Young Writers Society

Can someone plase help with understanding the play of romeo and juliet. I am totally bambusled! (is that a word?)

What are you trying to understand, exactly?

Tybalt rocks. That is all you need to know. Seriously, though, how can I help? I'm not exactly an expert but I do have a deep and abiding love for the Bard.

I love Shakespeare, I have both performed and studied a number of his plays. I saw Romeo and Juliet a few weeks ago at the New Vic Theatre in Staffordshire, it was great. However if you are having trouble with the understanding of the text go and see a production of it, or if you cannot rent out the films:

(Zeffirelli)Romeo and Juliet

(Baz Luhrmann) William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Read the wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_and_Juliet

Read Sparknotes: http://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/romeojuliet/

Or ask more specific questions about the play here and I'll answer any questions.

Yes, I too went through shakesphere hell in 8th grade. what i did was read a paragraph, and then translate on a separate sheet of paper. read, translate, read, translate. That should help you.

or...

read it outloud to yourself (with voice changes)

or...

if that doesn't work and all else fails, go read your play, and then go to (god forbid I say it) SparkNotes and decifer it all.

Our class just finished Romeo and Juliet a few months ago and I understood it pretty well. What's confuzzling you?

Ah, Romeo and Juliet.

All you have to remember is that Romeo is a wuss and Mercutio was awesome. A plague on both your houses, I say!

But what do you mean, you don't understand it?
*checks date on post*

Never mind. But still, I did this play last year, did Merchant of Venice this year, I do Othello next year, and then I do Hamlet and Macbeth, I think. Maybe it's just one or the other. But still. I like Shakespeare. He's funny, once you get past the language. Don't listen to people saying that he was famous for the beauty of his language -although it was pretty cool. He was famous for the quality of his bawdy jokes. Seriously, though. Theatre was in the lowest -and funnest- forms of entertainment, that's why the Globe was built on the brothel and bear baiting side of the Thames.

I second what Squishy said. Get a copy with annotations at the bottom (or in the margins if that's what you're into) and just be dedicated to reading and understanding it. I recommend learning about Elizabethan England if you want to understand all of the references, but that's just me.

The first couple of pages are always hard. Stick with it; he was a genius.

I second what everyone above said. Also, read it aloud; the best is to get a few friends or family members to read it aloud with you. Shakespeare after all was meant to be heard.



There is a useful study guide for the play here: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/love-in-the-arts/romeo.html

Good luck,
Cal.

Read Sparknotes.com 's version it saves your life every time.

Romeo=Edward Cullen (minus the charm and perfection and the -th ending words)

Juliet= Bella (minus the clumsiness)


Clear now?

Romeo and Juliet is a beautiful play, but can be interpretted in many different ways.
Personally, it is one of my favorite works ever (I've read it about twenty times) but not because of the whole "beautiful romance" ideas. I, and quite a few others, interpret Romeo and Juliet's tragic ending as a kind of way to mock the serious manner of the naive Juliet and the foolish Romeo.

Juliet is only 14 and believes that she has met the only love that she will ever have. Romeo, who for the majority of Act 1 is in love with another woman. The moment she declares that she wants to be a nun, he vows he shall never love again, yet claims that his soul is slave to 14 year old child the moment he lays eyes upon her. They know nothing about one another but their names, and yet they claim to be in love. They are married before they've known each other 48 hours. They are both impatient fools that can't even be bothered to make sure that their own plans work out.

However, I find that this view is hard to convey successfully without going deep into the story...

If you still need help with Romeo and Juliet or have problems with Macbeth, feel free to PM me.

Its been a long time since I've read Romeo and Juliet, so take that into consideration.

I personally viewed Romeo ancd Juliet as both a tragedy and a social cartoon of eurpoean society at the time, almost Don Quixote style.
At the time, the mentality of 'death before dishonor' was prevalant in europe. William Shakespere makes the point that family feuds and duels between gentlemen on matters of honor were, for lack of a better term, stupid. For one, europe had to deal with the occassional plague every now and then, and life expectancy was much shorter, making the idea of killing a person over an insult even more pointless.
While Romeo and Juliet is by far darker than Don Quixote, I think William Shakespere was making some social commentary in addition to writing great drama.

what helps me is to stand up and read the dialogue out loud while pacing forward. Whenever there is any sort of punctuation, I stop and change the direction that I was walking. It sounds weird, but it helps to better understand what the character was saying or feeling.

If you want to impress your teacher, tell her the play is based off of the Classical myth of Pyramus and Thisbe.