What You’ll Love about… Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
It never ceases to amaze me that this play that ends with the titular characters committing double suicide is taught to middle-schoolers. What’s great about it is that those lives are destroyed because the adults who rule the lives of their young people are too absorbed in their own nonsense to guide their young people to make better decisions, and there is a lot of that going around in the world I inhabit. Montague and Capulet perpetuate a ridiculous and pointless feud between their families. Friar Laurence agrees to officiate a secret marriage between Romeo and Juliet in an attempt to heal the rift between their families, and he also is the architect of the disastrous scheme to have Juliet pretend to kill herself. An apothecary breaks the law to sell poison to Romeo. Juliet’s nurse urges her to commit bigamy at one point. It’s a pretty subversive message to send to children, but it can be pretty enlightening, or at least comforting, for those who have been let down by the adults in their lives.
It is all the more frustrating when the adults oscillate between moments of maturity and moments of childish stupidity. To his credit, Capulet tolerates Romeo’s presence at his banquet, and he goes so far as to check Tybalt when Tybalt wants to start a fight with Romeo. That almost makes up for his actions in the first scene of the play, when…
