Romeo and Juliet/Headscratchers

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Why do people keep Completely Missing the Point about the play and the titular couple?

Because a lot of people have never actually read the thing. Popcultural Osmosis at it's most irritating; All they know is that it's about a couple that fall in love and are prevented from being together.

Hey...

This Page should have its title changed to the full title of the play: "The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet"

Okay...

...so at one point in the play Romeo has been banished to Mantua, and Juliet has been as good as kicked out of her house by her father because she doesn't want to marry Paris. Friar Lawrence's solution is for her to go back to her father and beg forgiveness, then fake her own death so that she can then run away with Romeo to Mantua. Now, here's a thought: why didn't she just run away to Mantua then and there? I mean, there is no reason at all why they should bother with the whole faking-death scheme: all it will do is introduce a gajillion different complications which could make things go horribly wrong (which they do), and the end result (Juliet leaves everything behind and runs away to Mantua to be with Romeo) would be exactly the same either way. So what's the point, other than Because The Plot Demands It?

• Juliet wasn't kicked out of the house, just yelled at and lectured and almost hit like any headstrong teenaged daughter. She had to have her Nurse tell her father she was going to the Friar's under the guise of confessing her disobedience; there's no need to make excuses for leaving when someone has kicked you out. That said, if Juliet ran away while she was engaged, her family and Paris would no doubt search for her, and given their means, money, and connections, would have good chances of finding her. Faking her death would ensure they wouldn't launch a manhunt for her that would end with her being dragged to the alter by her hair. (Given how things turn out, we can see that her and Romeo's chances for survival would have been better under those conditions, but they couldn't have predicted that.
• If she'd openly accepted her father's offer of leaving the house and went to live with her new husband, what are the odds that someone with the same mindset as Tybalt would call out a hit on Romeo?
  • One in one, because the mom sends out a hit on Romeo anyway.
• There's also the fact that Juliet was literally seconds away from killing herself. Friar Laurence was probably just saying the first idea that came to mind to stop her.

Why do the Montagues and the Capulets hate each other so much?

• Probably a minor economic dispute that spiraled out of control.
  • Doesn't the story say that nobody knows?
• They're rival mafia families.
  • Close, they were rival yakuza.
    • Okay... that is just plain cool!
• "From ancient grudge break to new mutiny..." It's one of those family feuds that probably started over something stupid, and now the origins have been long forgotten. Neither family is really in the right.
• They don't really hate each other that much. Take a look at Lord Capulet's lines at the party. In fact, take a look at everyone except Tybalt between the beginning and Tybalt's death. It's pretty clear that the only person who really believes in the feud is Tybalt. (Of course, this means that if Romeo and Juliet had been open about their relationship this whole time, nothing would have happened.)
• If only Tybalt believed in it, why were a whole bunch of Montagues and Capulets fighting in the streets at the start?
  • Those were servants, not family. I find it helps to use the (flawed but reasonable) analogy of a bunch of freshmen getting into a spat for a school rivalry that the older grades always talked about but never bothered with, beyond the occasional "harmless" prank.
    • But the second that both Lord Montague and Lord Capulet arrive, they personally demand swords and try to kill each other.

CAPULET: My sword, I say! Old Montague is come, And flourishes his blade in spite of me. MONTAGUE:Thou villain Capulet,--Hold me not, let me go.

• If you want to find rational and cool-headed, both of their wives demand the fight end, but the men? They HATE each other. Lord Capulet says later to Paris that it is not hard for old men like he and Montague to keep the peace, but twenty minutes before they were going to stab each other to death.
  • The men were probably spending most of their free time fighting each other in their youth, before they had to take command and hold the feud to get on with important business. They probably can't wait to have some fun trying to kill each other again. And Tybalt seems borderline Ax Crazy.
• If I recall correctly, one family was Guelf and the other Ghibelline. They were on opposite sides of a power struggle between the pope and the holy Roman emperor.
  • Or it could be the other way around: one family joined the Guelfs, so their enemies immediately supported the Ghibellines (or vice versa). While there were trends in long-term allegiance, people allied with either party out of immediate political convenience all the time.
• Many people cite the fact that Lord Capulet restrains Tybalt from attacking the masked Montagues during the party as evidence that Lord Capulet doesn't care about the feud. This Troper refutes that: Lord Capulet had just been told that very afternoon, in no uncertain terms, that another brawl would result in his execution. He's got every reason to lay low. Besides, it's a party, the Montagues aren't stirring up trouble yet, no need to make a pre-emptive strike and ruin the evening. Even at the end, when they're leaving, his reaction is basically a very unenthusiastic "Oh, you're going? No. Please. Stay. Okay, bye!!" whereas before he had been a marvelously gracious host.
  • He doesn't simply restrain Tybalt, he goes out of his way to praise Romeo's reputation and say that he seems to be a good boy:

