Episode #242 ... Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare

Speaker 1 Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This.

Speaker 1 Patreon.com slash Philosophize This. Philosophical Writing on Substack at Philosophize This on There.
I hope you love the show today. So, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.

Speaker 1 Many of you were probably forced to read this when you were in high school. And little did we know back then how much philosophy there was underneath the events of the play.

Speaker 1 See, this is one of those stories where I think to understand the significance of a lot of the stuff that happens in it, you got to know about a scene that goes on at the very end of it first.

Speaker 1 Because once we know about the ending of this play, then all the stuff before it starts to take on a whole new meaning.

Speaker 1 I'm talking about the scene where there are three people lying dead inside of a tomb in a churchyard. Two of these people are teenagers who have just taken their own lives.

Speaker 1 Their names are Romeo and Juliet. The other guy is named Count Paris, who's been stabbed to death by Romeo just hours before.

Speaker 1 Outside of the tomb, there's a friar from a local church named Lawrence who's pleading with the authorities of the city.

Speaker 1 He's confessing to how all this that went on here is partially his fault, that he had helped helped Romeo and Juliet plot the things that have led them to being in this place.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, the fathers of both Romeo and Juliet are standing close by the tomb mourning the loss of their children.

Speaker 1 They look over at each other, and as two people that have long hated one another, they say, you know what, enough of this. Let's shake hands right now, call a truce between us.

Speaker 1 Because look what all this fighting between our families has led us to. Two of our children are now dead.
By the end of this episode, we'll understand how all these people got to this place.

Speaker 1 And we'll understand a bit more about what Shakespeare wanted wanted to get across when he wrote this play.

Speaker 1 See, because something cool about this play in particular that makes it different from some of Shakespeare's other work is that we actually can reasonably take a guess as to the stuff he wanted to put a focus on here.

Speaker 1 You know, usually it's not very smart to assume anything Shakespeare was thinking if we don't have him explicitly telling us about it.

Speaker 1 But the great thing about this play is that Shakespeare didn't write the original story of Romeo and Juliet.

Speaker 1 No, he rewrote this story that he first saw as a poem somebody else had written 30 years before.

Speaker 1 And even that poem he was drawing from was heavily building on details from stories that came before it.

Speaker 1 This reimagining of a story, by the way, where you put new things in, make it your own kind of thing. This was standard practice in the industry back in the 1590s when Shakespeare is writing this.

Speaker 1 Anyway, what this means is that it becomes uniquely possible with this play for scholars to consider the original sources we know Shakespeare was building the story off of.

Speaker 1 And then we can know where his head was at because we can look at what he chooses to add to the story.

Speaker 1 What he adds becomes a statement of what he thought was important to include in his version of it.

Speaker 1 And from the very beginning, in a story that's typically remembered by people as one of the most beautiful love stories ever written, there's going to be multiple layers to what Shakespeare does in this play when he makes violence a central theme as well.

Speaker 1 He's going to give violence the treatment things receive in a tragic play, where again, we try to consider it with complexity, the right amount of ambiguity, and we try not to give in to the temptation of demonizing violence or idealizing it.

Speaker 1 The first scene of the play opens up with two families fighting in the streets of Verona, Italy. You have the Montague family on one side of this, and the Capulet family on the other.

Speaker 1 Now, the feud between these two families has been going on for generations in this town. Grandpa Capulet couldn't stand Grandpa Montague.
Their kids hated each other. Even their dogs hated each other.

Speaker 1 Used to be a lot of barking in this neighborhood. So Act 1 begins with the servants from these families getting into a scuffle in the street.

Speaker 1 And then once they're fighting, this escalates into other members of the family that start jumping in as well.

Speaker 1 There's Tybalt, who's a Capulet, sort of of the big brother figure in that family, not a guy you really want to mess with.

Speaker 1 And he jumps in and gets into a fight with Benvolio, who's one of the older boys on the Montague side.

Speaker 1 And the people of this town are standing around helplessly on the sidelines, watching as people go from verbally arguing, then they start getting loud. Now swords are getting drawn.

Speaker 1 The feud between these two families is once again making living in this neighborhood an incredibly scary thing for all these people.

