One perk to being a teacher, occasionally students posit ideas that are simply mind-blowing. Ideas that force a complete re-evaluation of precious assumptions. The students almost never realize the magnitude of these eureka moments because their ideas seem normal to them. It is almost always the teacher that does a double take; especially if the teacher has taught the same material for years.
So what happened in class today that had me so excited? A student of mine, probably accidentally, was able to change the entire theme of Romeo and Juliet with a single word change. This morning I woke up believing that Romeo and Juliet was a romantic tragedy about two star crossed lovers. I now believe Romeo and Juliet is a Greek tragedy where the Montagues and Capulets are facing their sins and being punished by vengeful gods.
The class assignment was to paraphrase the prologue of Romeo and Juliet.
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
The students were given the opportunity to use the tools available: dictionaries, thesauri, and translating apps. They used these tools to find synonyms and similar phrases for each line of the prologue. One of my students rewrote “Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean” as “Where the blood of common people makes their (Montagues’ and Capulets’) hands dirty.”
That one small change of “civil blood” to “blood of common people” fundamentally changes the theme of the story. If we think the Montagues and Capulets keep the violence amongst themselves, we can keep a sort of admiration for the families. Family, pride, honor, these are things audiences can respect and understand. We’ve seen it in The Godfather.
But smallfolk getting killed because rich people are unable to work out their problems? That’s unforgivable. Hired goons getting killed is one thing. They knew the game and still got involved. But citizens? Shopkeepers and students and construction workers?
When the powerful are brutalizing the powerless, a higher power ought to come and set things right. The plot of Romeo and Juliet plays out like an angry Olympian god decided to punish the two families. The scions of the families must die. That’s the final punishment. But the lead up to their deaths is what makes it so insidious. Romeo and Juliet are allowed to be happy, until they learn each other’s identity. The priest, full of hubris that he can end the violence with no reckoning for the perpetrators, is trying to spite the gods. The two lovers commit suicide. However, because the gods are angry, honorable suicides are unacceptable. They want to humiliate these people. The lovers are pushed into this ultimate outcome because a letter was delayed. Something as banks as a miscommunication led to a pair of suicides. But the gods have not finished. Just to ensure one last piece of heartache, they wake up Juliet just in time to see Romeo’s dying breaths. She has to watch him die; these are vengeful gods.
The largest tragedy in this interpretation is that Romeo and Juliet are innocents being used as tools to punish their families. It would be too nice of the powers that be to simply go after the people causing all the death and despair in Verona. The capricious gods drove the two young ones to suicide in order to further their agenda of bringing peace to Verona by bringing shared misery to the families.
The Keasy Depot 