#should i feel sympathy for the one whos ideological violence knows no bounds?

[clonehub]

Frankly I wish star wars would stop with trying to show redemption stories through people who willingly join fascist governments and/or commit genocide it's very tiring.

[arisefairsun]

My English teacher left me very confused when learning about Romeo and Juliet. He said that it wasn't a love story because they didn't love each other; Juliet just basically used Romeo, but I don't know what to think. Can you please explain to me if it's a love story, tragedy, or both?

Did your teacher say that Juliet used Romeo? How rude.

The first thing we have to remember is that the feud is the exponent of an unhealthy ideology that promotes violence, hatred, prejudice, and brutal misogyny. Don’t ever forget the world they lived in. Romeo and Juliet are not normal teenagers living in a normal world and making stupid decisions. They are children whose mental health ends up destroyed by the ideals of their families. I just won’t stand anyone who refers to them as ‘dumb’ because it’s a very insulting way of dismissing the destructiveness of social oppression and abuse. It’s so evident that their families caused their deaths that at the end of the play nobody has the guts to blame them for their own deaths and dismiss their emotions as shallow or dishonest. What they have done is too monstrous for them to deny. When both patriarchs find the young lovers dead together in the crypt they see the wrong in their actions and take responsibility for it. They know they killed their children. It was not teenage folly that ruined Romeo and Juliet. It was a sick society that glorified violence and prejudice.

Perhaps your male teacher is annoyed by the fact that Juliet hardly fits in the role of a sixteenth-century obedient wife who goes along with whatever her husband has to say. On the contrary, Juliet has a voice of her own. It is evident from the first conversation between the lovers that she has a very particular, specific way of thinking, and which doesn’t necessarily match that of Romeo. For instance, she gently mocks his stereotyped courtship when she says “you kiss by the book.” I would say she is a far better poet than him—he actually learns from her. Think about the way she corrects him when he tries to swear his love by the moon. She literally rationalizes everything. Romeo needs to get on her level. Later on, he will ask her to “sweeten with thy breath / This neighbour air, and let rich music’s tongue / Unfold the imagined happiness that both / Receive in either by this dear encounter,” to which Juliet answers that “conceit, more rich in matter than in words, / Brags of his substance, not of ornament”. You see, she doesn’t always agree with him, and she presents her own points of view resolutely. She is the one to give lessons.

Moreover, she is capable of turning against Romeo. Look at her reaction to Tybalt’s death:

O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?Beautiful tyrant! Fiend angelical!Dove-feather’d raven! Wolvish-ravening lamb!Despised substance of divinest show!Just opposite to what thou justly seem'st,A damned saint, an honourable villain!O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell,When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiendIn moral paradise of such sweet flesh?Was ever book containing such vile matterSo fairly bound? O that deceit should dwellIn such a gorgeous palace!

She only truly decides to stand up for him when she decides that it was most likely Tybalt who started the fight. So she has a very clear perception of judgment that she uses all the time, even when it doesn’t benefit Romeo. He recognizes her independence and doesn’t expect her to behave in a way she doesn’t agree with just because it would do him good. When he is banished, he anxiously asks about her well-being, aware that he may have lost her sympathy for good:

Spakest thou of Juliet? How is it with her?Doth she not think me an old murderer,Now I have stain’d the childhood of our joyWith blood removed but little from her own?Where is she? And how doth she? And what saysMy conceal’d lady to our cancell’d love?

Juliet is a really complex character who doesn’t need to adopt anyone’s posture because she has thoughts and ideas of her own. She has personality. Look at her words. Her courage is limitless:

O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,From off the battlements of yonder tower;Or walk in thievish ways; or bid me lurkWhere serpents are; chain me with roaring bears;Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house,O'er-cover’d quite with dead men’s rattling bones,With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls;Or bid me go into a new-made graveAnd hide me with a dead man in his shroud.

She doesn’t mind breaking any rules that may prevent her from getting what she wants. And she breaks them simply because she wants to. For instance, living in a world where names, honor, and dynasty do indeed determine people’s lives, she claims that what makes Romeo valuable has nothing to do with his surname. “What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, / Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part / Belonging to a man.” Tell her that her Romeo is not free from social constructs. She’ll fight you. And where does she get all these ideas from? She gets them from herself.There’s this delicious youth about her, this restless euphoria, this passionate determination, this unstoppable fierceness, this need to experience life freely. Juliet is too alive to stay quietly in the shadows. She has fallen in love with liberty so deeply that once her only chance to achieve freedom dies, she inevitably, tragically, dies as well. In my opinion, she is the most intelligent character in the play. She has some of the deepest and most revolutionary speeches. She makes what is to me the hardest and scariest decision when she drinks the friar’s potion. She is the sun. She is life itself. Romeo knows and admires this. In his dreams, Juliet brings him back to life because “she breathed such life with kisses in my lips.” Her love is stronger than all the hate living in Verona: “Look thou but sweet, / And I am proof against their enmity.” To him, she is a powerful light forcing her way through the window, overcoming the restrictions of the physical space, and thus freely expanding herself through the sky without restraint: “What light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”

