Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is one of his most popular plays, a tragic love story set in the Italian city of Verona. “Romeo and Juliet gives a wonderful exploration of young love, of first love, of romantic attitudes to love.” Stanley Wells, Shakespearean scholar
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“The play…is Shakespeare’s most popular. It’s more popular than Hamlet, more popular than any of the other tragedies or plays. It’s got this unbelievably brilliant heroine who’s two weeks short of her fourteenth birthday. We know more about Juliet than we know about any other of Shakespeare’s major figures…Shakespeare explores issues of rhetoric and language. How do you express teenage love? The first time Romeo sees Juliet, his language changes. It moves into a different key from the language he uses about Rosaline, which is a kind of sub-Petrarchan rhetoric, full of the usual kind of conceits, oxymorons, and so on. Romeo and Juliet’s language becomes extraordinarily dynamic, kinetic, full of the most extraordinary images of darkness and light which almost have a life of their own. This is rhetoric at its most highly wrought. ‘What’s in a name?’ It couldn’t be simpler, but this is Shakespeare’s magic: to generate lines that are more powerful for being very, very simple. Juliet’s ‘What’s in a name?’ is a challenge to all forms of bigotry and stupidity and otherness.” Read more...
René Weis on The Best Plays of Shakespeare
René Weis, Biographer
