by Clare Callow

Created on: February 13, 2008

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet has long been held up as a warning tale for feuding groups; an example of what is at stake when actions are motivated by blind hatred. In this aspect, the story has served as a vessel for important issues for hundreds of years, with the various sides cast as different racial groups, different cultures, different religions or different classes.

It is with some trepidation, and a knowledge that I am inviting a literary lynching, that I put forward the argument that the responsible parties in the deaths of Romeo and Juliet are the snotty teens themselves.

It is tempting to blame their families. After all, the feud in the play is established as being ancient; older than the teens' parents and so wide-spread that the servants of either side hate each other. There is no apparent reason behind the feud and the slightest insult is cause for a bloodied slaying. Could the knowledge of such blind hatred be the reason the two lovers seek refuge and eternal partnership in death? No.

We could blame their parents. Juliet is pressured into an arranged marriage and then disinherited at the first sign of hesitation; first her mother curses her name, then her father berates her with such fury that the women present are forced to restrain him from hitting his daughter. Romeo's parents are hardly better, failing to restrain him or even elicit civil behaviour from him in public. Is it their parents, then, that are the cause of the dual suicide?

No.

What about Friar Lawrence? He could be seen to hold responsibility as he not only marries the teens but is the mind behind their plan to run away. Could it be that his well-meant but ultimately badly-thought-out bumbling plans are responsible? No.

We begin to run out of issues. Near the end of the play, Romeo is not informed of Juliet's plan to fake death because Friar Lawrence's fellow monk is held up in a town full of disease. The concept of quarantine, and the ideas behind modern medicine, then, could be a source for blame; or even God Himself, as He not only allowed the disease to exist, He guided His follower to the town to perform His work, and He placed the idiot Friar Lawrence in a position of authority which allowed him to advise his stupid plan in the first place.

No and no. Nor is it the fault of the noble Prince Escalus, for failing to stamp out the civil unrest in time, or the fault of the Nurse, for failing to protect Juliet from the marriage.

It cannot be doubted that all of the above factors had

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