Speaker 1 I mean, who wants to walk outside their house and watch someone get stabbed to death in their front yard? So the fight gets interrupted by a local peacekeeping militia.

Speaker 1 And these people had to intervene into the fight because it took forever for the actual authorities to get there, the guy in charge of the town named Prince Aeschylus.

Speaker 1 The prince stands up in front of everyone, he looks out at all the people that were just fighting, and he says, look, I'm tired of all you capulets and Montagues that are making this town unlivable for people.

Speaker 1 So I'm going to make this real easy on you from here on out. If either one of your families gets into another fight like this, it's going to be punishable by death next time.

Speaker 1 In other words, if you fight, I'm just going to kill you. you.
And if you'd like to find out if I'm joking about that, just go ahead and try me. The two families calm down.

Speaker 1 They go back to their respective houses. The crowd disperses.

Speaker 1 But importantly, there's no real peace that's been made here by the prince, or a feeling that any of this that just happened has been resolved whatsoever.

Speaker 1 Now, the violence in this first scene is going to foreshadow to a progression of more and more intense scenes of violence that are going to go on throughout this entire play.

Speaker 1 Later on, Tybalt's going to challenge Romeo to a duel because he disrespected his family's honor. Tybalt at another point kills Romeo's friend, and then Romeo comes back and kills Tybalt as vengeance.

Speaker 1 After that, Romeo will kill Count Paris, and yet another person ends up dead. Point is, this level of violence is not something that was in the original story.

Speaker 1 So scholars over the centuries have made the case that there's something important about this violence that Shakespeare wanted to put on display here.

Speaker 1 The first thing to say, maybe, is that he wanted us to realize that violent feuding between families or groups like this, the kind of stuff that makes a place scary for people to live in, this usually goes on when there's some kind of an authority out there that's not doing their job properly.

Speaker 1 In our modern world, this could be that the authority is corrupt in some way. It could be that they're not properly trained or funded.

Speaker 1 Maybe the authority is just turning a blind eye to whatever's going on for any number of reasons. Remember, the prince doesn't even show up in the play until it's far too late to do anything.

Speaker 1 And even when he does show up, he doesn't really hand out real punishments that would be that much of a deterrent.

Speaker 1 So Shakespeare's initial point is that in the absence of real authority or moral leadership that helps mediate these things, everyday people, and usually men, will will behave in this sort of way.

Speaker 1 They will create codes of honor that people need to live up to, and then they'll use violence as a way of solving the problems they have with each other.

Speaker 1 And this was really common back in the time of Shakespeare too, by the way.

Speaker 1 Maybe you've heard of people from around this time where if they had a problem with someone, they would challenge them to a duel, where two people, in the name of their own honor, will pull out their weapons and have a fight to the death.

Speaker 1 This is what you did.

Speaker 1 And there are all sorts of guides you can find from back then, where, you know, gentlemen's quarterly will write down the rules for when you're dueling someone, how and when to do it if you want to remain civil.

Speaker 1 This resembles ways that men still behave today sometimes. But whether it was back then or today, this dueling culture is said by guys to have a purpose that's built into it.

Speaker 1 It helps to maintain order, they will say. If a guy disrespects you, you fight that person.

Speaker 1 And the silver lining to this for a society is that people are not going to go around disrespecting people if they're going to get punched in the face or killed as a consequence of it.

Speaker 1 So this is a code, in other words, formed among the people that supposedly makes the world a safer place in the absence of a real authority.

Speaker 1 But Shakespeare's trying to show in this play that all of this is nonsense at some level, that this isn't actually how these codes of honor work at all in practice.

Speaker 1 There's a great piece written by Jill Levinson, big name in the Romeo and Juliet space, and she makes this claim about the violence that we see throughout the play.

Speaker 1 The idea is that Shakespeare understood how backwards these honor codes really were. First of all, think of the absolute genius that's embedded into the logic here.

Speaker 1 I mean, somebody disrespects your honor, so now you've got to go and beat them up.

Speaker 1 But now whoever gets beat up has had their honor disrespected, and now they got to go beat up somebody else to make that situation right again.

Speaker 1 And you got these idiot guys that'll be like, well, that's not how real men do it. Real men fight and then win or lose.

Speaker 1 They dust each other off, shake hands, and they actually become friends afterwards. It's like, okay, not saying that's never happened before.
It happens.

