and Mercutio come up with the world’s greatest plan:
Marriage of convenience between Juliet and Mercutio.
Think about it.
Juliet’s parents want her to marry into the Prince’s family. Mercutio is a good compromise between no marriage and Paris.
Mercutio probably won’t get his inheritance if he keeps being HELLA FUCKING GAY ALL OVER THE PLACE so a beard is only a benefit to him.
They would probably get along great rolling their eyes at how adorably stupid Romeo is.
Romeo and Benvolio could get a “bachelor pad” right next to Juliet and Mercutio’s house. Every night, Romeo and Mercutio high five as they hop the fence to go bang their one true love.
The second half of the play is just all of them trying to keep up the charade and being “THIS CLOSE” to getting caught all the time. But everything ends nicely because true love conquers all.
Everybody wins. Nobody dies.
THE SHAKESPERE AU I NEVER KNEW I NEEDED
DUDE DID YOU JUST FIX ONE OF THE MOST ICONIC PLAYS EVER CREATED?!
ONCE AGAIN EVERYTHING IS SOLVED BY THE QUEER LENS.
*makes a perfect 90º bow*
i mean i definitely see the value in a play whose message is “parents being hateful asshats get their kids killed so don’t do that” but i am more than ready for a play about “kids outsmart warring parents and party while the old gangsters fight”
I just read the phrase “In Tennesse, William Shakespeare” as Tennesse Williams Shakespeare and I am honestly having so many bad ideas…
It’s just Shakespeare plays but set in the south and EVEN GAYER
I’m sorry, I just really love this idea and wanted to expand on it.
A boat washes up in a Louisiana bayou with only a handful of passengers left alive. The young woman who the boat was supposed to be taking to her destination is forced to disguise herself as a man for protection, and ends up in the employ of a local rich, closeted bisexual landowner. She/he is tasked with seducing a local heiress who has sequestered herself away in mourning for her brother. Meanwhile, servants of the heiress’s house attempt to prank the v old fashioned, v southern head of staff by forging a love letter. The temperature never drops below 98%. It’s sweltering. Everyone is horny.
The son of an old money southern millionaire must return to his families sprawling estate after his father dies mysteriously and his mother quickly remarries his uncle. On one incredibly hot night, the young heir thinks he sees the ghost of his father out in the swamp, who tells him that he was murdered, and that he must be avenged. Trapped in the confines of the estate and exasperated by the heat, the heir begins to decline in health. He feels pressured to seduce and marry the daughter of his parents irritating colleague, despite the fact that he is deeply in love w his best friend from college. Fighting w his parents about their role in his fathers death and the complexities of the socal norms he is forced to uphold ensues.
These were the only one I could think of that would work 😂 If you can, feel free to add more!
In second year, we did a narrative unit where we had to have a go at someone else’s story. We had limited choices, but i chose A midsummer night’s dream. I had this lovely idea of a New Orleans version, with Baron Samedi and Mama Brigitte as oberon and titania, a jumped up greaser poltergeist as Puck and relevant sacrificial animals as fairies. Hence the chicken. I did so much research on this, i learned so much about voodooism. So awesome and such a serious practise. These two gods seemed perfect to act as fairy royalty. Again an old piece, maybe two years old? But the ink is still good, I think. Enjoy
Edit, people seem to like this, would anyone be interested in me completing the scene? like i planned out the whole confrontation scene in 2014. Any thoughts?
I want this, I WANT the rest of it I am so EXCITED?
i generally say i don’t like ‘downer’ media, and that includes tragedies, but i quite like hamlet, and i think moby dick is the shit. recently i got to thinking what it is about the few tragedies i like that makes them different from the merely-depressing rest. best i can figure, here it is:
our protagonist has agency. he’s not a victim or a dupe. he could get out of the shit if that was his priority. of course, the way he could get out is not going to be easy or fun – ishmael’s options, for instance, were ‘mutiny’ or ‘swim’ – or else it wouldn’t be a tragedy, but he has choices he can make, is the point.
once he is in the shit, he struggles like a motherfucker. he doesn’t just sit down and go “oh well, suffering is good for the soul.” he fights. he plots revenge against his uncle. he clings to his boyfriend’s coffin in the freezing sea. he’s not a quitter.
when it all goes to hell, he doesn’t waste his last hours on futile scrambling to escape. he puts the pedal down and accelerates into that brick wall, screaming WITNESS ME with his last breath.
these, i think, are the criteria for a story i’ll like even though it ends with tombstones instead of medals. because even though our protagonist is dead, or bobbing amongst the corpses alone, or what have you, he remained himself and did what he thought was the thing he needed to do. which is the victory that really matters: remaining yourself and holding onto your will in the face of whatever the world throws at you.
@sphealrical your tags are a good addition, thanks
that’s absolutely worth thinking about, yeah – othello is a soldier, swift to violence, and he’s also accustomed to being betrayed and lied to. he’s been treated badly not just because of his skin color, but because he’s a moor – representative of muslim invaders who took over spain and so forth – and therefore an outsider. he’s always been treated as an enemy in europe. desdemona seems too good to be true. so when he hears she’s NOT true, he goes full tumblr callout drama and ruins everything.
but in a situation where the accusations were legit? if it had been his father’s ghost saying ‘avenge my murder’? SNICKTY SNICK wolverine style, play over.
and hamlet, he’s practically the opposite of othello in every way. he’s a dreamy danish goth who’s dating a weird girl who likes flowers, he loved his daddy and he’s being a big sulky poop about his mom remarrying too fast, everything is emotions and emo music and writing in his diary with purple gel pen. along comes his dad’s ghost going “hamlet you must do a violence!” and hamlet’s like… no? what? how about i just take a xanax and hide in the graveyard? once he realizes he really will have to do something awful, he tries to drive ophelia away so he won’t drag her down with him, and i’m pretty sure her suicide is when he switches over from acting crazy to actually being crazy.
but if someone had instead come along at the beginning and gone “yo ophelia’s the town bike, thought you should know” he probably would’ve replied “hey fuck you, stop spreading rumors about the sweetest girl in denmark” and there would’ve been no plot at all.
That said, I think it’s also worth bringing up that Hamlet is, essentially, an extended riff on the then-popular genre of revenge tragedies. In some ways, they were kind of filling a similar niche to slasher movies, in that the plot was largely about killing most of the characters in a chain reaction of spectacularly gruesome murders. People get revenge, and people get revenge for the revenge, and other people want revenge for that, and by the end of the play everyone is messily dead. (Shakespeare had actually earlier written a straight revenge tragedy in Titus Andronicus; to take someone’s summary that Wikipedia quoted,
“it has 14 killings, 9 of them on stage, 6 severed members, 1 rape (or 2
or 3 depending on how you count), 1 live burial, 1 case of insanity,
and 1 of cannibalism – an average of 5.2 atrocities per act, or one for
every 97 lines.”)
Many of Hamlet’s plot points are genre cliches or references to The Spanish Tragedy (the play that more or less launched the genre), including the play-within-a-play and the ghost. The thing is, though, a standard revenge tragedy protagonist would probably have done the Othello thing. But instead we’ve got Hamlet, and he… acts like someone who’s seen a lot of revenge tragedies might, if they were trying to avoid the spiral.
He makes absolutely sure he has the right guy before he does anything. He tries to get Ophelia out of the line of fire (and for all that his dickishness to her works out horribly long-term, he does succeed in convincing Claudius that he doesn’t care about her). He figures out he shouldn’t trust Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and proceeds to not trust them. …And then he stabs the wrong guy, and all the plot tropes his actions were calculated to avoid come crashing down on his head because he was trying to avoid them.
Hamlet is basically like the vampires from Carpe Jugulum, but for revenge tragedy tropes.
ooh, interesting point! yeah, he is disturbingly genre-savvy, isn’t he?
(titus andronicus is the one shakespeare play i’ve never read. i do not need that kind of nightmare fuel thanks will ol buddy i’m just gonna give that one a miss.)
i love that pair of comics and i know i’ve seen them before but i had forgotten them completely.
