A tragedy is when bad things happen to good people. Equivalently, when someone is trying to be good, but isn't quite good enough to manage it and their just punishment destroys much of value. Romeo & Juliet is not a tragedy because they're both shitbags.
Romeo is a criminal, incompetent, and multiply perverted; he uses honour as an excuse to murder the winner of a duel because he's butthurt. Juliet is the most basic of basic bitches. Fun fact: marrying without posting the banns is not a legitimate marriage. A "secret" marriage is like a secret press release or a circle with corners. Hoes gonna ho, I guess. At the time of the Globe posting the banns were centuries old and the audiences should have known her plan was pure wrong.
Both of their families are better off without them. The only tragedy is the fact they weren't stillborn.
"Shakespeare’s principal source for the plot was The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), a long narrative poem by the English poet Arthur Brooke, who had based his poem on a French translation of a tale by the Italian Matteo Bandello."
Courtly love is neither courtly nor loving. It's early feminist Sophistry. "Romance" is sterile.
P.S. sounds like peasant behaviour to me. "What would the peons do if they had fancy jackets and the habit of wearing swords? First, being unable to distinguish seemings from beings, they would develop an overinflated opinion of themselves..." Globe audiences ate up Shakespeare because they identified with the characters; the characters were not noble. That and lack of competition.
The moral of R&J: don't let cads near your daughter if she's too vapid to know better. Also, don't raise a cad because he's apt to come to a sticky end as a result of his bad education and the weird schemes his latest fun hole devises because she's bored.
Let's do Hamlet.
"Hmm, I think my uncle is a fratricidal traitor."
Broke: investigate.
Woke: pretend to be crazy.
"Wait, what do you mean pretend?" Is this inbreeding?
Literally Elizabethan soap opera. Elizabethan Jerry Springer. Elizabethan Always Sunny.
In reality kings had food tasters or other measures and if they died of poison it was iatrogenic. Poison as a weapon is largely a modern phenomenon. Ancient folk remember political poisonings precisely because they're rare and non-representative, the same way a news event makes the news precisely because it's so rare you can ignore it. (E.g. stranger kidnappings.) A king dumb enough to die to poison? Deserved it. The only tragedy in Hamlet is that Hamlet's mutant dad was ever king in the first place.
Hamlet is proof that the most important trait a work needs to become popular is to be popular. A work has to be absolute trash before it can't be saved by a perception of popularity.
P.P.S. The name 'Globe' is itself suspiciously humanist. What did you name it after, Shakespeare?
P.P.P.S. Don't forget Galileo is promoted exactly because he was a terrible scientist. Either as a flex or sabotage. "Haha! We made you take Galileo seriously!" "Be like Galileo (because he is no threat)."
P.P.P.P.S. Turns out having a Queen really is kind of a bad idea. England had Kings again later..or did it? Was already too late by that point. Centuries of LARPing? They venerated Shakespeare, so...
6 comments:
Let's imagine R&J as a tragedy.
Romeo, finding himself in love with an impossible match, attempts to make peace between the families, thus addressing the root cause of his problem. As opposed to committing trespass and fornication. He appoints himself ambassador, attempts to understand both sides' grievances, and tries to craft a compromise, or a least a cease-fire.
This might seem a bit overboard, given Juliet is just some vapid bitch, but let's say he sees something in her that nobody else does.
At a preliminary summit / party, a drunk Mercutio trips and dashes his head open on a stone during a primarily verbal altercation with Tybalt. Romeo, distraught due to the death of his friend, accuses Tybalt of pushing the man from behind. Romeo's case is bolstered when it is discovered Tybalt has been obstructing the peace process from the shadows, apparently purely to spite Romeo, and the altercation resulted from Mercutio realizing this and blowing his lid at Tybalt. There are witnesses but none were close by; their testimonies are contradictory, self-serving, or in two cases actually impossible. "I saw Tybalt stab Mercutio! Right in the face!" Neither were armed, Mercutio's face is uninjured, and from their vantage point view of the heads would have been blocked by the trees.
This escalates. Naturally.
Putting this side by side with Shakespeare's version, we can see that, for example, it was not necessary for Romeo to be the son of a donkey. (By contrast, if Spock could learn facts as a result of experience, he would rapidly stop being a proper Spock character.) Here, he is understandably unable to control himself in the wake of a tragic accident, and poor luck conspires to make it too difficult for the immature young man to recover. Also note an undercurrent: why haven't the adults taken on these duties, which, as it turns out, Romeo is unequal to? Where are the parents? Why is it necessary for Romeo to be heroically noble, instead of merely ordinarily noble?
I repeat: it's not a tragedy when an addict falls asleep on the tracks and gets pasted by a train. That's a Darwin award. Original Romeo is a very normal dumbass who does dumbass things and gets his dumb ass killed as a result.
There is nothing in this rather febrile, sweaty effort I can address, or care to try. It's from another world, and one I never want to go to. Maybe someone else will want to take it on. Nothing else you've written has ever defined the impasse so starkly, and it also somehow evokes Orwell, although in a rather ambiguous way.
Hit a nerve, I see.
No. “It was like being trapped on a dance floor and crooned at by a drunk."
Cope.
With regard to your reformulation on making it a tragedy - it's not like that.
Let me explain - as a rule channeling conceit is absolutely destructive to the people in question. So, they don't do it. "Wipe out your pride the moment it arises".
But. This can cause problems, it can bring danger. In particular they are too eager to clinch a deal, to play the game - And simply to get a foot in, they are willing to debase themselves.
For example, see America being over eager in trying to bring China into the fold.
Put yourself in the shoes of those who have difficulty with 57 - 72 in the Bhikkhu Pattimokka.
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