Speaker 1 But what happens more often in the world we live in? I mean, look around you. Somebody gets beat up and they come back with a group of their friends or with a gun.

Speaker 1 The whole logic of this setup is just stupid.

Speaker 1 And Levinson makes the point that Shakespeare's trying to show here how not only do these honor codes not actually maintain the order of a society, but that violence like this even has a progressive element to it that makes it something that actively works against keeping things ordered.

Speaker 1 That when this is how you solve your problems, you're left with a world like the one we see in the play, where even the servants of the Capulets and the Montagues have to fight each other on sight.

Speaker 1 Duels are being thrown down. People are killing each other out of vengeance for other killing that's going on.
This is the kind of world that this strategy produces.

Speaker 1 So if what's going on here is not this fantasy of theirs where we're maintaining the order of the world, Shakespeare's getting us to consider, what end is all this violence really in service of then?

Speaker 1 Well, if you pay attention, it mostly just serves the pride and ego of the people that are doing the fighting.

Speaker 1 It makes the Montagues or the Capulets feel good about themselves, and it's only then, once their pride is secured, that they hide behind this other story of how it's good for anyone else.

Speaker 1 This is a very dangerous trap for people to fall into for William Shakespeare.

Speaker 1 Because whenever a society has a problem that needs to be solved, notice how violence can be a really easy way to solve whatever it is that doesn't require that much creativity.

Speaker 1 Violence, then, at just an abstract level, becomes a really easy thing to add on to a culture, where then once it's there, embedded into the way that people solve things, it's always far more difficult to remove it than it was to add it.

Speaker 1 Reminds me of the point that people sometimes make about protecting freedoms. You know, very easy to give up freedoms you you have to solve some temporary safety issue.

Speaker 1 But those freedoms are much harder to get back once you've already given them up. Well, violence becomes something similar here.

Speaker 1 And as you're reading or watching this play, and you're seeing all the violence that Shakespeare has worked into it, understand that there's a bigger question he wants to get us thinking about here.

Speaker 1 This is a point that's made originally by Elizabeth Fraser. She's a philosopher at Oxford.

Speaker 1 And she says, a real question that Shakespeare gets us considering is what kind of an authority out there, if any, can actually end this violence that's going on between these two groups that are fighting each other?

Speaker 1 And she thinks what he shows us is that it's not the police that can stop fighting like this, or the authority of the state more generally.

Speaker 1 After all, the prince in the play always shows up too late, and then doesn't actually follow through with any of the punishments, especially when it comes to the members of these elite families.

Speaker 1 They always seem to be getting away with it. It's not the moral leadership of the church that can stop this fighting.

Speaker 1 All the stuff they use to try to bring the families together, that all fails horribly as well. So what else is out there as an authority we can rely on?

Speaker 1 Well, for Shakespeare, maybe you're someone who thinks that these people just got to take the Gandhi route to all this.

Speaker 1 Where, look, all these people really need to be able to come together is the authority of love in their life. That love ultimately is the cure for all the violence in the world.

Speaker 1 Well, as he shows in the play, even the intense love of Romeo and Juliet that we'll talk about soon is nowhere near enough to actually bring these families together.

Speaker 1 The only thing that finally brings an end to the violence between these two groups is a catastrophe. It is Romeo and Juliet taking their own lives in an event that shakes these families at their core.

Speaker 1 And as bleak of a picture as this may paint about the world for Shakespeare, it seems the only way to get any semblance of peace between these groups that otherwise are so obsessed with their own pride is for some catastrophe to strike that gives us at least a temporary break from all the violence that otherwise would be going on.

Speaker 1 Point is, despite this play mostly being seen by people as a love story, this point about violence may be one of the main messages Shakespeare wanted to send people with this play.

Speaker 1 Anyway, the story is about love, though, at a very important level. So let's get back into the events of the play a bit so that we can talk more about it.

Speaker 1 Because after the prince threatens the families with the death penalty, you know, once everybody's moved on with their day after the fight, a relative of the prince named Count Paris pulls aside the father of one of these families, Lord Capulet, and he asks him if he can have a word with him in private.

