Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Christine on Greenblatt Intro to Romeo and Juliet



Greenblatt Intro to Romeo and Juliet (Christine Ahn)


May be the most well-known play among Shakespeare’s work, Romeo and Juliet, is not definitely original work of Shakespeare. The story of two lovers with star-crossed fate due to rivalry of two families was popular subject back then. Heavily borrowed from Arthur Brooke’s Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, Shakespeare attempts to transform a story that was told by other writers over and over into something rich and flavorful. Though Shakespeare follows the main outline of Brooke’s narrative, he makes several changes to intensify theatrical factors.

One of the important changes Shakespeare had made would be messing with time. Juliet was sixteen in Brooke’s version of Romeus and Juliet while she’s only thirteen in Shakespeare’s. Also, in Brooke’s version, the story took 9 month to develop and to end and in Shakespeare’s play, they meet and fall in love and die in less than a week! Greenblatt explains this too-young-to-be heroine as a young girl suddenly awakening to passionate desire against the will of her family, throwing herself into irresisti1ble fire like a moth. The writer of this play does not stop here- he erases possible fantasies, making the dead lovers to be rejoined in happier afterlife. “Here, here will I remain, with worms that are thy chambermaids.”

Noticeably, the play throws in an important idea of ironic nature of the word. Famous line of “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” is a good example of this ironic situation. Only if Romeo’s name is an arbitrary sign, can her love be realized, comments Greenblatt. But with words being arbitrary, their love, composed of words, is nothing but list of meaningless words.

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