You know what they say! One man’s tragic flaw is another man’s pretty reasonable personality asset under the circumstances, I guess. Do…do they say that?
shakespeare’s character descriptions/stage directions/contexts are so vague it makes me so happy. wanna make Laertes hamlet’s ex boyfriend? doesn’t say HE’S NOT. wanna make juliet a trans girl? WHERE IN THE SCIRPT DOES IT SAY SHE ISN’T??? fucking put King Lear in SPACE set that shit on the enterprise THERE ARE NO RULES IN SHAKESPEARE
The best part is that pretty much all of the fights are “they fight” with no mention of whether it’s with swords or throwing knives or kung-fu or if they just do the slappy-hands thing at each other.
the only rule in shakespeare is that a bear must show up in the winter’s tale. could be a grizzly. polar. panda. hell, antigonus could’ve wandered into a gay club.
if you give hamlet and laertes light sabers though i’m not sure how you’d do the poisoned sword schtick
I am 100% convinced that “exit, pursued by a bear” is a reference to some popular 1590s meme that we’ll never be able to understand because that one play is the only surviving example of it.
Seriously, we’ll never figure it out. I’ll wager trying to understand “exit, pursued by a bear” with the text of The Winter’s Tale as our primary source is like trying to understand loss.jpg when all you have access to is a single overcompressed JPEG of a third-generation memetic mutation that mashes it up with YMCA and “gun” – there’s this whole twitching Frankensteinian mass of cultural context we just don’t have any way of getting at.
no, but this is why people do the boring archival work! because we think we do know why “exit, pursued by a bear” exists, now, and we figured it out by looking at ships manifests of the era –
it’s also why there was a revival of the unattributed and at the time probably rather out of fashion mucedorus at the globe in 1610 (the same year as the winter’s tale), and why ben jonson wrote a chariot pulled by bears into his court masque oberon, performed on new year’s day of 1611.
we think the answer is polar bears.
no, seriously! in late 1609 the explorer jonas poole captured two polar bear cubs in greenland and brought them home to england, where they were purchased by the beargarden, the go-to place in elizabethan london for bear-baiting and other ‘animal sports.’ it was at the time run by edward alleyn (yes, the actor) and his father-in-law philip henslowe (him of the admiral’s men and that diary we are all so very grateful for), and would have been very close, if not next to, the globe theatre.
of course, polar bear cubs are too little and adorable for baiting, even to the bloodthirsty tudor audience, aren’t they? so, what to do with the little bundles of fur until they’re too big to be harmless? well, if there’s anything we know about the playwrights and theatre professionals of the time, it’s that they knew how to make money and draw in audiences. and the spectacle of a too-small-to-be-dangerous-yet-but-still-real-live-and-totally-WHITE-bear? what good entertainment businessman is going to turn down that opportunity?
and, voila, we have a death-by-bear for the unfortunate antigonus, thereby freeing up paulina to be coupled off with camillo in the final scene, just as the comedic conventions of the time would expect.
you’re telling me it was an ACTUAL BEAR
every time I think to myself “history can’t possibly get any more bananas” I realize or am made to realize that I am badly mistaken
I feel that anyone who believes Romeo & Juliet is about some kind of Great and Timeless Love TM* needs to see this.
WE WERE JUST TALKING ABOUT THIS TODAY IN MY SHAKESPEARE CLASS.
If you go and actually read what Romeo says to Benvolio in the first scene, you will realize that he is only upset because HE WANTED ROSALINE’S BODY AND SHE SAID NO AND SO ROMEO WAS MOPING AND PITCHING A FIT ABOUT IT. Then, the second he lays eyes on Juliet, he’s basically saying
External image
During the balcony scene, Romeo talks about how he scaled the wall of the garden to see Juliet. That is not romantic. That is disrespectful to her. This is a private area of the Capulet home, and Capulet built the wall around it to protect his daughter. This was a time when a woman’s virtue was the most important thing she owned. If Juliet was found with a man in this very private part of her home, everyone would think she was no longer a virgin, her reputation would be ruined, and it would be much harder, if not impossible, for her father to make a good marriage.