Speaker 1 He says, Lord Capulet, you have a daughter, don't you? Her name's Juliet, from what I've heard. Well, it's your lucky day today.

Speaker 1 I, as a member of this royal family that's in charge of the city, I have a proposition for you.

Speaker 1 I want to marry your daughter, make her my wife, and merge your family into this more royal family that I'm a part of. What do you say about that whole possibility? To which Mr.

Speaker 1 Cathwood says, aye, but she's not yet fourteen, Count Paris.

Speaker 1 Quote, let two more summers wither in their pride, ere we may think her ripe to be a bride, end quote. In other words, Count Paris, he's saying, probably not a good idea, right this second.

Speaker 1 Juliette's only 13 years old, after all. And I'd prefer it personally, he says, if you'd wait two years before any of this that you're talking about happens.

Speaker 1 And two years' time, she'll be 15, fully ready to be married at that point. And in the meantime, look, we're having a big party tonight.
Everyone's going to be there.

Speaker 1 And if this is really what you want to do, you can come over tonight, introduce yourself to Juliet, and get started on that long wooing process that, let's be honest, it's probably better if it all goes on.

Speaker 1 Count Paris agrees to this and says he'll be there.

Speaker 1 We cut away to a different scene now in the play, where one of the sons of the Montagues, young man named Romeo, is moping around completely upset talking to his two friends.

Speaker 1 He's moping because he's just been rejected by a woman that he professed his love to. Her name was Rosaline, and Romeo loved Rosaline more than life itself.

Speaker 1 He'd just met up with her right before this and told her about all these feelings he was having. But Rosaline just didn't feel the same way that Romeo did.
You know, the timing here is just horrible.

Speaker 1 But I was just thinking when you said all that that I should be taking a vow of chastity here soon. Sorry, Romeo, but it's not going to happen.

Speaker 1 Disappointed, his friends are trying to cheer him up when they get the idea that Romeo should go to this party that the Capulets are having that night.

Speaker 1 After all, they say, there's going to be tons of eligible bachelorettes there. And what better way to get over Rosaline than to compare her to other potential partners in real life?

Speaker 1 Romeo just wants to go because Rosaline will be there, and at least he'll get to see her for a few minutes. Nonetheless, he agrees to go.
So he shows up to this party.

Speaker 1 And from the moment he gets there, he knows he's going to have to sneak around a bit when he's in one of the houses of the Capulets.

Speaker 1 I mean, if anybody catches wind that there's a Montague at this party, there's going to be problems for him.

Speaker 1 He's looking around, scanning the room for some trace of Rosaline, and then out of the corner of his eye, he sees someone else.

Speaker 1 And while he has no idea who she is, he knows she's the most beautiful person that he's ever seen in his life.

Speaker 1 He says, quote, it seems she hangs upon the cheek of night, like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear. Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear, end quote.
It turns out she kind of likes him too.

Speaker 1 And to call what happens between Romeo and Juliet here, love at first sight, it almost fails to describe something important about it.

Speaker 1 I mean, these are two people that kiss each other before they even know each other's names.

Speaker 1 They instantly start speaking in their own kind of poetic verse to each other, like they've been together for years. By 10 minutes in, the two of them are as in love as two people can possibly be.

Speaker 1 Juliet, of course, at this point, doesn't really care about Count Paris. And Romeo's forgotten all about Rosaline.
Rosa, who?

Speaker 1 And at the end of the party, both of them talk about the other one, to the nurse that works in the Capulet house, who's close to Juliet.

Speaker 1 And the two of them realize at this moment that they have just fallen in love with the one person that should be their mortal enemy.

Speaker 1 Is it right to love someone where everything about them runs contrary to what your family believes?

Speaker 1 Also, regardless of how they both feel, is it even realistic to hope that they could ever be together?

Speaker 1 These questions obviously run through their heads, but both of them can't ignore what they experienced that night at the party. So after the party ends, Romeo.

Speaker 1 can't stop thinking about Juliet, lurks in the bushes outside of her balcony, and overhears her talking to herself about how much she loves him.

Speaker 1 He comes out of the bushes and calls out to her, and what follows is the famous balcony scene from the play where they profess their love for one another and agree to get married the following day.

Speaker 1 Their families, of course, can't know about any of this, so Romeo goes to a local friar named Lawrence and asks if he'd be willing to marry them in secret.

