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ARTicles vol.4 i.3: Re: R&J
FEB 1, 2006
What critics have said
“It has become a commonplace in criticism and performance that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Julietrepresents an ideal – and an endorsement – of romantic love. But in my view Romeo and Julietis more ambivalent in its presentation of desire … the play complicates rather than validates passion and clandestine marriage among teenagers.”
—Sasha Roberts
“Juliet is at least thirteen years and forty-nine weeks old, when the legal age for marriage was twelve. Juliet was, as her mother apparently felt, almost an old maid.”
—William G. Meader
“Over the past twenty years, Romeo and Juliethas become the Shakespeare play assigned to more U.S. high school students than any other. Julius Caesar has been usurped; the sexual revolution has replaced the civics lesson.”
—Jonathan Goldberg
“[O]ne of the reasons for the resilience, the liveliness, and the cultural durability of Romeo and Julietis that alongside the famed sweetness of its lyrical affirmations flows the salt and vinegar of its cynical bawdry … the play, though so richly lyrical, remains predominantly unsentimental.”
—Cedric Watts
“What is striking about the relationship between Romeo and Julietis the extent to which it anticipates and ultimately incorporates violence. Both lovers have a lively imagination of disaster.”
—Madelon Gohlke Sprengnether
“Marriage is a dangerous condition in Shakespeare. Plays that continue beyond the point where comedy ends, with the old fogies defeated and a happy marriage successfully concluded, depict the condition as utterly disastrous.”
—Stephen Orgel
“As soon as Romeo falls in love with Juliet, his literary fantasy turns into literal reality: the beloved is a real enemy, and many paradoxes follow: the lightness of love becomes a serious matter, and scenes of joy are transformed into tragedy.”
—Ann Pasternak Slater
“The play does have splendid poetry, but I do not think that the poetry alone can account for the popularity Romeo and Juliethas enjoyed for nearly four hundred years. The poetry certainly helps, but behind it is what may be Shakespeare’s most carefully wrought and systematically developed plot.”
—Michael Hall
Compiled by Mark Poklemba, second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.
