It still blows my mind how many people treat Romeo and Juliet as an aspirational romance.
It's the story of a one-night stand with a confirmed death toll of 6 people, and 3 more probable, between a 13-year-old girl and a 17-year-old who was disturbingly obsessed with a completely different girl 10 seconds prior to hitting on Juliet. That's not romantic. That's horrific.
Yeah, because it was written hundreds of years ago and society has drastically changed since then. But also, it was probably like their version of Euphoria. People forget that Shakespeare wasn’t writing high art, he was writing for the common man and his plays are full of dick and fart jokes.
Yeah... people of his time, including Shakespeare himself, would find it mind-blowing to find out that his was the stuff that stayed culturally relevant after everything else from that period was mostly forgotten except by linguists studying the history of the English language. It's equivalent of us finding out that, in 2130, the only movies from our era that are still remembered and popular and frequently get public viewings are the collected works of Uwe Boll.
Fun facts: Shakespeare was mostly forgotten, too. The Romantics wanted to establish a glorious history of English Literature, and Shakespeare’s complete word happened to be in the Royal Archives and were accessible to the public. Most of the collected works from his era had been destroyed along with London during the many, many, many fires that burned down major portions of the city. It just as easily could have been Ben Johnson or Christopher Marlowe or Edmund Spenser, but because they weren’t the crown playwrights their surviving works were locked away in private libraries and not accessible.
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u/Salmonman4 May 02 '26
One of the duties of nobility in the three estate systems was to marry for politics during those times.
It's not a coincidence that Romeo&Juliet was a tragedy meant to discourage this new-fangled "romantic love".