Speaker 1 He agrees to, then he marries them, and now Romeo and Juliet are left to deal with the fallout of how their love for one another is going to impact everything else in their lives.

Speaker 1 And just so we don't kind of interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank everybody that goes through the sponsors of the show today. First up today is Zock Doc.

Speaker 1 Remember that doctor's appointment you were supposed to make a while ago? You know, that one you meant to book, but you got sidetracked and completely forgot about it until now?

Speaker 1 Well, why not book it today? I mean, with ZocDoc, you might be able to even book it by the time this ad is over.

Speaker 1 ZocDoc is a free app and website where you can search and compare high-quality in-network doctors and click to instantly book an appointment.

Speaker 1 We're talking more than 100,000 doctors across every specialty, from mental health to dental health, primary care to urgent care, and more.

Speaker 1 You can filter for doctors who take your insurance, located nearby, are a good fit for whatever medical need you have, and are highly rated by verified patients.

Speaker 1 Once you find the right doctor, you can see their actual appointment openings, choose a time slot that works for you, and click to instantly book a visit.

Speaker 1 Appointments made through ZocDoc also happen fast, typically within just 24 to 72 hours of booking. More often than not, you can even get same-day appointments.
I use ZocDoc, and you should too.

Speaker 1 So stop putting off those doctors' appointments and go to ZocDoc.com slash philo to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. That's z-oc-c-d-oc-c.com slash philo, zocdoc.com slash philo.

Speaker 1 And now their sound effect.

Speaker 1 Up next, this episode was sponsored by Quince. You know, with cold mornings and holiday plans in season, all I really want are my wardrobe choices to be simple.

Speaker 1 I want stuff that looks sharp, feels good, stuff I'll actually wear. And for me, that's all the stuff I've come to expect when I get something from Quince.

Speaker 1 And even if you don't need anything this holiday season, keep in mind Quince makes a great gift for someone special. They got $50 Mongolian cashmere sweaters that feel like an everyday luxury.

Speaker 1 They got wool coats that are equal parts stylish and durable. Even their denim is something that is durable and nails the fit every time.

Speaker 1 Quince partners directly with ethical factories and top artisans. They cut out the middlemen to deliver premium quality at half the cost of other high-end brands.

Speaker 1 That way you can give luxury quality pieces to your family without the luxury price tag. Give and get timeless holiday staples that last this season with Quince.

Speaker 1 Go to quince.com slash pt for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too.
That's quince.com slash pt with free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash pt.

Speaker 1 Last but not least, today is sponsored by NordVPN. Whenever you're online, you leave a digital trail.
Everything you watch, buy, and search for is there if you know how to look for it.

Speaker 1 A VPN is a simple tool that encrypts your internet connection and routes it through a secure server that's somewhere else.

Speaker 1 This way, your activity stays private and you can change your virtual location whenever you need to.

Speaker 1 But because of this technology, NordVPN is something that lets you watch sporting events and TV shows that aren't usually available in your region.

Speaker 1 Also with NordVPN, if you're traveling abroad, you can still access your usual streaming services just like you're back at home.

Speaker 1 With Threat Protection Pro, NordVPN can scan files for viruses during download and block ads and malicious links.

Speaker 1 One NordVPN account can be used up onto 10 different devices, and with apps on all the major platforms, they have thousands of servers across many countries for fast, reliable connections.

Speaker 1 So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to NordVPN.com slash filo this. Our link will also give you four extra months on the two-year plan.

Speaker 1 There's no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee. The link is in the podcast episode description box.
And now, back to the podcast. So to pause again for a second.

Speaker 1 You know, I can just imagine Shakespeare writing this play, knowing that the actions of Romeo and Juliet were going to spark some pretty heated discussions between people.

Speaker 1 Because depending on who you are, you could view all this that just happened in the story in any number of different ways. Let's talk about a few of them.

Speaker 1 One obvious, valid perspective that we should probably start with, that Shakespeare definitely would have appreciated, is that Romeo and Juliet here are clearly wrong for what they've done.

Speaker 1 That ultimately, this is just a couple dumb teenagers that have no idea what love is, let alone what it takes to be married.

