Play Review: Romeo and Juliet, as a play, is doubly curst, uh, I mean cursed. First, the play is typically pushed on teenage students because it involves teenagers. And everyone knows that anything teens are forced to do in school is horrible. Students complain about: (1) the odd language; (2) that it's a play (not one of those epic novels); and (3) it's set in some bizarre time and place (no cell phones? no cars? not L.A.? not New York?). Second, paradoxically, the play is so immensely popular that it quickly becomes trendy to slag it off to show how brilliant the bloviating reviewer happens to be, and what a putz that overrated Billy Shakescene is. This despite that so much language from the play has entered our everyday language. But Romeo and Juliet is beautiful, intelligent, and worth valuable critical analysis, being astonishingly ahead of its time. Juliet rejects her parents' right to make her marriage choice, ignoring societal strictures and choosing to marry for love instead. This is much like any Jane Austen novel in which women are pushed to marry for their family's advantage, but instead daringly choose (or demand the right) to marry for love, and this a full 200 years before Austen. Romeo and Juliet has some of the most beautiful language ever written, the lovely sonnets magically propelling the story. For me, Juliet and Romeo's intertwining sonnet creates a metaphor for their love, communicating their love as some kind of celestial (and infinitely more clever) rom com montage. The first part of the play, despite constant and ominous foreshadowing, seems light, comedic. Romeo's swift fickleness from despairing over his love for the prim Rosaline to his rapid infatuation with lovely Juliet is comic (and Romeo is shown humanly flawed, no immaculate Adonis he). Mercutio with his ready wit and punning wordplay is matched by Romeo line for line. But all changes in Romeo and Juliet when Mercutio is slain. Although even as he dies he can pun and mock, from there the play moves toward its tragic conclusion. But there are lovely moments along the way. Juliet and Romeo debate whether evening is morn, or morning is eve, much as Katherine and Petruchio did in The Taming of the Shrew. Juliet, as a woman ("her means much less") is much the more daring of the two, her reputation, future, her life, family ties, all endangered by her actions. In a brilliant scene, she magnificently dissembles about her love for Romeo, appearing to agree with Lady Capulet, while never actually saying so. Her father proclaims his love and respect for his daughter, but when she refuses his unpalatable arranged marriage, Capulet becomes a raging monster, calling her "carrion" and a "curse." Facing her own father's cruelty, Juliet sees only one way out (those judging her by today's customs and practices are glibly ignoring four centuries of history). Her (and Romeo's) sturdy willingness to die makes me wonder if the crushing teen suicide rate today is at all similar to that of Shakespeare's time. The ending is also brilliant, and subject to many interpretations. Has Shakespeare anticipated the modern conflation of love and death ("our love become a funeral pyre")? Capulet says that death "deflowered" his daughter; Romeo states that death keeps Juliet "to be his paramour." Are the children a human sacrifice to end their families' blood feud? Is death the only way the two can be together? Have they been fatally punished for daring to flout society's rules? Or has Shakespeare created the audience's concern for the young lovers, brilliantly raised the audience's expectation that a rosy ending is still possible (despite the words of the Chorus in the Prologue), and then utterly and cruelly crushed that hope. Perhaps it was as portrayed in the film Shakespeare in Love with the audience's stunned silence at the end of the play. A conclusion to take the breath away. [5★]
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