However, the patriarchal structure of her society inevitably thwarts her liveliness. She must restrain herself. Look at the way she refers to her house: “Bondage is hoarse and may not speak aloud.” She feels like a prisoner who must stay silent. But if she were free, things would be quite different: “Else would I tear the cave where Echo lies / And make her airy tongue more hoarse than mine / With repetition of “my Romeo!” Now compare that with her attitude in the first act, before she met Romeo. She had assured her mother that she would “look to like, if looking liking move. / But no more deep will I endart mine eye / Than your constent gives strength to make it fly.” She is trapped in the role of the submissive daughter who allows her parents to command her life. She didn’t dare contradict her mother the way she does with Romeo later on. So while she must show obedience to her parents, she can let out her real self in Romeo’s company. He is interested in listening to her and taking into account whatever she has to say. She finds a friend in him, as she once says, and she begins to free herself from the constraints of her society. Romeo is her chance to achieve a more exciting life. But even as she imagines him as a little bird that she can cherish, she stresses her lack of freedom as opposed to his ability to fly. She is “loving-jealous of his liberty.” In the “balcony” scene (though there really isn’t any balcony), she is locked in her window. But look at the stage direction from 2.6, which is when they get married:

Enter Juliet somewhat fast and embraces Romeo.

She comes in running and immediately hugs Romeo because she is finally free to move. So after gaining some agency through their love, she is not ready to let the friar “dispose” of her “among a sisterhood of holy nuns” in the last scene. I’m inclined to read the play as the lovers’ attempt to assert themselves in a society that doesn’t care about them. They try to build new, private identities that do not match their public roles. I will not say they used each other because of the negative connotations of the word, but I will definitely say that they took advantage of their relationship to explore their real selves and figure out what they really wanted to be, and not what their relatives wanted.

I can’t see how anyone could claim that Juliet used him when she is so tenderly in love. In the balcony scene she feels like she will have to wait for “twenty years” to receive Romeo’s news when she’s actually going to send the Nurse for him at nine o’clock in the morning. When she realizes the night is nearly over, she lets him go, but “no further than a wanton’s bird.” She literally fears she would kill him “with much cherishing” because she has too much love to give. She actually feels like her affection is endless: “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep; the more I give to thee / The more I have, for both are infinite.” It makes her feel so rich she “cannot sum up sum of half” her wealth. She complains that “love’s heralds should be thoughts / Which ten times faster glide than the sun’s beams.” She wishes her thoughts and Romeo’s could communicate instantly because the Nurse fails at being “as swift in motion as a ball.” (Notice how she is talking about thoughts here. There’s a lot more than physical desire going on between Romeo and Juliet.) She is so happy to be with him that she pretends it was the nightingale singing. And then there’s the kind of metaphors she creates for him. They are tender and loving. The Nurse says she has been making puns out of the similarities between Romeo’s name and ‘rosemary’. Can you get any more ridiculously sentimental than that? He is her “sweet”, the “god of my idolatry”. She thinks that “every tongue that speaks / But Romeo’s name speaks heavenly eloquence” because he is literally perfect: “So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called / Retain that dear perfection which he owes / Without that title.”

I would also like to stress that she is very protective of him. Romeo is a scared child who needs as much help as her. She does her best to free him from the constraints of their world. Picking up again the pilgrim/saint motif from their first conversation, Romeo asks Juliet to “call me but love and I’ll be new baptized.” From that moment on there will be two Romeos: Montague’s heir and her Romeo. Look at this dialogue between the Nurse and Juliet:

Nurse: Will you speak well of him that killed your cousin?Juliet: Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?

She knows Romeo’s real, private identity depends on her. If she leaves his side, her Romeo will fade away and the feud will take over his existence. What makes her drink the friar’s potion, after having expressed all her fears, is the thought of Tybalt’s ghost haunting Romeo. She is afraid that Tybalt, who is one of the major exponents of toxic masculinity, violence, and rage, will destroy Romeo if she doesn’t prevent it.

O, look! Methinks I see my cousin’s ghostSeeking out Romeo, that did spit his bodyUpon a rapier’s point. Stay, Tybalt, stay!Romeo, I come! This do I drink to thee.

Her fierce protectiveness is present all along. “I would not for the world they saw thee here,” she’d do anything to prevent her family from hurting him. She stands up for him when the Nurse criticizes him: “He was not born to shame. / Upon his brow shamed is ashamed to sit, / For ‘tis a throne where honour may be crown’d / Sole monarch of the universal earth.” I can’t imagine anything she wouldn’t do to keep Romeo safe and loved: “Things that, to hear them told, have made me tremble; / And I will do it without fear or doubt, / To live an unstain’d wife to my sweet love.”When her mother confesses her plans to poison him, Juliet wittingly offers to prepare the venom herself, making her mother believe that she wants to kill him when she is actually saving his life:

Madam, if you could find out but a manTo bear a poison, I would temper it;That Romeo should, upon receipt thereof,Soon sleep in quiet. 

