Romeo and Juliet: William Shakespeare’s So-Called Manipulations

ROMEO AND JULIET: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S

SO-CALLED MANIPULATIONS

by

Polea, Mark Manuel

Cerico, John Matthew

College English 2

Ms. Maria Thereza Panzo

March 2007

THESIS

William Shakespeare is one of the best literary figures of all time. He has always been one of the favorite playwrights of the many. Students, teachers, and even critics choose his work as their subject. He has written many plays that aroused intrigue among his audience. Like any other artists, Shakespeare also has his own set of critics whose interpretation of his works seem to defy and oppose what has been a conventional analysis. Between tragedy and comedy in plays, the transition is not quite clear. Romeo and Juliet is a picture of love and its pitiable fate in a world which atmosphere is too sharp. Two beings created for each other feel mutual love at the first glance and every consideration disappears as both only thought of what they feel for each other. Under circumstances Romeo and Juliet unite themselves by a secret marriage, relying simply on the protection of an invisible power. After that, untoward incidents follow in a rapid succession and their heroic deed for the sake of their love for each other was put to test and ended with a voluntary death. Under Shakespeare’s handling of the play, it has become a glorious song of praise. The sweetest and the bitterest love and hatred, festive rejoicings and mourning, the fullness of life and deprivation, are brought close to each other in this play.

Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, gathered numerous negative feedbacks because philosophies and beliefs of certain individuals were being run over when the book was released to the public. The book conveys its message right from the beginning. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet on the other hand, was said to be an opposite of what its audience interpret its events to be.

INTRODUCTION

Romeo and Juliet is the most famous love story in the English literary tradition. Love is naturally the play’s dominant and most important theme. In the course of the play, the young lovers are driven to defy their entire social world. Love is the overriding theme of the play, but a reader should always remember that Shakespeare is uninterested in portraying a dainty version of the emotion, the kind that bad poets write about.

Love in Romeo and Juliet is a brutal, powerful emotion that captures individuals and catapults them against their world, and, at times, against themselves. In other words, it resists any single metaphor because it is too powerful to be so easily contained or understood.

Romeo and Juliet does not make a specific moral statement about the relationships between love and society, religion, and family; rather, it portrays the chaos and passion of being in love, combining images of love, violence, death, religion, and family in an impressionistic rush leading to the play’s tragic conclusion.

All through out the play, the audience would not have suspected the author’s concealed real manipulation of the events and characters of the play. It is very well crafted that audience focus on the series of events. Only very few people, mostly critics, and the so called pessimists, see Romeo and Juliet in another level, and some people had to agree. According to these critics, William Shakespeare has manipulated the two main characters, Romeo and Juliet and the events, in such a way that there is no escaping whatever circumstance there is. Every possible solution to the dilemma that successively takes place in the play is a catch22. Furthermore, according to these critics, Shakespeare set the two main characters, Romeo and Juliet, so that they had no choice in what they did. Almost everyone that hears this side of argument, and try to go deeper in analyzing the play, have to agree.

DISCUSSION OF RESEARCH

"Romeo and Juliet" is a play that really makes the audience wonder if the two young lovers had any chance for a life. In the prologue, Shakespeare states that "From forth the fatal loins of these two foes/ A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life" (37). There is a debate in philosophy that applies very much to this play. The debate is concerned with two opposite ideas about human beings which