Romeo and Juliet is an eternal story. It is well known in every parts of the world, and it is famous by its sad tragic ending. A pair of young lovers, sacrificed with their lives for their blazing true love. This story is like a model of extreme love, and it brings up a doubt about if it is worth to sacrificed for love, for relationship. Maybe "born shiny like the flower in May, and die like the falling leaves in autumn" is some people's personal belief. But here, I want to discuss about is Romeo and Juliet's tragedy was the result of fate and uncontrollable forces, or was the outcome a result of circumstance and strong personalities?
I believe it is the result of fate and uncontrollable force, but I think circumstance was responsible for the tragedy too. The play of Romeo and Juliet was written by Shakespeare in 1595. It was a great a time for the western world to make literature products. But it was a tough time for people to live too. Just two years before the play was written, there was a huge plague happened in Europe. Under the horror of the "black death", any plague that were happened are related to darkness, hopeless and death directly. So the shadow of plague is hidden in the play. I guess this is the reason why the ending was a tragedy in that play.
In the play, the characters are symbolic too. Our main characters, Romeo and Juliet are young. Juliet is about 13 years old, and Romeo is only couple years older than them. Although at that time , people marry much more early than our modern days, but they are still too immature. They are too young to have a relationship, to fall in love and the most important part: too young to take the responsibilities that they should take. They thought love is a simple thing as the game they played when they were young, " pretending that they are couples, or family members". We can't look forward a pair of teenagers to manage their relationships well, even they are trying to get married. If you let me to make a metaphor about their behavior, I would say they are like the Adam and Eve who tried to eat the forbidden fruit. And unfortunately they got their punishment: death.
I would say from the setting of the play we can see this is a tragic play. "In the ancient city of Verona in Italy, there were two biggest, strongest families in there. They are enemy, for centuries. Their feud would be solved only by blood and death." And unfortunately, always unfortunately, the two poor young lovers are from the enemy families. It seems like it is impossible for them to get together, even there's no chance for them to meet and know each other. But dramatically, they did figure out all of the "impossibilities". Maybe only god, or Shakespeare knows how this happen. Especially in that time period, there was not any thing like "free love, free relationship" happened. Youths didn't have that much freedom for them to choose their partners. Even they "fall in love" with someone, but the only thing they can do is to follow what their family require them to do.
For all the factors that was impossible to be happened, it must be a tragedy if something shouldn't be combined but it did. It was just like their destiny, they are born to be together, try to get together and die together. Just like the butterflies, they admire light, and want abandon to darkness forever. Yes, forever. There's only one way to be with the light forever: Bathing in the blaze, let the holy fire clean their souls, and give them freedom to love, in the immortality.
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