I’ve come to be generally suspicious of deconstructions and hot takes. Yes, they’re kind of entertaining in a way, looking at something from a different angle, but they often just go too dark. And I do appreciate when people go purposefully light and funny with deconstructions, like the one I read where Breaking Bad is just a particular science class going buckwild in their fanfic speculation about their boring teacher, Mr. White. That’s funny stuff, but probably wouldn’t be as funny–or as necessary–without the annoying clickbait edgelord hot takes out there.
And I’ve always been annoyed for that reason by the “Romeo & Juliet isn’t a touching love story, it’s two teenagers acting like idiots” thing. I mean, I get it. It’s not a touching love story, it’s a tragedy. But how it ends is definitely not all the fault of two young teens who fell inadvisably in love. Rather, it’s a story of a bunch of adults systematically failing their children to a catastrophic degree. And yes, this insight is brought to you by working on a Romeo & Juliet production, or R&J-adjacent production, for the fourth or fifth time.
This time around I’m playing Prince Escalus (again), and my friend Rachel is playing Lady Capulet. At rehearsals lately she’s been going off on me, in a very playful way, about how all of the events of the show are my fault, for not keeping a tighter lid on things. Of the three official times the Prince shows up, twice it comes only after the violence has ended, so I concede she’s got a point. But she’s also making the critique largely in character, and in so doing only highlights the Capulets’ own culpability. They have every opportunity to de-escalate things, but fail to. And worse, they force Juliet into a marriage that they themselves question the propriety of, which is the real spark for the awfulness of the play’s final act.
And don’t even get me started on Friar Lawrence.
Bottom line, if everyone had just left Romeo and Juliet alone, there’s a decent chance their romance would have run its course, like most teen romances do. But then, that would not be a tragedy. And certainly what makes it one is not just their failings (and don’t get me wrong, they make some bad decisions), but everyone’s. Everyone is to blame for how things go down. Everyone has a chance to keep things from getting as bad as they get, and the adults who should know better are first and foremost.
Anyway, this is far from the final word on that show, and I’m sure this is but a leaflet in the forest of works written about Romeo & Juliet, and perhaps not a very clever one at that. But I’ll take it over cleverness for its own sake.