And, to say truth, Verona brags of him To be a virtuous and well-govern'd youth: I would not for the wealth of all the town Here in my house do him disparagement:

• • The (subtle, but present) implication is that the feud is actually taken much more seriously by the hotblooded younger generation than by their elders, and that the elders (while not immune to it) are looking for a way to bring it to a close.
• Well, I think it had something to do with an incident involving noodles.
• This troper had personally assumed the feud's origin was intentionally left unaddressed-- that way, the audience wouldn't get caught up in taking sides rather than simply watching the play.
• With no real reason for this feud it makes Mercutio's death more tragic, which he himself realises hence why he curses both the Capulets and Montagues. He knows he's died for nothing.
• I don't know about you guys, but looking at it from the outside I find it kind of hard to buy the orthodoxy of "They've been fighting for so long they've forgotten why." How do we know they don't just have competing economic interests? Mayve they've just been fighting for a long time over the banking and trade industry in the city.

Why on Earth does the Friar randomly run away in the last act after just seeing Juliet waking up and seeing Romeo and Paris's bodies-- precisely when she is at her most vulnerable, as he himself had recognized earlier-- on such a dumb pretext as him hearing a sound and getting scared by it? I know that having a (up til now) sensible Friar around to stop Juliet from using her "happy dagger" would kinda ruin the emotional torque, but still...

• ...huh? I don't remember that happening.
  • Act V scene 3:

Friar Laurence: I hear some noise. Lady, come from that nest Of death, contagion, and unnatural sleep: A greater power than we can contradict Hath thwarted our intents. Come, come away. Thy husband in thy bosom there lies dead; And Paris too. Come, I'll dispose of thee Among a sisterhood of holy nuns: Stay not to question, for the watch is coming; Come, go, good Juliet, Noise again I dare no longer stay. Juliet: Go, get thee hence, for I will not away. Exit Friar Laurence

• • This troper always took that as the Friar saying "Um, Juliet, there's been a change of plans. People will be here and they will be angry, Romeo's not going to be here, and you should probably come with me without looking in that direction! Hurry!" and Juliet telling him "Screw you, if I don't get rescued by Romeo, I don't get rescued at all," and Friar Laurence assuming either that she was being thickheaded and would be kept care of by her family while he would be killed, or she had already seen the body and wasn't going to be helped
  • Who says the Friar's a good guy? He performs what is essentially an illegal wedding despite knowing Romeo's a feckless rake, knows lots about poisons and dodgy drugs, is frankly callous to Juliet's bereaved family, saying how much better off she is in heaven... The postal problems aren't his fault, true, but I can't help feeling his automatic thought was: If both these kids are dead and I run off, no one's ever going to know I had anything to do with it. He argues (not at all convincingly) that he's trying to bring the two families together, but what is his method of doing this? A secret wedding. What was stopping him from using his presumed influence with either family to make it legit? As mentioned previously, only a handful of skanks are keeping the feud alive and the Prince is sick to death of it. All in all, it makes me interpret him as flawed at best, downright corrupt at worst.
    • The wedding wasn't necessarily illegal, depending on when the story takes place. Remember, Shakespeare was living in a Protestant country at the time - his knowledge of the new marriage regulations in Catholic Italy would have been spotty at best.
    • Why would the Friar knowing about poisons and drugs make him corrupt? Someone had to know about those things. And while he knew that marrying Romeo and Juliet wasn't such a great idea, he thought that it was a way to end the family feud going on. As for the question though, this troper always figured that the Friar was just scared. He was a very religious man who probably figured that there were evil spirits and bad karma and all associated with hanging around inside a tomb at midnight and ran for it. Juliet herself was terrified of being in the place and probably would have run too, if it weren't for the whole "Romeo is dead" issue. She even panics at the sound of a noise, which prompts her to kill herself quicker.
    • I think it's the fact that the Friar just happens to know how to make a coma-inducing potion is what makes him seem corrupt. Why would a priest need to fake a death?
      • Probably learned basic medical skills from being a friar and taking care of sick people in that capacity, if not even more (remember, many priests did and still do intellectual stuff on the side). And knowing how to save people through medicine often gives you the same knowledge on how to cause all sorts of horrible things to happen to people, including coma and death.
      • Your doctor could probably name about a hundred different combinations of pills that could kill you if he wanted. He knows these because he has to understand the side effects of what he's giving out. The Friar understands how his herbs work, and can therefore produce a certain potion when asked.
    • Remember that England was a Protestant country at this point, and there was a certain mistrust of Catholicism. In Shakespeare's source, Arthur Brooks' Romeus and Juliet, one of the morals was not to take council from "superstitious Friars." Shakespeare seems more sympathetic towards Friar Lawrence, but there was still some problematic aspects to his character.

