I hope you are all well where ever you may be....i have finished Romeo and Juliet (after much savoring i must admit....is it my favourite? potentially YES indeed!) and as per usual i am going to shpeel out my random understandings and thoughts.....with no doubt ample quantities of irrelevant comments of course!
The Prologue
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
My oh my the Bard was a cleaver so and so! this Prologue rips down the 4th wall and tells the audience before the play has even started - THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS, PEOPLE DIE...OH AND BY THE WAY DON'T GET CARRIED AWAY THIS IS JUST 'TRAFIC' ON OUR STAGE...With Romeo and Juliet being such a well known tale (bare with me here this could and probably is contradictory to the previous sentence) i read it with emotional predictability, i indulge in the sad bits and boy am i ready for them, but in the first showings of the play the audience didn't have that ....and so the Prologue's importance and I'm sure success is completely thought out...Bravo!
is Romeo an Emo?
Romeo is so emotional and an archetypal 'Teenager' with his moody, sullen manner ...in my minds eye i can see him with a black swishy fringe, baggy jeans and an ipod blasting 'Paramore', a little like my friend Adam from work...
Note: this is Adam he love Paramour and has a swishy fringe
Adam
Paramore
it might be worth mentioning that although he looks like an 'Emo' (feel awful really, using pop culture stereotyping...its a little unfair to group people isn't it? anyway please forgive me on this one as I'm just trying to make a point.) he is daft as a brush and doesn't take his self to seriously. So....back to Romeo! sometimes i just want to give him a bit of a shake, particularly at the start of the play when he is chatting to the lovely Benvolio his cousin, its like trying to get blood out of a stone...the first time we meet him we get the impression he is a bit of a wet weekend:
Act1: Scene 1
BENVOLIO :Good-morrow, cousin.
ROMEO :Is the day so young?
BENVOLIO :But new struck nine.
ROMEO :Ay me! sad hours seem long.
Was that my father that went hence so fast?
BENVOLIO :It was. What sadness lengthens Romeo's hours?
ROMEO :Not having that, which, having, makes them short.
BENVOLIO :In love?
ROMEO :Out--
BENVOLIO :Of love?
ROMEO :Out of her favour, where I am in love.
BENVOLIO :Alas, that love, so gentle in his view,
Should be so tyrannous and rough in proof!
... I wonder whether The Bard does this to show the contrast between his behavior when he meet his love Juliet and the light that fills him up from the dark of the previous scenes?
Off the Point Sam thought: the play is constantly tooing and frowning from light to dark with very little grey areas, one minuet its incredible happiness and the next tragedy...it makes for such an exciting read even though i know the story. What is anything or anyone with a bit of contrast?
Romeo is so changeable i get the impression that his friends and family are used to the whirled wind of his affections whipping different woman up and in that become consumed by them...when we first see him visit the Friar Laurence (Act 2:scene3), the Friar * is still in the understanding that its Rosaline he is crazy over. After all how can he be so flippant with his love? i wonder if Romeo is the boy who cried Love...how many times has he fallen in love like this? the previous times weren't real but only he (Romeo) knows that.
*Friar Laurence: Holy Saint Francis, what a change is here!
Is Rosaline, whom thou didst love so dear,
So soon forsaken? young men's love then lies
Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.
Jesu Maria, what a deal of brine
Hath wash'd thy sallow cheeks for Rosaline!
How much salt water thrown away in waste,
To season love, that of it doth not taste!
My Favourite Bit
is in Act 1: Scene 3 the Nurses speech about Juliet as a child:
Nurse :Even or odd, of all days in the year,
Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen.
Susan and she--God rest all Christian souls!--
Were of an age: well, Susan is with God;
She was too good for me: but, as I said,
On Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen;
That shall she, marry; I remember it well.
'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years;
And she was wean'd,--I never shall forget it,--
Of all the days of the year, upon that day:
For I had then laid wormwood to my dug,
Sitting in the sun under the dove-house wall;
My lord and you were then at Mantua:--
Nay, I do bear a brain:--but, as I said,
When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool,
To see it tetchy and fall out with the dug!
Shake quoth the dove-house: 'twas no need, I trow,
To bid me trudge:
And since that time it is eleven years;
For then she could stand alone; nay, by the rood,
She could have run and waddled all about;
For even the day before, she broke her brow:
And then my husband--God be with his soul!
A' was a merry man--took up the child:
'Yea,' quoth he, 'dost thou fall upon thy face?
Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit;
Wilt thou not, Jule?' and, by my holidame,
The pretty wretch left crying and said 'Ay.'
To see, now, how a jest shall come about!
I warrant, an I should live a thousand years,
I never should forget it: 'Wilt thou not, Jule?' quoth he;
And, pretty fool, it stinted and said 'Ay.'
LADY CAPULET :Enough of this; I pray thee, hold thy peace.
Nurse :Yes, madam: yet I cannot choose but laugh,
To think it should leave crying and say 'Ay.'
