Tragedy Love Feuding and the Pursuit of Happpiness

I remember first reading Romeo & Juliet in middle school. It was my first year at Walkersville Middle, eighth grade. I was the new kid. I was so nerdy and book-oriented. I remember, though, how much I hated going to English class while we read Romeo & Juliet. I remember when our teacher assigned us having to come up and deliver a soliloquy to her, and only three of us did the harder version which offered extra credit, but also made us stand out as everyone else whined about having to do it. Our soliloquy was Juliet’s soliloquy, a rose by any other name.

O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father, and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.	40
Jul.  ’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself though, not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part	45
Belonging to a man. O! be some other name:
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes	50
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name;
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.

Reading all that at eighth grade in front of a room of my peers was probably the hardest thing I'd ever done. It was also the most rewarding. But back to the star-crossed lovers. Romeo & Juliet was considered to be a “romantic story” in middle school. That was back when kids thought each other had coodies still, or at least in my class. Reading these lines aloud to one another, was so very, painfully awkward.

That being said, that wasn’t my last dance with Shakespeare’s work. In high school, we put on the Twelfth Night. A year later, another school presented the Twelfth Night. The two were so different, though, as our school took a more Shakespearean approach, more towards the period of the play, where the other school set the show in a Hawaiian luau theme.

Linganore High School's Twelfth Night

To me, people understood the other school’s show better than ours and were more engaged. People sat forward in their seats, laughing at swords which were plastic flamingos and really tuning in to what was going on. So while I haven’t seen Romeo & Juliet on stage, I can say that how any Shakespeare play is presented really changes the story. But in all actuality, they would be different. Every director has a love for the show they are putting on, and each one wants to portray it a certain way. These range from vaguely similar to widely different and unique. I never could have pictured Shakespeare as a luau.

The same year of the other school’s production, in my senior English class, I watched the Hollywood Romeo & Juliet movie, which largely left me wanting to be sitting in a theater watching a live school production rather than… well, that. Taking away lines or changing lines from characters in a play that is already meant to have succinct lines just takes away from how the characters develop and our understanding of what is going on.

Really? An angel falls for a knight in shining armor?

Maybe I’m old fashioned like that. Why fix what’s not broken? Why change what works well already. Then again, I think about doomed or tragic love. I’ve made it to a point in my life where all my friends from before college are getting engaged, are married or are having babies. I’ve watched very good friends have their relationships shredded by pointless family fights or because of a traditional ideal. My best friend, who is like a brother to me, had his fiancee leave him on Friday night. When he first asked her father for her hand, her father said no. Talk about doomed and tragic love.

What I take from this and why I share this very personal insight, is because my friend told me in all reality it wasn’t her father’s decision, just as it's not my mother’s when I reach that point. It’s about are you happy in the relationship. How does that tie to Romeo & Juliet? Well, in the end, I believe if things hadn’t gone south, that Romeo had started to appreciate Juliet for her grace and smarts. I believe if he hadn’t been as melodramatic they could’ve had a good chance at happiness. But they focused more on their families opinions more than their own happiness. It is not about the name in the end, which goes back to what my friend told me. It's about are you happy.

I believe Shakespeare’s works hold over so much because he imparts more than just face-value stories. Even though we aren’t being forced into marriage at sixteen anymore, maybe, just maybe, we can still find ways to relate to the two doomed, star-crossed lovers.