Who or what is to blame for the tragic outcome of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet?
In the tragedy of Romeo & Juliet, a play written by the famous playwright William Shakespeare, many new themes, concepts and ideas are explored, that range from questioning the basis of society right to the concepts of fate, love and death, and addresses everything in between. They play gravitates around a central, tragic plot—starts as simple as boy meets girl, but little do they know the one cajoling a kiss from the other is the youth of their family’s greatest adversary, and this reluctance to let go leads on to a sequential chain of ill-fated events. As much as the tragedy covers many new ideas, it also leaves room for many unanswered questions. One of which …show more content…
Each of the characters represent political, psychological and social aspects of their society, and Shakespeare uses these minor characters to emphasize major events and concepts throughout the plot. As the story is centrally a play, Shakespeare developed characters such as Juliet’s Nurse to provide comic relief for the audience with her inane malapropisms. Similarly, the minor role of Mercutio has comical elements with his humorous and witty banter, but it was with his death that Shakespeare later used to heighten his tragedy. Mercutio’s infamous last words, the repeated curse— “a plague a’ both houses” highlights his firm belief that each side were equally to blame for his catastrophic demise. The audience may also infer from twice-spoken and differently tensed curse that Shakespeare himself intended for the blame to be heaped upon the families, and understand that the curse later predicted the unfolding of the tragic conclusion for both of the noble houses. In the climax of the novel, the Prince of Edolas comes forth, and bearing witness of damage that lay in the family’s wake, he too is seen to blame the noble families for what came to be. It is this addition of minor characters and plot development that assists Shakespeare in revealing his blame on both the …show more content…
Had it not been for the ancient hatred of the two families that drove the ‘death-marked’ lovers into making such drastic actions so far as to taking their own lives as Shakespeare so clearly points out, there could have potentially been hope for a peaceful resolution. In doing this, Shakespeare enables the audience to feel great amounts of empathy for the star-crossed lovers, heightening the resulting tragedy and showering the play is dramatic irony especially as the thrice-spoken curse came to be. Like in many of William Shakespeare’s plays, the reasons behind the plot may often seem ambiguous to the viewers, as there is normally no obvious answer to the biggest of questions. But it is this stockpile of unanswered questions and possibilities that make the play so tragic, and one of the biggest lead ups to the resulting tragedy was the damaging nature of the Montague and the Capulet’s old