Why, after her father told her to marry Paris 'or else', didn't Juliet simply tell him she was already married? What horrible fate would have befallen her for giving a reason she didn't want Paris to "make [her] a joyful bride"?

• It's the middle ages. Considering how you could of gotten hung for extramarital sex, how do you think they would react to you marrying someone behind everyone's back? Plus, even if I don't really know the social stigma around secret marriages, it clear no one would argue with what the father chooses to do at that time, and he probably wouldn't like her actions...
  • Getting married to a guy from the despised rival family who'd recently killed her cousin? Her father would have probably had a heart attack.
    • Though that would resolve that problem if he had a heart attack, considering the medicine in the middle ages.
• It was an illegal marriage. In the Renaissance era a precontract of marriage, what Juliet had with Paris, had all of the binding of a real marriage. People were able to get out of inconvenient marriages if they could prove that the partner had a precontract with someone else that had never been officially terminated, making the marriage void. That's how Henry VIII got out of his marriage with Anne of Cleves. If she had brought it up, it would have escalated the problems of the feuding families to untold heights because Romeo had tricked Juliet into an illegal marriage while she was betrothed to someone else and had deflowered her, making it near impossible for her to get a respectable marriage.
  • Actually, there was no precontract, just a proposal. However, the age of consent in Elizabethan England was 21, meaning you can't get married without parental approval until both people are 21, so it was still illegal.
    • Except Romeo and Juliet takes place in Verona, Italy...

I know it's brilliantly written and whatever but why does nobody pay attention the the fact that this WHOLE ENTIRE STORY takes place over the course of about a half of a WEEK?

• It's a common failing with Shakespeare plots: look at Othello, where there would seem to be two separate time schemes working at once (we really need an Othello page!) It's odd since the source material occurred over a few months, but this seems to highlight several points: 1) Our lovers are reckless teenagers, more likely to fall in love overnight; 2)How long (realistically speaking) would they be able to keep their marriage secret? 3) It makes more sense that Romeo would kill Tybalt straight after Mercutio's death, and of course he's banished straight afterwards; 4) It has to be a short space of time for the Friar's drug to work ... OK, other factors like the plague breaking out and Capulet doing a 360 turn to let Paris marry his daughter are less explicable, and fit more within a long range timeline. Let's chalk it up to the fact Will had to write to a deadline. If your company has to produce a certain number of plays per season, things like plot and sense can fly out of the window. He would never have expected the play to last past his lifetime, never mind have tropers picking at it on the Net hundreds of years later.
  • Of course Capulet's decision to let Paris marry Juliet could happen realistically in a short while. The movie Romeo + Juliet has him be drunk as a lord out of grief for Tybalt's death, which leads to him impulsively deciding to hand her over. It also explains why he gets so furious at her, since she refuses the marriage while he's still drunk and upset.
• Also, what does it matter that it takes about a week? Some full doorstoppers take place over a few hours, and some short stories take place over years.
• A play is a lot like a movie. It's only a couple of hours long and it needs to keep a fast pacing to get through everything in time. Introducing long time breaks between scenes would require some way of establishing that time has passed (dialogue, narration, etc...), lines used to explain what has happened in the interim, break the feeling of continuous action and plot developments, and so on. So what movies and plays often to do is take some Artistic License and let relationships (both romances and friendships) develop unrealistically fast in order to cram all the important stuff in.
• It's probably worth noting that in Arthur Brooks' Romeus and Juliet, the poem from which Shakespeare took the story, the events took place over the course of several months.

