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True Love in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet Essay

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I prefer to think of Romeo and Juliet as a love story with a tragic ending rather than a classic tragedy, because the love Romeo and Juliet find and share is beautiful and inspiring: there is nothing tragic about it.

Juliet My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep. The more I give to thee,

The more I have, for both are infinite.

[Act 2, Scene 2, 133-35]

Their heart-rending deaths are of course tragic, resulting as they do from an unforeseeable flaw in Friar Laurence's well-intentioned but unlikely plan. Their lives, however, serve to prove that young love is viable, that young people know what they want and will go to extreme lengths to find it. The fair (ie beautiful) city of …show more content…

If the respective heads of the feuding houses come across initially as concerned fathers, this impression fades. Romeo is closer to Friar Laurence, in whom he is able to confide than his own father.

Romeo Hence will I to my ghostly father's cell,

His help to crave and my dear hap to tell.

[Act 2, Scene 2, 188-9]

Juliet answers to her father, treats her mother with respect but looks to her nurse for motherly advice and attention. It is fair to say that the Friar and the Nurse fulfil roles as surrogate parents, more out of situational proximity than choice. The Nurse carries out the necessary role of go-between in the early stages of the relationship and the Friar marries them. In the crisis caused by Tybalt's death and Romeo's banishment, the Nurse fails Juliet completely by taking the easy way out.

Nurse I think it best you married with the County.

O, he's a lovely gentleman!

Romeo's a dishclout to him.

[Act 3, Scene 5, 218-220]

The Friar is better intentioned than the Nurse but his plans still go astray because of ill chance or fate.

Fr Laurence Romeo! O, pale! Who else? What, Paris too?

And steeped in blood? Ah, what an unkind hour

Is guilty of this lamentable chance!

[Act 5, Scene 3, 144-46]

It is significant that the two young people rely on people outside of

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