Speaking of good marriages, Count Paris is seen as the bad guy because he “comes between” Romeo and Juliet. Capulet had arranged for Paris to marry Juliet in 2 years time, when she would be 16, in a time when most women were already married and mothers by the time they were Juliet’s age at (almost but not quite) 14. Most fathers would have already had their daughters married by now, but he wants to wait two more years AND PARIS IS OKAY WITH THAT. Not only that, but Paris is young (her father could have had her married to a 60 year old man), titled (he’s a fucking Count), wealthy (again, he’s a count, which means Juliet will have financial stability), and, from what we see of him, he is a very good guy. Capulet could have done a LOT worse in choosing his son-in-law.
Finally, here’s something to consider: Juliet was 13, Romeo was 17. Their relationship lasted 3 days, defied their parents, and ended in the deaths of 6 people.
If I ever hear you say that Romeo and Juliet is the greatest love story ever told, I will bitch slap you.
That is all.
And then, in Shakespeare’s next play, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he basically went out of his way to make fun of the people who thought that Romeo and Juliet was so deep and romantic in writing the “Pyramus and Thisbe” sequence performed by a bunch of lousy, middle-aged men who saw too deep into it.
Rejected dude on the rebound initiates a murder-suicide, OMG GREATEST LOVE STORY EVER TOLD.
Shake-speared!
Bitch I have a degree in this, so you can fucking try to bitchslap me but I will punch you in the face, because you have serious genuine factual errors and reading comprehension FAIL.
Which is to say, without the nasty attitude, this post is actually wrong about a bunch of stuff.
POINT THE FIRST: Let’s start with the stuff about Juliet and Paris. Let’s also start with this “everything you ‘know’ is actually wrong” problem with the idea that sixteen was a normal marriage age.
It wasn’t. The average age of marriage in Shakespeare’s day and culture was MID-TWENTIES. Marriage of kids younger than that was something the aristocracy did, mostly to secure alliances, and was seen as kind of squicky. Even there, a lot of those young people stayed with their parents until their late teens. It was rare – not Unheard of, but rare – for girls younger than that to be encouraged to have children because, bluntly, IT TENDED TO KILL THEM, and that’s a waste of a good alliance.
Further, Italy was the place where you set stories when you wanted to get away with Ridiculous Edge Cases. You know how, like, _The King and I_ is set in “Siam” so these things can be pushed to their ludicrous and most violent edges? Same with setting shit in Italy. English audiences would go LOL THOSE CRAY ITALIANS AMIRITE and not get hung up on feeling insulted/etc. The fact that Juliet’s thirteen and Paris is going “younger than she are happy mothers made” and her dad’s giving in etc is SUPPOSED to be skeezy as fuck. Paris pushing for her marriage RIGHT AFTER Tybalt dies and, again, her dad giving in is SUPPOSED to look like they’re being assholes, because they ARE. Capulet threatening to throw Juliet out on the street when she doesn’t want to marry Paris isn’t supposed to be “normal”, it’s supposed to make him look like the pride-bound domineering asshole he is.
Same with the whole “walled up young woman” thing: that’s another “those fucking Italians, lol” touch.
Which brings us to POINT THE SECOND: Romeo and Juliet’s love affair didn’t kill no-fucking-body.
THE FEUD killed four people (Mercrutio, Tybalt, Romeo and Juliet) and Paris being a fucking gross and uncompassionate selfrighteous dick killed two more.
SO LET’S TALK ABOUT Mercrutio and Tybalt! The morning after the Capulet party, Tybalt wants to kill Romeo. He wants to kill him, not because of his cousin – as neither he nor anyone else has the FAINTEST IDEA that Romeo and Juliet are in love – but because Romeo showed up at the Capulet party the night before PERIOD.
One: Romeo didn’t even want to go to the party. Mercrutio insisted (and insisted, and insisted) that they gate-crash in masks. Two, Capulet, Tybalt’s uncle and the head of his family and THE GUY IN CHARGE basically told Tybalt to chill out, it’s fine. Tybalt’s devotion to The Feud is so intense that he’s ignoring that because of the ~*insult*~ Romeo has done the Capulets. Three, the Prince just said YESTER-FUCKING-DAY that if he caught anyone feuding again he was going to kill them.
