Romeo and Juliet: By Any Other Name

For my money, Romeo and Juliet is an incredibly entertaining play. Not a moment passes without brawling, marrying, killing or some ominous prelude to one of those big three – not, at least, until the Prince comes out at the end to say “Shame on all of you, and me for putting up with you. Look what we did to these poor, whiny teenagers!” I mean, let’s be honest about our protagonists: these two weren’t exactly “look on the bright side” kind of people. One of my favorite scenes sees Romeo sprawled out on the ground of Friar Lawrence’s sell, crying his eyes out about his banishment. Both the bawdy Nurse and the good Friar himself in turn effectively say to Romeo “Geez, man. Seriously? Man up already.” Juliet of course throws some major fits of her own, but she clearly gets that from her crazy dad - one minute she’s his only unswallowed hope, the next he’s ready to kick her out and have her “die in the streets” (3.5.204).

Back to our star-crossed lovers though. The thing is that there was pretty much only one trick in their Coping with Life’s Hardships playbook all along: quitting. It strikes me as a typical teenage mentality: “this is remotely hard, so I quit.” They both were contemplating suicide even when Romeo got kicked out of town; their hasty overreaction to a relatively minor obstacle clearly being a red flag – friends and family had plenty of time to kick themselves later. In fact, haste seems to be the fatal flaw for Romeo and Juliet here. The couple had an unspoken agreement all along that they weren’t going to waste time thinking anything over. “Let’s just impulsively make life-altering decisions, without giving them much of any thought.”

Seeing as this big rush took Romeo and Juliet from strangers to dead husband and wife in less than a week, what surprises me is how synonymous with romantic love Romeo and Juliet has become in our culture. Far be it from me to be cynical, but this seems to be more of a cautionary tale than a love story. Certainly we can allow for love at first sight to explain away Romeo’s initial pining for Rosaline, but is the best we can do for our ideal romance this kind of melodramatic short-term relationship? I think not, people. We can do better. I’m content to love Romeo and Juliet as the lamentable tragedy that it always was, but I prefer my love stories to end with happily ever after. Call me old-fashioned.