And yet, I warrant, it had upon its brow
A bump as big as a young cockerel's stone;
A parlous knock; and it cried bitterly:
'Yea,' quoth my husband,'fall'st upon thy face?
Thou wilt fall backward when thou comest to age;
Wilt thou not, Jule?' it stinted and said 'Ay.'
i just love this! The Nurse is such a fantastic character and so comical...the whole tale she tells is a little embarrassing for Juliet (as she reminds her of an incident when once she fell backwards and the Nurses husband said when you grow up you will fall back and enjoy it *wink wink* and the little Innocent Juliet say 'Ay') and the scene makes for real comedy when Lady Capulet gets a little tired of the Nurses ramblings, but she carries on anyway! It helps us as an audience see into the past of the Capulet's, and adds real weight to the tragedy....the Nurse has been like a mother to Juliet from the day she was born. This makes for two childless woman at the end of the play.
Note to self:Add the Nurse to parts i have to play before i kick the bucket!
Theme- Stars
Is it really any wonder people cash in on the Internet selling stars for people to buy for their loved ones? I wont lie it has crossed my mind before to maybe purchase one as a quirky present for The Sween but i always think....how on earth can you sell a star? i mean it isn't any ones to sell... Romeo and Juliet is full of stars, beautiful lines about the unknown lights in the sky (great to put in valentines cards people! so i shall pop them below)
Act1:Scene3
Capulet: Earth treading stars, that make dark heaven light
Act2:Scene1
Romeo:Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return
Act 3:Scene2
Juliet:Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
Queen Mab
Mercutio has such a way with words, he is like the coolest kid at school...he radiates off the page this hedonistic, mischievous manner which pulls me in. When i read the Queen Mab speech i had to re-read it, there is so much! I really liked this bit in Baz Luhrmanns film (flash back to Sam aged 11 who wore out her VHS copy of the film from complete over watching...don't judge her! she was a child with a Dicaprio obsession and a tendency to be a little over dramatic...*Not to self don't talk about self in third person!*) Harold Perrineau makes this speech his own....
The big WHAT IF?
What If? (What) (If) ...its so prolific in this play, i asked it in almost every scene and it got me to thinking about fate, destiny and how huge a What If can hang over your head...
What If the Friar went with his instincts? his speech in Act 2: Scene 6 is so foreseeing, he knows what will happen to this young pair of lovers:
Friar Laurence: These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,Which as they kiss consume: the sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite:
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.
why he so naive to think that all this messing about with potions and faking death was the answer? As a grown man he should have had more bloody sense, surly?
...Obviously with out these missjudgements there would be no play, but in relation to our lives i think this play written so many years ago has something very relevant to say... don't be swept away by emotion, Love and Love well, but don't be at the mercy of What Ifs... This is our time, our lives ...lets live it! ... (Pause for comment on cheesy 'Sam' motivational shpeel!...Sorry)
Poor Juliet is full of them in her speech in Act 4: Scene 3
Juliet:Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again.I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins,
That almost freezes up the heat of life:
I'll call them back again to comfort me:
Nurse! What should she do here?
My dismal scene I needs must act alone.
Come, vial.
What if this mixture do not work at all?
Shall I be married then to-morrow morning?
No, no: this shall forbid it: lie thou there.
Laying down her dagger
What if it be a poison, which the friar
Subtly hath minister'd to have me dead,
Lest in this marriage he should be dishonour'd,
Because he married me before to Romeo?
I fear it is: and yet, methinks, it should not,
For he hath still been tried a holy man.
How if, when I am laid into the tomb,
I wake before the time that Romeo
Come to redeem me? there's a fearful point!
Shall I not, then, be stifled in the vault,
To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in,
And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes?
Or, if I live, is it not very like,
The horrible conceit of death and night,
Together with the terror of the place,--
As in a vault, an ancient receptacle,
Where, for these many hundred years, the bones
Of all my buried ancestors are packed:
Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,
Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say,
At some hours in the night spirits resort;--
Alack, alack, is it not like that I,
So early waking, what with loathsome smells,
And shrieks like mandrakes' torn out of the earth,
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad:--
O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught,
Environed with all these hideous fears?
And madly play with my forefather's joints?
And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud?
And, in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone,
As with a club, dash out my desperate brains?
O, look! methinks I see my cousin's ghost
Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body
Upon a rapier's point: stay, Tybalt, stay!
Romeo, I come! this do I drink to thee.
What if these two families could have sorted their troubles out before the lives of Romeo and Juliet where wasted? War never really makes sense and is almost always regretted... in my opinion nothing good can come from it! Someone throw the dictators, rulers and trouble makers of our world a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare with a post-it where Romeo and Juliet begins ...
wow! i really have gone on a little today.... forgive me but Romeo and Juliet really got my thoughts going and its been an amazing read! If you haven't read it you should, its so fantastic and you cant appreciate its beauty by just watching the film...even though the film is brill and full of beautiful people...
Happy Valentines Day
Peace Out
Sam
x
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