Speaker 1 And they have no idea how much what they've just done completely disrespects everything that makes their love for each other even possible in the first place.

Speaker 1 A lot of people throughout this play will tell these two that they should think a little harder about what they're doing here, consider the effect this is going to have on things, and they will repeatedly ignore this advice from the people around them, no matter who's giving it to them, parents, friends, or the church.

Speaker 1 In other words, what's happening here, from one perspective, is that in service to some intense feeling that they're having, that they've had for all of about 24 hours together, they will burn to the ground every social institution and relationship that makes their lives even possible.

Speaker 1 That party that they met each other at? Only possible through the sacrifice of many of the people around them that made it happen.

Speaker 1 That cutesy, romantic, iambic pentameter verse that they talk to each other in when they're feeling really lovely.

Speaker 1 They pull that from a culture that they share that predates them, that makes anything that they're saying to each other meaningful.

Speaker 1 See, there's plenty of people that will read this play as Shakespeare giving a cautionary tale about morality. That it doesn't matter how Romeo and Juliet feel in a moment.

Speaker 1 Everything they do in this play is spoiled and irresponsible.

Speaker 1 To act on some intense feeling feeling that you have, where you really, really want something, and to do that, flying in the face of your responsibilities and all the people that rely on you in the world, whether you do this with a person or with any other form of vice, you're still in the wrong.

Speaker 1 And this being about your romantic life doesn't give you a free pass here.

Speaker 1 You know, someone coming from the side of the argument might say that most human beings that have ever lived on this planet have not gotten married based on some romantic connection that they have to someone else.

Speaker 1 That people have mostly gotten married for social mobility, strengthening alliances, an inheritance within a family, and to the people that see marriage more along these lines.

Speaker 1 It's wonderful if romantic love is there in a marriage, but that to do what Romeo and Juliet have done here, to base your marriage on these intense feelings that you have for someone, is wildly irresponsible, precisely because of how suddenly these feelings can come on and how suddenly they can go away.

Speaker 1 This kind of person would look at something like the divorce rate in societies that go the more romantic route, and they wouldn't be at all surprised by it.

Speaker 1 Now, you can imagine, you're walking out of the theater, you just saw this play, and you can imagine that this is one of the perspectives someone could have about it.

Speaker 1 But there's another take on all this that Shakespeare obviously wanted people considering as well, that's much more on the side of Romeo and Juliet.

Speaker 1 There's a well-known article on this play that was published in 1961 by a guy named Paul Siegel.

Speaker 1 Specifically, he had a take on the way that love is depicted in this play that's become pretty famous in conversations about it.

Speaker 1 Anyway, one of the points in his article is that what Shakespeare is ultimately doing in this play is giving voice to a view of love that goes against the traditional Christian view of of love, where Romeo and Juliet as characters are representations of an almost cult-like religion of love that by the time this play was released had been referenced in artwork all throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Speaker 1 So many examples people give as evidence, you can see, of this religion of love that emerges.

Speaker 1 You'll have poets that talk about love in the extremely passionate way that Romeo and Juliet do in the play, where it sounds like this feeling of love is something that captivates them.

Speaker 1 You have the love imagery and mythology that's been used over the years with figures like Cupid and Venus, both of which are referenced in the play, by the way.

Speaker 1 You even have in this religion of love a rival soteriology to Christianity.

Speaker 1 A soteriology is a view of what earns a person's salvation, where in this religion of love from around this time, dying in the name of your romantic love for someone else is the highest good that can be achieved.

Speaker 1 Some people even thought that if you died for someone you love, you would live on with them in a kind of lover's paradise after you were dead.

Speaker 1 This becomes a kind of sainthood, in other words, that people try to live out as members of this religion of love.

Speaker 1 Anyway, Siegel argues that Shakespeare clearly knew about all this stuff, and that traces of all these things show up in Romeo and Juliet, some of it directly in their language, you can just read it.

Speaker 1 Some of it's just implied by the way the play treats their deaths. Point is, he's saying this is really what Shakespeare has in mind when he creates these characters.

Speaker 1 He's using a tragic play to present a tension between a Christian view of love, marriage, and salvation, and this alternative view you can find in this religion of love.