Why do productions often take out Paris's death, but leave in the Prince's comment about losing "a brace of kinsmen"?

Can they not count to two?

• Most likely, they were just trying to save time.
• They probably don't know that "a brace" means "a pair." Even if they do, it's an easy line to overlook, buried among all the Shakespearean style dialogue.
• Huh. That line always sailed over my head-- I thought he said "abrasive kinsman," acknowledging that Mercutio was, at least partially, responsible for his own death as well.

Why couldn't Juliet have just asked to wait to marry Paris?

She could have just made an excuse that she needed a few more weeks to marry Paris or something of the sort without yelling at her father (thus making him angry and forcing her to marry him) and in that span of time she could have left for Romeo.

• She doesn't yell at him or anything. Her dad comes in, asks his wife if she already told him about the wedding, and her mother says yes, and that Juliet is thankful but will not get married. Capulet immediately goes bananas, clearly implying with his questions that he thinks Juliet is an ungrateful little brat, and Juliet's attempt to appease him does no good. She probably didn't think he was gonna react that way, and I doubt any excuse she could have come up with would have made a difference.
• She does ask to wait--"Delay this marriage for a month, a week"--but it only makes her dad angrier.

Wait a minute...

I have two issues with the couple's wedding night. First off-nobody hears these two? Nobody even comments on any mysterious sounds coming from Juliet's bedchamber. Oh, and they spent the whole night together and, instead of running off together somewhere to live their lives, just have some sex. Brilliant move, kids.

• In regards to the second part, see "It is not a romance" above. The story is about two horny teenagers who "fall in love" after meeting and throw their lives away over what basically amounts to lust. In other words, Shakespeare wanted them to be this stupid. That was the point.
• The plan was for Romeo to hang out in Mantua until the Montagues and Friar Lawrence could convince the Prince to pardon him, at which point he would have been reunited with Juliet. Juliet running off with him immediately would have ruined that. As to the sex...come on, this was their wedding night. I don't think even the most prudish would object to them wanting to get one night together.
  • He was in no danger at Mantua. If they'd gone there together, they could have had all the nights/days/afternoons they pleased with nobody to bother them.
    • Yes, but if Juliet had run away with him to Mantua, that would have completely ruined any chance of their marriage ending the feud and instead become yet another reason for Montagues and Capulets to kill each other. Friar Lawrence was still hopeful that once tempers cooled over the latest incident, he would be able to get Romeo a pardon and find a way to get the Capulets to accept the marriage.
  • Nobody heard them because the Nurse is on their side - a la Shakespeare in Love. She could come up with something.

Does anyone else feel really sorry for Paris?

Everyone else in some sense caused his/her own death. Romeo and Juliet were suicides. Tybalt went around starting so many fights that he had to have had the life expectancy of a goldfish. Mercutio, while not as hot-headed as Tybalt, still started the fight that killed him. Paris, though, fell in love with a girl and courted her in the way his society found acceptable. Then, after she died, he tried to arrest a known criminal who was breaking into her tomb. Hard to see why he deserved to get skewered.

• • This troper feels sorry for him, though that may be due to the fact that I played him in a production once. But it's also interesting to note that at the end of the play, almost none of the characters even acknowlege his death. Granted, the families are grieving for their kids, but Capulet seemed to have a certain fondnesss for the man earlier. Ultimately, the girl Paris was hoping to marry cheats on him, apparently dies, when he goes to her resting place to grieve, he finds the man who killed his friend who kills him and all anyone can do is mope about the tragic death of his killer.
• That's the point - Paris was a good guy who just wanted to marry Juliet and in no way deserved his fate. Romeo himself realizes this and grieves over his body. This troper always saw the death of Paris as symbolic of how crazy and out of control the entire situation had gotten.