Remember the previous day? When Romeo didn’t know Juliet from Eve nor she from Adam, but we opened the play with servants fantasizing about killing the other sides male servants and raping their female ones? Because of The Feud? Just checking.
Tybalt gives no fucks. Tybalt is going to avenge ~*his family’s honour*~ by at the very least beating the shit out of if not killing Romeo.
And you know what Romeo does *because of his love for and romance with Juliet?*
He refuses to engage. He says no, Tybalt, I know you hate me but I don’t hate you and I’m not going to pay attention to the insults you’re slinging at me, I apologize for wrongs I’ve done, let’s call it all fair. No, I’m still not gonna fight you even if you keep insulting me.
For love of Juliet, Romeo tries like crazy NOT TO FIGHT.
Mercrutio, on the other hand, either can’t stand to see Romeo insulted or thinks because he’s the Prince’s nephew he’s special and the no-brawling rule doesn’t apply to him, pulls out his sword and starts to fight. It’s IRONIC that in trying to stop Tybalt and Mercrutio, Romeo gets in the way of Mercrutio’s parry and gets stabbed, but it’s also Mercrutio’s own damn fault. His “a plague o’both your houses” speech may be very quotable and thunderous, but it’s also hypocritical as hell, considering how DELIGHTED he was to participate in their Feud for his own amusement right up till he got stabbed.
(Watch out for Shakespeare: he likes to do things like that.)
This, really, is the point of the entire prince’s bloodline in this play: they every damn one of them think they can just sort of ignore or deal lightly with the Feud, and the Feud gets them.
So that’s two for the Feud.
Then Juliet fakes her own death. Well, actually, after being told by her father she has no choice but to marry Paris whether she wants to or not, and RIGHT NOW, or he’ll physically throw her out on the streets to starve to death or whore herself, she shows up in Friar Lawrence’s cell saying “fix this or I will fucking kill myself.”
And Friar Lawrence is a coward and fails her. Because here’s the thing: she and Romeo are married. End of story. All Lawrence has to do to FORCE the Prince to get involved and give them protection (or for that matter the local bishops and even the pope) is walk out there and say “they’re married, I witnessed it, we’re done.”
The thing is, this is entirely likely to get the FRIAR into a metric shittonne of trouble. So instead he concocts this huge complicated bullshit plan, and to the appearance of everyone except Lawrence and Juliet, she dies. Then Romeo thinks she’s dead so he kills himself, then she finds him dead and kills HERSELF and wait why was this all a problem in the first place?
OH RIGHT, because of the Feud. (Otherwise frankly the Romeo/Juliet match is fucking AMAZING and would give both families the economic power to dominate Italy. Seriously they’re idiots.)
Now, on his way in to kill himself Romeo also kills Paris and Paris’ servant, in both cases in self-defense. They’re there because despite Juliet rejecting him Paris basically feels a proprietary ownership of her DEAD BODY because her father promised him her living one. Basically.
Just think about that for a while. Think of how GROSS that is. Because it’s really gross.
Those are the only two deaths you can sooooort of blame on the actual romance. I feel they’re more appropriately blamed on patriarchy, but whatever makes you happy.
But. The point is: THIS PLAY IS ABOUT HOW THE FEUD KILLS PEOPLE. Like it literally tells us this in the prologue. “Two households, both alike in dignity/in fair Verona where we lay our scene/from ancient grudge break to new mutiny/where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.” Aka “so these two idiot families start brawling and killing each other over an old grudge.” The relevance of the children is not that they were in love: it’s that they were BECAUSE of their parents DOOMED. That’s what “star-crossed” means. It means “you are fucked”. It means “fate says you can’t have this.” Their “misadventured, piteous overthrows” – aka their fucked up, incredibly sad efforts – “doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.”