And then they subvert a lot of patriarchal norms: It’s Romeo who rejects his name, though he never asks the same from her. They consummate their marriage in Juliet’s bed (I read some critic say that Juliet brings Romeo to her “sexual territory” lmao) and finally, Romeo kills himself in the crypt of her wife’s family rather than in that of his own father. I think this is perfectly conveyed in the last dialogue of the play:

Montague: For I will raise her statue in pure gold;That while Verona by that name is known,There shall no figure at such rate be setAs that of true and faithful Juliet.Capulet:  As rich shall Romeo’s by his lady’s lie;Poor sacrifices of our enmity!

Juliet is the center of their conversation. While she will be raised in pure gold and everyone will praise her, Romeo’s merit seems to be that he will lie by her side. Shakespeare acknowledges the importance of Juliet’s character again by ending the play with the words “Juliet and her Romeo.” Which doesn’t mean that Romeo is a fool that agrees with everything that Juliet says. He sometimes disagrees with her. (Remember, for example, when Juliet wanted to take it slow in the balcony scene. He answers, “O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?”. More on that here. Another interesting part is when he agrees to stay with her after the nightingale vs. lark debate, though he still doesn’t believe that she is right. He knows what Juliet is asking for is wrong: “Come, death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so”). I would actually say they’re equals. In fact, they are introduced as “a pair of star-crossed lovers” who “take their life”, not lives, as if to emphasize their alliance and their oneness. Romeo states that his love for Juliet is equal to hers: “My heart’s dear love is set / On the fair daughter of rich Capulet, / As mine on hers, so hers is set on mine, / And all combined, save what thou must combine / By holy marriage.” To him, true love consists of a mutual exchange of affection: “Her I love now / Doth grace for grace and love for love allow.” The chorus claims that Juliet is “as much in love, her means less,” which leads me to believe that the play presents the lovers as internally equal and socially unequal, as this post explains here. Lastly, their parents promise to build equal monuments for both of them. Romeo’s statue will be “as rich” as Juliet’s. It is as if after all the wrong they did, they are finally ready to honor them justly.

I think that while Juliet suffers because of her lack of agency, Romeo suffers because socially speaking he has too much agency (and he will have even more once he inherits his father’s possessions). He basically couldn’t care less about his responsibilities as Montague’s heir. Look at his attitude in the first scene:

O me! What fray was here?Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all.

The heir of the Montague house doesn’t even want to know what happened. Later on he will attempt to kill himself in order to get rid of his name: “O, tell me, friar, tell me, / In what vile part of this anatomy / Doth my name lodge? Tell me, that I may sack / The hateful mansion.” On the contrary, Juliet’s perception of the world revitalizes him as she believes that his real identity doesn’t depend on his name. So of course he will describe her as “a rich jewel” hanging in “the cheek of night”, of course he thinks she would “shame those stars / As daylight doth a lamp” if she were in the sky. Of course Juliet is capable of bringing him back to life in his dreams. He clings to her in the same way she clings to him because she instroduces him to a purer side of life. She becomes his home: “And I’ll still stay to have thee still forget, / Forgetting any other home but this.” It’s the pleasure of talking to her that he loves: “How is’t, my soul? Let’s talk; it is not day.” They transcend the restraints of their society with the freedom of their love. Look at Romeo’s words:

With love’s light wings did I o'er-perch these walls;For stony limits cannot hold love out,And what love can do that dares love attempt;Therefore thy kinsmen are no stop to me.

(I think that passage is quite relevant nowadays, since prejudice and hate are inspiring people to build walls and ban innocent souls from coming in. Romeo might be overly sentimental, but the thing is he just wants to get rid of the hate that’s been imposed on him and turn it into love. And that’s not silly or ‘dumb’. Not when you live in a world where hate is accepted and love is seen as a shameful feeling. Romeo refuses to be stopped by those who want to harm him out of hate.)

It’s not that kind of love story where the characters get their happy ending after overcoming some obstacles. We know Romeo and Juliet are sentenced to die from the first lines of the play. The prologue tells us we are going to sit there for two hours to watch them fall. We don’t know how it’s going to happen, but we know it will somehow. And I think part of the point is this: People can’t be happy if their society doesn’t support them. They can’t be free if they are forced into violence, in Romeo’s case, and passivity, in Juliet’s case. It’s the story of two children who try their hardest to become what they want to be, and they do so with each other’s help. But they fail because they are left alone. They die because they cannot live without each other. They cannot live without each other because nobody else can help them. Nobody else can help them because their society is sick. It’s a love story that exposes the problems of a toxic environment.

As for the genre, it’s something that has been up for debate for centuries. Some say it’s a tragedy. Some say it shares some characteristics common of comedies. Indeed, you could argue that the play follows the pattern of a comedy up until Mercutio’s death. It really depends on how you want to look at it. Romeo and Juliet die, but the feud dies as well. Capulet and Montague assure that there will be no more hate in Verona. So you could say that Friar Laurence’s wishes are fulfilled. The lovers, the “poor sacrifices”, turn their households’ rancor “to pure love.” Love wins. They fix their world. There will be no more violence. But the ending is evidently still tragic as the young lovers lose their lives. I would say it’s both a pessimistic and optimistic story at the same time.

This post is getting too long, but I could go on. Come back to the ask box if you have any question!