All the tropers beating the rest of us over the head with "IT'S NOT A ROMANCE!"

Okay, we get it. You're so much smarter than everyone else in the world because you interpreted Romeo And Juilet correctly. But from the popular mis-interpretation, the songs have been written, the movies have been made, and the sitcom episodes involving the School Play have been aired. You can't change that, and frankly I think everyone has the right to their Alternate Character Interpretations as they please. I doubt Shakespeare even cares at this point. He's dead. (But if the spirit world does exist, I still don't think he'd really give a toss. Seriously, ghost Shakespeare would have better things to do than bitch about how teenagers and pop culture interpret one play out of the 37 he wrote.)

• Seconded! And a TV Tropes Made of Win Archive to you, troper!
• So if enough people are wrong, the wrong just goes away. That's certainly convenient.
  • No, I was just saying beating people over the head with something is goddamn annoying. You're talking as if this is a huge political issue that could affect humanity as we know it. Dude, people interpreting one Shakespeare play "wrong" is not going to cause the collapse of society.
  • Not to mention, it's become a universally recognizable benchmark of romance, which your insistence that it is not a romance is not going to change. (Also, have you read that dialogue? that is some fine poetry.)
  • Sorry.
    • Also, the thing about plays... sans Word of God (and sometimes regardless), there is no such thing as a correct or incorrect interpretation. That's what an interpretation is.
      • I'm sorry, but of course you can interpret something incorrectly. We have an entire pages dedicated to people making this mistake, like Draco in Leather Pants, Completely Missing the Point, Misaimed Fandom, Fan Dumb, you name it. Sure, it might be hard to determine if an interpretation is right or not, but just like opinions, they can be straight up wrong if they screw up the interpretation badly enough.
        • Your Mileage May Vary, they can be blatantly opposed to the author's intentions, but it's only considered "wrong" because people decided that authorial intent trumps everything before Death of the Author was codified.
  • I acknowledge the romance aspect, but what annoys me is people forgetting that it's also a tragedy. If there can be Romantic Comedies, who's to say there can't be Romantic Tragedies?
  • There's definitely romance involved, but I'm not sure you can call it a tragedy. Most tragedies have outside events and forces conspiring against the protagonist's happy ending, but the bad events of the play come about mainly because of the two lovers' own bad decisions and poor communication. One is surprised that Mercutio didn't just smile at Romeo's wangsty declarations of love, chuckle a bit, put an arm around his shoulder, and explain that if he can keep it in his pants for a few days, maybe Lord Montague can pull some strings and arrange a proper introduction. Not to mention that Mercutio's death could have been avoided if Romeo had simply told Tybalt that he and Juliet were married and thus could not fight him. The worst that could have happened is he triggers Tybalt's Berserk Button, which was being hammered on anyway.
    • Huh? The reason you're giving for why it isn't a tragedy is exactly why it is one. One of the defining characteristics of Tragedy is that the hero(es) bring about their own downfall.
    • Exactly. The reason why it's a tragedy was because two teenagers died in circumstances that could have been so easily avoided.
  • Romeo and Juliet's death is a result of outside forces. A conveniently timed plague keeps the guy with Friar Lawrence's explanatory letter from reaching Romeo.
• I always thought it was supposed to be a tragedy. The brilliance of Shakespeare is that many of his plays work on different levels based on the backgrounds of different members of the audience, and R and J is a perfect example of this. When most people read it, they are freshmen or sophomores in high school, and admit it, you felt exactly like Romeo and/or Juliet when you were a young teenager. Teenagers see the power of the "romance" because it is all they know. Older and Wiser members of the audience see the exact same material, realize Romeo and Juliet are typical teenagers more in lust than anything, and think, "Dear God, those kids killed themselves over nothing!" It's worth noting that we see R and J's parents before and after the "main plot" and I don't think that was just a convenient means of providing exposition and denouement. Viewers are supposed to sympathize with the parents, not just the teenagers. The romance aspect is more prominent to younger members of the audience, and the tragic aspect is more evident to older members of the audience.