This is a tragedy about how THEIR PARENTS STRIFE killed them. They’re doomed from the start. And you know what Romeo and Juliet’s romance – their “death-marked love”, which is to say “the love that will get THEM killed” – ACTUALLY FUCKING DOES?
It saves Verona.
“The fearful passage of their death-marked love/and the continuance of their parents’ rage/WHICH BUT THEIR CHILDREN’S END, NAUGHT COULD REMOVE/is now the two-hours’ traffic of our stage.”
Again, translating for those who need it: this really sad and fear-inducing story of their totally fucking doomed romance, and how NOTHING BUT THEM DYING would make their parents stop fighting, is what we’re going to show you in the next two hours.”
People were already dying from the feud. They were being injured. Property was being damaged. Brawls were spreading out and killing innocent bystanders. *The Montagues and Capulets were effectively having a gang war.* What Romeo and Juliet did was *make it stop*. Except that everyone involved, the Prince included, had their heads so far up their asses that nothing but their children killing THEMSELVES because of THE PARENTS’ ACTIONS (or in the Prince’s case two of his relatives getting killed along the way) could make them realize oh shit, this is not good, and make peace.
The Prince reiterates this in his closing remarks, in case anyone missed it, even blaming himself: “and I, for winking at your discords, too have lost a brace of kinsmen.”
Modern readers should actually hone in on this pretty well, because we’re still doing this shit. The publicized suicides of queer kids, of girls who were raped, of trans kids – notice how there are all these things a lot of society was fucking ignoring until those happened?
(And actually killing yourself explicitly to bring attention to the wrongs and abuses being done to you that you cannot escape was a cultural norm even then, and can be found behind a ton of ghost stories and revenge stories. Shakespeare knew what he was doing.)
POINT THE THIRD: let’s talk about Romeo and Rosalind vs Romeo and Juliet.
Some context: Shakespeare is not a boy band. Shakespeare is Fall Out Boy. NEVER take anything he’s saying at surface level. His most famous cycle of sonnets is actually a super bleak charting of the failure of love between an older and younger man that sort of devolves into this sordid triangle between Narrator, Golden Youth and Dark Lady, and that whole “my mistress’ eyes” sonnet is nowhere near as complimentary or appearance-positive as people seem to think it is. (The Narrator – who is a character in his own right – is tearing down other women, not elevating his mistress.)
So there was this guy named Petrarch, who popularized the sonnet to HIS format (in Italian) by writing a whole bunch of poems to Laura, who was unobtainable, not interested in him, and eventually dead. THIS BECAME THE FASHION: devoted love and adoration to this woman you couldn’t have, who didn’t want you, and perferrably died chaste so you could idealize her without fear she’d do something human. And Romeo is ABSOLUTELY being a Pining Petrarchan Lover with Rosalind. He’s also writing cliche drivel so cliche it’s MEANT to sound like cliche drivel, to a woman we never even see on-stage.
Then there’s Juliet. And you know what the BIG difference is with Juliet?
Juliet is right there. She’s *PARTICIPANT*. She is matching him passion for passion and lust for lust and, in poetic form, EVEN LINE FOR LINE. Their speech together COMBINES into sonnets – SHAKESPEAREAN sonnets, aka the form Shakespeare made up for himself because he thought Petrarch’s wasn’t as cool. And suddenly cliches are being thrown out. The cliche was the mistress being the moon: fuck it, Romeo says, Juliet is the SUN; the cliche was to swear by the moon, the stars, and Juliet says no don’t do that, swear by YOU. They even get into blasphemy. Juliet is the OPPOSITE of a Petrarchan mistress: she is right there, she is SO right into Romeo right back, she’s alive, and the more he encounters her and the more she’s human and wanting and silly and joking the more he adores her. He loves her MORE after they’ve fucked, after Juliet is manifestly no longer the chaste unachievable idol.
Is it true love? Who knows. They’re both babies, and it’s a play: conventions of the theatre DO allow for people to fall in love at first sight. But whether it’s love or just infatuation, the point is they’re both right there, they’re both feeling it equally and as partners, and Juliet gets to be a living participant with her own desires.
(Like seriously her wedding-night speech before she finds out Tybalt’s dead is pretty damn sexy, guys.)
And whether or not it’s love or infatuation the play and the text very clearly come together to indicate that what’s between Juliet and Romeo is DIFFERENT than that crap with Rosalind.
POINT THE FOURTH: And minor, but still important – R&J and the Dream were almost certainly written more or less at the same time, and it’s of note that the Play Within The Play in this case both STARTS OUT lacking all the other context thats attached to Romeo and Juliet’s story as I laid out above, but that Bottom et al go on to strip it more and more and more of its meaning and context as they go on, rendering it nothing more than silly melodrama. The joke, thus, is rather more complex.
SUMMARY: Romeo and Juliet is a stunningly rich play that is mostly about how feuds fuck people over badly and how if you have to wait until YOUR KIDS OFF THEMSELVES to figure that out you deserve to lose your children. Romeo and Juliet are victims of the feud and its mindless death-lust, not perpetrators of death on others. They’re not supposed to be figures of ridicule OR representatives of True Love: they’re supposed to make the audience go “oh BABIES, no, you’re going to end so badly” and then be sad when they do.
Also common knowledge about social practices of the past is usually wrong. Thank you and good night.
I have been waiting for this rebuttal for ages oh my gods.
Sassy gay friend! This man is my hero.
I have no stake in one interpretation or the other, I just like these kinds of intellectual deconstructions filled with snark. =)
“…unobtainable, not interested in him, and eventually dead.” 🙂 Fabulous. And so true.
The best part about Shakespeare is that we will never be done fighting about Shakespeare.
The reason I hate the “Shakespeare didn’t actually write Shakespeare” theories so much is they seem to be inherently rooted in taking his works away from ordinary people. “The son of a glovemaker could never have written these plays! Surely only an Aristocratic Intellectual, like the Earl of Oxford, could be responsible!“
Honestly fuck off. Shakespeare was one of us. His plays were written for the masses. He was an ordinary man who captured the voice of the people and the depths of their emotions. We credit Shakespeare with making up words and phrases, but who’s to say he wasn’t writing down what he heard on the streets? "But something as complex as Hamlet could never have been written by Shakespeare! It must have been the work of a nobleman!” Well guess what, not only did he write it, but he wrote it because that’s what his audience liked. The hordes of ordinary people consumed his deeply philosophical play about a young man musing over life and death and sin and they LOVED it.
Shakespeare was a crowd-pleaser and an entertainer, and reason his work is so beautiful and poetic and philosophical (as well as bloody and sexual!) is because he was responding to popular demand. Most people attending the theatre were illiterate; they consumed literature by listening, and this is one of the reasons why playwrights utilised iambic pentameter and rhyming schemes. Their dialogue is poetry, and it’s beautiful to listen to. The first time Romeo and Juliet meet, their shared dialogue creates a sonnet. Imagine a commoner sitting in the crowd listening to that, and it hits him like an arrow, wow, listen to the way these characters speak,this is love at first sight.
Shakespeare was an ordinary man, and the beauty and complexity of his works were fuelled largely by the appetite of ordinary people. Although plays could be written and performed for the aristocracy, it was the hordes at the theatres that one had to keep happy. This modern obsession with putting him on a pedestal and trying to make him high culture or inaccessible to ordinary people is just gross. This upstart crow will always be one of us, and his work will always be for us.
Just to add on a bit, I was an English major, and I remember once in college, my linguist professor was discussing Shakespeare, and how he created new words. She said that linguists have studied the languages of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, and they’ve basically come to the conclusion that Shakespeare didn’t invent these new words, at all. They theorize that he actually picked up these words from young women who would use them, as slang speech. Slang speech in these centuries can be found in letters young women wrote to each other, with the slang coming from them shortening words, in order to write faster. Of course, women’s ways of talking have constantly been looked down upon throughout society, but here’s an article from Smithsonian, discussing the fact that young women throughout history have shaped language, and continue to do so. They say that what holds men back (men trail by about a generation) is the fact that they make fun of the way in which women talk.
just moving along like everyone else 