Re-Introducing Romeo &amp; Juliet
Stage plays (perhaps not unlike train passengers entering into a busy station) often arrive at their platform laden with all sorts of baggage. This baggage might include the typically pre-conceived notions we bring to famous works of literature, including the many powerful caricatures that have entered the popular culture from movies we’ve seen and the tiresome adages that have been baked out of their oft doughy texture. Also included (somewhat more perniciously) are the famous literary critiques of a play that have gone unchallenged far too long. (Even this august critique will become, eventually, ahem, the stuff of spider-webs and star-dust). These are a play’s extra suitcases, its gauche handbags, and its over-priced weekender duffels: the signs and signifiers of a play, if not precisely the Kantian Ding an sich—the thing-in-itself. From a distance we might be forgiven for mistaking the ungainly silhouette of that jumbled heap of luggage for the contours of the actual work itself: after too long a while, it can be difficult to separate the two in our minds. We are what we carry with us, after all. 
In this light, the first thing we should say about William Shakespeare’s bravura romance, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, (c. 1595) is that, like so much other great literature, it is not what it at first seems to be. Appearances, as the well-established cliché goes, certainly can be deceiving. Indeed, this very notion has served as a recurrent theme for Shakespeare—it is threaded throughout much of his work—the idea that the semblance of one thing often served as a mask for another. As Prince Hamlet rather famously says to his mother, Gertrude:
“Seems, Madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’”
So, let us lay out what, precisely, from all appurtenances, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet seems to be about; let’s haul all of the hot-takes, the glib glosses, and the well-entrenched misconceptions out into the open and have a look at them in the clear light of day. From there, we’ll be able to develop a new analysis of the work, striving to uncover the thematic contours of the play we ought properly to recognize—if only we can allow ourselves to quit schlepping around centuries worth of unnecessary literary baggage. 
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Part I: Ostensibly. 
Ostensibly, Romeo and Juliet details a great love affair; indeed, the very name of the play serves as a byword for true love—the kind of heart-wrenching, hair-pulling, white-knuckling, screaming-into-your-pillow style romance that the troubadours once celebrated in song. This vision of Romeo and Juliet champions the two lovers as soulmates, willing to sacrifice their own mortal souls rather than to succumb to the oppressive dictates of an arranged marriage. The arranged marriage, of course, in this conception of love and romance, is a kind of union, which, again, ostensibly only serves the desires of the parents for harmony, financial stability, and social security. There’s nothing true, real, passionate, or lasting in this conception of arranged marriages: they are destined merely to suppress the uniqueness and individuality of each lover, as if that mere fact alone will serve to make life easier for the parents. On this view, the institution of marriage becomes a kind of prison, and the years and decades of marriage are spent grinding away in a loveless contract, the lovers consigned to the roles of inmates serving a relentless life sentence. 
This is a hugely appealing way to parse the basics of Romeo and Juliet, as well as the most widespread. And it’s wrong. That is to say, it only accounts for one side of the story.
Part of the appeal to this way of viewing the play—the conventional view, mind you—is that not only does it tap into the huge torrent of romantic poetry which is generated in the characters (especially Juliet), but it captures a kind of generational conflict which plays handily into our imagination about the idealism of adolescence and the comparatively cold calculations of adulthood. Ostensibly, of course, the play represents the merging of two hearts and minds; it is the high romance of lovelorn teenagers. Juliet is all of fourteen years old, we recall, as her mother, Lady Capulet, likely would have been when she herself was betrothed to Juliet’s father. Lady Capulet herself is said to be weeping “immoderately” over Tybalt’s death, a suggestion that her most piquant romantic feelings were never housed in the person of Lord Capulet, rather in her boisterous late cousin, Tybalt. Whether or not this issue should ever be “cut and dried,” it is clear that this unfortunate and enduring romantic paradigm will continue, generation to generation; and it’s part and parcel of what John Keats called Shakespeare’s “negative capability”—his art, in other words, of not choosing ideological sides—that keeps these questions open and urgent for audiences, after four centuries of nearly continual production. 
William Shakespeare was a part-owner of London’s Globe Theatre, and as such, he had a business to run. Romeo and Juliet was never intended as a closet drama, in other words, a play only meant to be read; it was meant, rather emphatically, to be staged—and that stage production was intended to fill seats. Mounting a piece of theater in a coherent and captivating way involves making an important set of choices about thematic meaning and how that meaning is bolstered and created in actual space. 
“One of the chief reasons we go to see a great play is to see someone making a choice that will change their lives.” -Declan Donnellan
Perhaps the chief reason that Romeo and Juliet has been staged and filmed thousands of times in the past hundred years alone, is not solely due to the scintillating verbal imagery painted by the lovers, and it’s not precisely for that grotesque pang that’s summoned as we bear witness to an inadvertent double-suicide of two young people with immense promise. It’s rather that, as the great British theater director, Declan Donnellan suggests, that we are permitted, in the dimmed lights of a playhouse, to watch these characters step out of the roles that society and family had pre-ordained for them, to watch them embark on a new journey, which will be fatal, but which will cement their uniqueness as individuals. 
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Part II: Talking Past Each Other.
What defines a great love affair—is it feelings? Certainly there are many characters and stories with tremendous feelings, who don’t actually foster love in their communications and their relationships. Put another way: 
What good are enormous feelings if we’re endlessly talking past one another? 
Whom precisely is Romeo discussing in the following passage—could it be Juliet? But what has any of this to do with Juliet?
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ROMEO
But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she:
Be not her maid, since she is envious;
Her vestal livery is but sick and green
And none but fools do wear it; cast it off.
It is my lady, O, it is my love!
O, that she knew she were!
She speaks yet she says nothing: what of that?
Her eye discourses; I will answer it.
I am too bold, &#8217;tis not to me she speaks:
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars,
As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
O, that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!
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Certainly one of the great triumphs of the play is the star-crossed nature of the action. We’re reminded, in subtle ways, how the characters interact with a version of tragedy that dates back to the Greeks. In fact, this is made explicit in the Greek names of two related characters of the play: Prince Escalus and County Paris. In a play otherwise set squarely in Verona, Italy, these two Greek-named characters remind us of 1) the law of the land, as embodied in the Prince of Verona, and 2) of the statutes and traditions of society, as embodied in County Paris, who, according to the desires of Capulet, is slated to marry Juliet. 
As Heraclitus said: &#8220;Character is destiny.&#8221;
We forget, because it is purposively and decisively cut from many productions (including famous film versions, such as the Baz Luhrmann rendition, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes), that Paris fought in armed combat with Romeo for Juliet’s hand, and died doing so. Often, when this powerfully transformative cut is made to the play, the character of Paris is construed as a comic figure, ludicrous and starry-eyed with little gravity; though, of course, if any young lover in the play is starry-eyed and ludicrous, his name is Romeo; whereas Paris is dutiful, sober-minded, and true. Here is the conciliatory tenor of Paris’s actual voice, when speaking to Juliet’s parents: 
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PARIS
These times of woe afford no time to woo.
Madam, good night: commend me to your daughter.
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And later, to Romeo: 
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PARIS
O, I am slain!
Falls
If thou be merciful,
Open the tomb, lay me with Juliet.
Dies
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It’s here perhaps we begin to get a good sense for what the play is really about: the scintillating, “bad-boy” boyfriends don’t always make good life partners. And good life partners aren’t always appealing to adolescent erogeny and yearning. 
We’ll always have Paris? Don’t be so sure. 
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Part III: The Cautionary Tale.
A cautionary tale might be defined as a story whose outcome should serve as an admonition to other would be followers-suit. We think of “The Boy Who Cried ‘Wolf!’” as a hallmark example of the kind. Perhaps The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet should also be considered along those lines. Is there a romantic love worth dying for? 
I think this remains an open question, one which is not, as the conventional wisdom would have it, mandatorily worthy of emulation. To enjoy love, after all, we must first survive romance. 
As you read this tragedy, full of wonders and poetic marvels as it is, allow yourself to reflect on what would be required to stage it properly. Whom would you cast? What themes would you work to emerge or dampen in the course of its five acts? Which characters might emerge as noble, comic, diffident, or ultimately inscrutable? (And who gets to play the nurse!) Finally, what would be the moral and emotional sentiments, if any, that we can imagine audiences taking away from your production? If we can think through and find this connective tissue for ourselves in our reading, we make it all the more unlikely that as the train pulls into its station, that we’ll confuse the enormous heaps of wayward baggage with true picture of the passenger itself. 
Happy reading. 
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-Allen Guy Wilcox