Reading romeo and juliet

Read this article wive at a full are a ink about wut the words may be and you which bind y sub-ploes How do dience to example e devices choseal text itself our ow Kumes and Jules is amongst the most famous of Shakespeare's plave Save as first performance at the end of the sixteenth century a has been a constant presence in our culture, referred to in des books. It has been reworked in opers, ballet, film, music and Fiction, Through his depiction of their fate Shakespeare created one of the cons of our culture and raised Romeo and Juliet to rank bende Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Iseult, as doomed lovers caight up in one of the three great tragic love stories of the western world. Many who have never even read a word of Shakespeare will neognise their names, and there can hardly be an educated person in the English speaking world who has not beard of the feud between Montagues and Capulets and of this ill-fated love story, The self-destructive passion of lovers at odds with the expectations and obligations of the world in which they live is at the heart of two of Shakespeare's tragedies. Romeo and Juliet is distinguished from the other (Antony and Cleopatra) as a tragedy of young love. Its extraordinary power has much to do with the way it recreates the pasionate extremism of youth, the excess of its hopes and its despairs, the clash between its idealiun and the bitterness of experienced adults. It captures both, on the one hand, the innocence of youth, confident it can overcome (or ignore) the world and, on the other, its passionate self-centredness, its determination to count no cest in seeking the satisfaction of its desire. As the poet John Donne raccinctly put it in a poem probably written at the same time as this ple, the world of their love is so self-sufficient that for Romeo and Juliet, wholly absorbed in each other, "Nothing else is" ("The Sun Rising"). That is both the splendour and the tragedy of their story And yet, for all the power of its depiction of adolescent passion in conflict with a world riven by partisan hatred, materialism and hypocrisy, it is not easy for a modern reader to get on terms with this play, It fails to meet many of the expectations which we bring To a text and many of its features ance, even slightly