Speaker 1 Now, if this is an accurate depiction of what Shakespeare was going for in the play, which many people assume it is, then one direction you could take this conversation is to ask what makes specifically the characters of Romeo and Juliet choose this religion of love instead of the Christian view that's otherwise all around them?

Speaker 1 And one answer to that could be that people in general are far more likely to idealize erotic romantic love for another person like this when they don't feel like the world around them takes their existence very seriously.

Speaker 1 Consider how Juliet at times is just a pawn in some marriage scheme between her father and some other guy she doesn't even know. What she wants doesn't even matter to them that much.

Speaker 1 Consider how the feud between their two families that neither Romeo nor Juliet even care about that much, dominates aspects of their lives in ways that they're just supposed to have unquestionable respect for.

Speaker 1 Consider how both of them as teenagers are thought of mostly as just extensions of their parents.

Speaker 1 I mean, remember the other perspective we just talked about that says, what does a teenager understand about love anyway? And this point is usually taken by people to be a pretty good one.

Speaker 1 That any feelings a young person like this may be having are not mature enough to be considered a fully legitimate experience.

Speaker 1 But a point Shakespeare's making is, what if when we write off the experience of people like this, for whatever reason we do, if the very world they live in doesn't even seem to legitimize the experience they have, then romantic love like this, where there's this undeniable obsession that someone has for another person, That can feel to someone like the most real thing that has ever existed for them.

Speaker 1 Consider how this might apply to someone living today in a world where a lot of people out there are struggling with meaning. You know, someone may look out at the world they live in.

Speaker 1 They get told that they're a really important piece of all this that's going on. But the world they actually see is a world that doesn't seem to really care about them.

Speaker 1 It's corruption everywhere, alienated from everyone.

Speaker 1 I mean, in a setup where a person's whole existence feels like an afterthought to the world, Romantic love like this can feel like a borderline religious experience to that person.

Speaker 1 And who is anyone to tell that person, or Romeo and Juliet for that matter, that what they're feeling there isn't real?

Speaker 1 So yes, this may seem like a really naive move by them that flies in the face of everything that constitutes their life. But from another angle, what are they really burning to the ground there?

Speaker 1 A bunch of people that don't really consider or care about them anyway. People wrapped up in their own pride, honor duels, marriage schemes, and their whole brand of religious nonsense.

Speaker 1 Maybe another way to view Romeo and Juliet, then, is that they aren't irresponsible teenagers. They're just people that have the courage to act on the thing that feels the most real to them.

Speaker 1 That this is what any courageous person might do. That their real crime here, if any, is just being people who aren't cowards.

Speaker 1 And this is another point that's often made about Shakespeare's depiction of love in this play.

Speaker 1 You know, it's been hundreds of years since this play came out, and generations of people have seen it from a lot of different cultural backgrounds.

Speaker 1 And the funny thing is, people don't usually leave the theater after having seen this play and think that the takeaway is that these two kids were a couple of morons.

Speaker 1 No, this is generally regarded by people as one of the greatest love stories that was ever written. Why is that, you got to ask? There's another great article that talks about this exact point.

Speaker 1 It's written by Natasha McKeever and Joe Saunders.

Speaker 1 And their theory about this point is that Romeo and Juliet and their teenage romance embody something important about what love is that we value when it doesn't go on in a teenage romance.

Speaker 1 They say it's easy to miss this about the play, because most theories about love and philosophy talk about love as though it's something that's either rational or irrational.

Speaker 1 Meaning, love is talked about as something that we do for rational reasons. You know, I love someone because I've thought about it a lot and they check certain boxes for me.

Speaker 1 Or love is talked about as something that's irrational, that it's something that falls outside the bounds of rational and irrational altogether. For example, how about a song?

Speaker 1 What if someone asked you, you know, is happy birthday, the song, rational or irrational in your opinion?

Speaker 1 There's a sense in which by asking that question, you're committing some kind of a category error, that a song is just not the kind of thing that's either rational or irrational.

Speaker 1 So what are we even talking about here? Well, so too with love and some theories, it's said.

Speaker 1 But the point that they make here is that the reason audiences generally see Romeo and Juliet as a great love story is that love is neither purely rational or irrational, that there's something partly irrational about love when it's real, that we're sensing when we witness their relationship.

