Thursday, March 22, 2012

I need help with my essay for school. How and why does Shakespeare capture the complexities of human relationships in Romeo and Juliet?

I would say that where Shakespeare most captures the complexities of human relationships in this play comes in Romeo and Juliet's conflict between their individual relationship and their familial relationships.
Romeo and Juliet's relationship should be very simple and straightforward. They are two young people who meet and fall head-over-heels in love. They should be able, in a perfect world, to pursue their romance wherever it takes them.
However, as we know, the situation is not so simple because their two families are involved a deadly feud. The two young people are, therefore, caught in a dilemma: if they want to be loyal to their families, they must not see each other anymore. However, if they want to be true to themselves, they need to continue developing their relationship.
They get caught in a web of complexity because they see through the surface of a mere name and refuse to automatically hate each despite their families being at loggerheads with one another. At the same time, they love their families.
It seems to me you might look at Juliet as one who get caught in this web of complexity. After Romeo kills Tybalt in act 3, scene 1, Juliet experiences deeply conflicted emotions. She loved Tybalt as her cousin and is initially very angry at Romeo for killing him. Yet she has also just married Romeo and loves him deeply.
Juliet also gets caught in a web when her father insists she marry Paris, although she is already secretly married to Romeo. Shakespeare wants to examine what happens when one deeply felt relationship, such as a loyalty to a parent, bumps up against another deeply felt relationship, such as falling in love. Shakespeare does this because he knows relationships don't occur in a vacuum but within a network of other, competing relationships. How we navigate these is important. As Romeo and Juliet don't do so well balancing these conflicting sets of priorities, we as an audience might explore alternatives.

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