Romeo and Juliet

I went to see Romeo and Juliet on the night of Friday the 13th. The following blog will be an analysis of this Shakespeare play, using our script analysis questions as a guideline.

The major conflict of the play occurs between the two main characters, Romeo and Juliet, and their families, the Montagues and Capulets. The two lovers’ families despise each other, forcing Romeo and Juliet to hide their love and attempt to be together without their families finding out. These characters represent different things. Romeo and Juliet symbolize love, while their families represent hate. Romeo and Juliet look past their family differences to love each other for who they really are, while their families can’t see past the other’s name, and despise everyone in the other family for simply having the wrong name.

The characters all have different objectives carrying them through the play. Romeo’s objective is to be with his beloved Juliet and her objective is to spend the rest of her life with her love Romeo. The families’ objectives differ from the two young lovers in which the only thing driving them throughout the play is their hate for the other family.

The climax of the play Romeo and Juliet would be when the two kill themselves. Poor Romeo doesn’t get the Friar’s letter telling him of Juliet faking her death. Romeo finds out of her death and not knowing of its true nature, plans to go see his beloved and kill himself to be with her. He buys poison and drinks it as he holds his wife in his arms. Then Juliet awakens from her death like sleep only to find her one true love dead by her feet. She decides she must take her own life for living a day without Romeo would be worse than death itself. So she stabs herself with a dagger to be with her husband. This makes Romeo and Juliet’s final actions them taking their own lives in order to be with the other in death. And thus they’re dead.

Then we come to the resolution of the play. The two families enter Juliet’s tomb room to find their son and daughter dead lying on the floor. Juliet’s family sees her lying there freshly dead, not how they buried her and Romeo’s father enters to see his son dead upon the floor of the enemy’s tomb just after losing his wife. Friar explains what has happened in this outrageously devastating scene to both of the afflicted families, the Montagues and Capulets. He tells of Romeo and Juliet’s forbidden love and how because of their families hate for each other they had to sneak around them which eventually lead to the disturbing scene placed in front of both of the families. The families hate for each other caused their children to choose this devastating fate. The families feel so terrible after discovering their hate led their children to death, and they finally realize that’s all that hate can ever bring; pain and suffering. At this point the two families take their final action in the play and finally decide to put this hate for each other to rest, with a simple handshake.

The idea that the play represents is that nothing is to be gained from hate but pain and suffering. We must learn to love and appreciate each other for the person on the inside and not simply hate each other for what we look like or where we come from or for our name alone.