Speaker 1 Think about the two of them at the party when they first meet. McKeever and Saunders say that there's three irrational things that we mostly notice as an audience there.

Speaker 1 One, is who they choose to love is irrational, and that it's instant, basically at first sight. There's no real vetting going on by them.

Speaker 1 Two, how deeply they fall in love is irrational, and that it's at a level that's not emotionally safe. They go all in with each other all at once.

Speaker 1 And three, how central that love becomes in their life is irrational, where the two of them are literally willing to die in the name of their love for each other when, again, they've only known each other for all of a couple days.

Speaker 1 Now, the point they're making here is not that we should model our behavior after these two crazy teenagers.

Speaker 1 I mean, most likely, you build your life around stuff that's based on so little, your life is probably going to end up in a really chaotic place.

Speaker 1 Their point is, the reason this feels like a love story to us, the reason the, say, 50-year-old married couple who've been together for 30 years, go to the theater, see this play, and come away feeling like this is a great love story, is because the love that has endured for 30 years like that has no doubt had to have moments that include these three forms of irrationality for it to be able to survive.

Speaker 1 These are people that understand at some level that the love we most admire, for some reason, has this kind of irrational element to it sometimes, and that this is something about how we view love that seems to transcend culture or time period.

Speaker 1 Anyway, a lot happens to Romeo and Juliet after they get married. Once Romeo comes back to town, Juliet's cousin Tybalt challenges him to a duel for daring to come to their house party.

Speaker 1 And again, Tybalt kills Romeo's friend, and Romeo kills Tybalt. And you you remember what the prince said was going to happen if either of these families ever fought again?

Speaker 1 Well, surprise, he doesn't actually carry out the punishment he said he would. He just banishes Romeo and says that he can never come back.

Speaker 1 Soon after this, Juliet's family pulls her aside and says she's just going to marry Count Paris and that she doesn't really have a say in the matter anymore.

Speaker 1 She goes to Friar Lawrence and asks him for help. What can I do to stop this from happening? What can I do to go and be with Romeo?

Speaker 1 And at this point, the friar comes up with maybe one of the worst plans ever conceived of by a human mind.

Speaker 1 Friar Lawrence gives Juliet a sleeping potion, where the whole plan is that it's going to make her appear to be dead.

Speaker 1 And then once her family has mourned her loss and done the whole funeral proceeding, she will wake up from this sleep, sneak away from the churchyard, and then go to live with Romeo in a neighboring city.

Speaker 1 This really is the plan. And the friar also is going to send a letter to Romeo telling him about the whole plan.
which turns out never actually gets delivered to him.

Speaker 1 So when Romeo hears rumors going around that Juliet's now dead, and when he comes back and sees Juliet seemingly laying dead inside of her family's tomb, well, he stabs Count Paris, who sees Romeo there and thinks he's come to desecrate the grave of a rival family member.

Speaker 1 He doesn't know they're married. And after Romeo kills him, he drinks a vial of poison, lays down next to Juliet, and dies.

Speaker 1 Then Juliet, who wakes up just a few minutes after this, sees that Romeo is laying next to her and has done this, and she decides to take her own life as well, so that she can be with Romeo forever.

Speaker 1 Now, there's tons of conversations that have been had over the years about this Friar Lawrence guy as a character.

Speaker 1 It's said that there's a critique of stoicism Shakespeare intended rooted in his character, an alternative stoicism for whatever it's worth.

Speaker 1 Sometimes people say that what his character was really meant to show is that this is what happens when people overestimate their expertise in an attempt to try to help someone and just end up doing more harm.

Speaker 1 Either way, the families finally come together after the death of their children, and the play ends with the town of Verona, Italy, finally looking forward to a short period of peace between the families.

Speaker 1 I hope this whole discussion on love and violence in the play has been helpful for you. Honestly, I can't wait to hear what many you have to say about the play in the comments section on Patreon.

Speaker 1 Look, I had no idea how many of you in this audience had actually taught Shakespeare to people in the past.

Speaker 1 Like, that's just the gratitude I feel to be around people like all you and to be able to grow faster. Just thank you again.
Anyway, I hope you have a great rest of your week. Thank you for listening.

Speaker 1 I'll talk to you next time.