• Sensitive much, OP?
• I have to agree with the OP here, at least when people shout that it isn't even a love story, but a satire on juvenile infatuation. That's in interpretation, not a fact. Yes, of course it is a tragedy (although the only really tragic mistake is done by Romeo when he kills Tybalt, the rest is happenstance). But the whole "those crazy kids weren't in love, they were just infatuated"-hypothesis is not the only critical interpretation. In fact, a lot of people, e.g. Samuel Coleridge, see the difference between infatuation/in love with being in love (Romeo & Rosalind) versus real love (Romeo & Juliet) as one of the major themes of the play, noticable by changes in Romeo's style of speech. So, while the genre is, of course, tragedy (and couldn't be romance anyway cause that is no classic dramatic genre), that does not prove in any way that Romeo and Juliet does not contain a romantic love story between tragic protagonists. It's "star-crossed lovers", not "star-crossed teenage fuck-buddies", or whatever the Elizabethean term for that would have been.
• To me the most annoying part of this interpretation is the general failure to realize that it's not like Romeo and Juliet themselves are the only people in this who act without thinking. It's practically the Veronese national character to be too impetuous, if you trust this plot (for another good example, see Michael York's version of Tybalt in the 1968 film. He's a blustery, swaggering Jerk Jock, but he sure as hell didn't actually mean to kill anybody, and it's plainly obvious that as soon as he stabs Mercutio he's full of horror at what he's done).
• By the genre standards of the day, it was a tragedy. Now, it would be classified a tragedy/romance, because multiple categories are possible. There, now - that wasn't so hard, was it?
• The basic impression I get of the OP is this: "FUCK THE PREVAILING ACADEMIC OPINION, I'LL INTERPRET IT HOWEVER I WANT! AND I'VE GOT THOUSANDS OF FORGETTABLE SCHOOL PLAY EPISODES AND BAD TAYLOR SWIFT SONGS TO BACK ME UP!"
  • Only because the supporters of the "prevailing academic opinion" can be very obnoxious about it. Look at one of the first entries on this page - "STOP CALLING IT A ROMANCE. IT'S NOT A ROMANCE." The tone is very much, "I'm smarter than you." If that's not just as obnoxious as anything the OP said, then I'm Madonna. The OP's point wasn't over the accuracy of either interpretation, but just pointing out that the people who get all bent out of shape about it are overreacting, since the "incorrect" interpretation is the one accepted by pop culture. You notice he (or she) didn't even mention their own opinions on whether he or she thinks that interpretation is correct or not?
  • The problem with this is that there isn't really a "prevailing academic opinion" on Romeo and Juliet--it's a play whose "message" is notoriously hard to pin down. If anything, the prevailing academic opinion is that Romeo and Juliet draws heavily from both the romantic and tragic traditions. You'd have a hard time finding an academic who insists it must be solely one or the other. The whole "Romeo and Juliet is a satire of oversexed teenagers who aren't really in love" is an opinion mostly pushed by disaffected high school honor students, not academics--that view isn't supported by the text (which makes it clear that we are supposed to view R&J as "really" being in love).
• The worst part of the "It's not a romance!" argument is that . . . well, up until Mercutio's death, it largely is structured as a romantic comedy. Shakespeare structured it that way on purpose, playing with the audience's expectations and using the conventions of romantic comedy in order for the ending to have maximum impact. And even leading up to the ending, it still seems as those things might work out the way they would in a standard romantic comedy--that Juliet might wake up in time, that she and Romeo could reunite, that the friar could use that to end the feud and bring the two families together, etc. Obviously it's unfathomable now, because nobody goes to see Romeo and Juliet without knowing how it will end, but with its original audiences, the idea that it was supposed to seem like a romance until the closing scene was the point. Unless they were the rare exceptions who were familiar with the source material, audiences would go in with the preconceived expectation that everything would work out for the best, because that was what happened when you watched a romance--and that made the ending all that much more shocking and tragic. Obviously the ending ultimately reframes it as a tragedy, but the idea that people are somehow dumb for reading this as a "romance" when that's exactly how Shakespeare hoped they would read it--and when the conventions of romantic comedy take up 90 percent of the play--seems kind of strange to me.

