The question of who is to blame for the young lovers' deaths in Shakespeare's tragedy Romeo and Juliet is a subjective one with many possible answers depending on one's interpretation of the play. Prince Escalus himself comes to no verdict in the final scene, instead parting with the open-ended proclamation: "some shall be pardoned and some punished."
One could argue that Romeo and Juliet are themselves the most directly responsible, as it is by their own hands that the newly-wedded pair takes their lives. However, this argument ignores the larger picture that has driven Romeo and Juliet to this point.
On the other end of the spectrum, one could zoom far out and argue that, on a societal level, it is the long-standing feud between their families that is to blame for their deaths, thus placing the blame on Lords Capulet and Montague as the heads of each respective house. If there had not been this barrier to Romeo and Juliet entering into a relationship, and had Lord Capulet not been pressuring Juliet to marry Paris, the ending of the play could have been easily avoided. Indeed, at the end of the play both men agree to put aside their longstanding rivalry to prevent what happened to their children from ever happening again.
The strongest argument, however, is that Friar Laurence is the most to blame. As Romeo's close confidant and frequent adviser to the titular star-crossed lovers, it is Friar Laurence's advice that guides the course of their relationship, and it is his plan that ultimately goes awry. He is the one who gives Juliet the potion to help her fake her own death. He is the one who tries and fails to get a message to exiled Romeo to tell him of this plan. He is also the only one who could have really prevented Romeo and Juliet from killing themselves, but he arrives at the tomb too late—just after Romeo has already killed himself—and then he leaves Juliet there alone, enabling her to stab herself. In the final scene of the play, he tells the whole story to the lovers' fathers and the Prince, saying,
"and, if aught in thisMiscarried by my fault, let my old lifeBe sacrificed, some hour before his time,Unto the rigour of severest law."
Here, he acknowledges himself that he may have had some hand in how events unfolded and offers himself up to the mercy of the Prince.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Who is to blame for Romeo and Juliet’s deaths?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment