Plume de Lynx

inkskinned:

penfairy:

Dismissing Romeo and Juliet as dumb horny teens is OUT, crying because every attempt these children made to show love, kindness and tolerance in the face of senseless hate only led to more violence and death is IN

crosspoint: the entire thing was that they were dumb kids. reading R&J growing up goes in stages: “this was so sad” “they’re so fucking dumb what the fuck” “this was so fucking sad”. 

they’re dumb kids. there’s plenty of textual evidence they are both sort of selfish in their love (ie Romeo’s on the rebound, Juliet just super doesn’t want to get married to Paris and is desperate for anything-except-that-guy) and a lot of evidence they didn’t truly know each other/see each other for anything but for a romantic ideal (the entire “but soft” monologue intentionally uses grandiose terms and basically translates to “oh fuck she’s pretty”). they literally can’t even communicate essential information correctly. in my opinion they’re not a good match – and shakespeare knows how to write a good match.

but they should have been allowed to be dumb kids. 

the families had gotten to a point that even love – even stupid, selfish, childish love – devolved into violence. while the scenes they share are peaceful until the end, their solo scenes are dominated by violence – romeo with physical violence and juliet suffering the violence of having been essentially sold to an older man. they took the violence that they were surrounded by and turned it onto themselves. they had been raised in it, had been cultivated by it, and when they faced adversity, violence was inevitably the only thing they knew how to control. juliet – soft, innocent, sympathetic juliet – is the final death. and hers is by a wielded blade.

they weren’t trying to be a beacon of kindness or tolerance. but they were just kids. and what had seemed perfectly sensible (after all, the feud had resulted in death in either side, the rage made sense), the suddenness of a truly…. senseless death – who else can the families blame but themselves. no more finger pointing. after trying to hurt each other for so long, they only hurt themselves.

i’m convinced r&j isn’t about a one true love. juliet is the only one who calls it true love, the narrator certainly doesn’t. the first monologue describes it as “piteous“. instead, i think it’s about how it shouldn’t have been their last love. romeo and juliet could have been a romantic comedy about how fast kids fall in love with the stupidest things, how they make declarations of true love by the hour, how they float from one person to another, how they call crushes true love without knowing each other’s middle names.

it could have been a comedy. and i think, kind of, that’s what makes it such a perfect, terrible tragedy.