• I think the point is the original poster is sick of debating the whole romance/non-romance issue altogether

Romeo + Juliet, head vs. heart.

Why did Juliet shoot herself in the head instead of the heart? Was it some sort of commentary about... something, or was it just that people usually don't shoot themselves in the heart?

• Well, these days we all know that emotions actually happen in the brain rather than the heart, so... maybe it is still symbolic?
  • Thinking about it further, perhaps the symbolism is that their love wasn't from the heart, because they rushed into their relationship (although that probably demands Juliet shooting herself in the vagina, but perhaps that's TOO symbolic.)
• Yes. Suicide by shooting in the heart is sufficiently uncommon for it to have been a plot twist in a Lord Peter Wimsey novel.

Romeo and Juliet's ages

• Why in modern productions both of them will be around 16-19 (or older) but in the play Juliet is 13-14 and Romeo is only a little older. Is it to stop the Squick factor.
  • I would imagine partly for the squick factor, yes, but partly because Shakespeare is pretty tough material; there are probably not many thirteen-year-old actresses capable of handling it, if there are any at all. Plus there's the general tendency of stage performances to cast child/teen roles with actors several years older than the character is supposed to be.

In the 1996 movie, Romeo + Juliet, why does Juliet just sit there and watch Romeo die?

Romeo is thrashing around for about 5 minutes after Juliet wakes up. She's awake and rational enough to figure out that he's taken poison. So why doesn't she do something about it: induce vomiting, scream for help, run for a phone and call 911, anything? Instead, she just watches him die while planning her own suicide. It makes her creepy.

• It would make it more realistic, but less tragic. Also, she was probably panicing from it and still a bit woozy from the poison she'd taken.
• He's hardly 'thrashing around'. Also, she sees him drinking the poison and probably twigs that there is absolutely nothing she can do about his impending death. Remember 'if you had the strength of twenty men, it would dispatch you straight.' Inducing vomiting would make it worse; screaming for help, running to a phone? she's supposed to be DEAD! Also, 'Romeo. Is. Banished!' so anyone she could get to for help probably wouldn't be too happy to see him.

Why didn't Juliet just ask to deliver the poison to Romeo himself and then run away with him

• Okay,Juliet you tell your mother that you're upset over Tybalt's death when you're really crying over Romeo's banishment and your mother offers to sent someone to poison Romeo,you say you say you want to mix the poison yourself,then Mommy Capulet announces your engagement to Paris and you decide to let the cat out of the bag about Romeo. Let me explain this to you slowly, you could have said you wouldn't feel right about being married when your cousin's killer lives,then run off with Romeo and live happily ever after.
  • Yes, because people routinely would send 14-year-old posh girls to assassinate people, and would have just let her go on her own. That makes a ton of sense.

Why did Balthasar tell Romeo of Juliet's death?

Their love was secret. No one knew about their relationship other than themselves and Friar (and the Nurse, if I recall correctly). To anyone who didn't know about their previous encounter, why would they think Romeo would care about a random girl from Verona dying?

• Because Romeo asked for news of Juliet. What does Romeo have to lose by having his servant know?
• It's shown later that Romeo is not above threatening to kill Balthasar, so perhaps he scared him into keeping the secret.

Why is Romeo allowed to love Rosaline but not Juliet?

He tells his friends that he loves Rosaline, but he keeps it a secret when he falls in love with Juliet. However, they're both Capulets.

• a) Mercutio and Benvolio tease Romeo endlessly about being in love with Rosaline; Romeo feels that it's actually serious with Juliet this time (well, more serious than Rosaline, anyways)--"He jests at scars that never felt a wound"--and decides not to bring it up in case they start in on him again. Friar Laurence ends up doing it for them, though.
• b) Rosaline is a Capulet, but Juliet is the head of the family's sole heir. Romeo is screwed if he openly admits anything.
  • It's debatable whether he would actually have been screwed. The play goes out of its way to show that Lord Capulet had heard good things about Romeo specifically, and had a good opinion of him -- whether this would have extended to marrying his daughter is obviously a different question, but given that the heads of both families had plenty of reason to want to end the feud, it's not totally impossible, either. It's very possible to read the secrecy and cloak-and-dagger planning of everyone in on the secret as another form of folly.

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