From forth the fatal loins of these two foes a pair of star crossed lovers take their life whose misadventured piteous overthrows doth with their death bury their parent’s strife. “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. But it is the darkness that wins in the end, except for the notable fact that it is their deaths that finally conclude the strife between the two warring families. Romeo and Juliet is a play of opposites: light and dark, youth and age, love and hate, the moon and the stars. The language is exquisite throughout, unlike anything else he had written or will write. There are also over 175 puns and wordplays in Romeo and Juliet. Young love expressed with a tenderness and beauty new to literature and the stage. The imagery was original as well, full of richness and metaphor. Shakespeare discovered a new language for love in Romeo and Juliet, using sonnets and blank verse as never read or heard before. These two intense set of years produced the greatest wealth of genius in the history of world literature and defies explanation or logic. He will achieve this burst of genius soon enough again, when from 1599-1606 he would write Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Othello, All’s Well That Ends Well, Macbeth, King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra. It is written around the same time as Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594-95), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), and will be followed closely by The Merchant of Venice (1596-7), Richard II (1595), and Henry IV, Parts I (1596-7)and II, all part of a profound and unmatched initial creative explosion of productivity following his first eight plays, where only Richard III attained any similar status in the canon. Shakespeare’s maturity continues considerably in the years surrounding Romeo and Juliet, easily his greatest work to date. The nurse and friar Lawrence are also deep, genuine and powerfully written characters, who each propel the plot to its inevitability of tragedy. There are two entirely different plays before and after the death of Mercutio. His last words are ‘a plague on both your houses’, and so it becomes from his death to the precipitous tragic ending. Who else could possibly have delivered the ‘Queen Man’ speech? His death gives rise to all the catastrophes that follows. According to Dryden, Shakespeare reported that he had to kill off Mercutio or else his large presence would have killed the play we know as Romeo and Juliet. Along with the two fated lovers themselves, Mercutio is one of Shakespeare’s greatest creations. Shakespeare matures substantially as a writer in Romeo and Juliet, which has marvellously written characters. This is the quintessential love story of Western Civilization. The power of their love ensures, in the world they inhabit, that it will lead inevitably to their deaths. We know their fate and then witness their innocence, charm and love, even as it all leads to such utter tragedy. We know what will become of them from the start, unbeknownst to them, of course. Their deaths are indeed foretold in the prologue. A play of youthful impulsiveness and extravagance, Romeo and Juliet is a love story such as had had never before been depicted on the English stage, and it certainly makes the tragic ending hard to bear. What we have here is the most intense romantic tragedy ever written, unmatched in world literature. This is a play about the intensity of doomed young love, a young love that will descend into the flames of its own idealistic intensity. Romeo and Juliet remains perhaps the Bard’s most popular and well known play, along with Hamlet.
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