Exploring Love and Lust in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
In Verona, an ancient grudge continues to throw new mutinies and violence between the Capulets and the Montagues. Through bad luck, Romeo and Juliet, the young descendants of those two prominent families, fall in love at first sight. Believing that this holy relationship will end the feud, they decide to stay together, get secretly married, and defy their own fate that will finally lead to their tragic death. However, this death succeeds in making their love become the most known romance that the first, present, and future generations will ever hear about. It’s a romantic story with vast and profound meaning. It shows that true love is the one that strikes at first sight, not the one that grows gradually. It also demonstrates how a person in this time could act to sacrifice and protect his love. Shakespeare’s associations of romanticism are misunderstood; we can see that especially between love and hate, a wonderful mixture that explains the tragic end of the two lovers. He shows how much Romeo’s passion is true and strong by creating a tension between his overwhelming desire and his fear and worry about his soulmate’s dignity and destiny. Juliet’s thinking about the consequences of her love is more systematic than Romeo’s. That doesn’t mean that she is less romantic than him, but simply more mature, even though she is fourteen and he is seventeen. Shakespeare, another time, uses a lot of foreshadowing, like when Friar Lawrence says, “Just as healing herbs can kill, love also can lead to death.” I really fell in love with this sentence. During the whole time I spent reading this story, a big enigma was installed in my mind. I was asking myself about my real opinion about the story. The answer, as much as it would look simple for other people, was as much as it looked hard for me to know. I don’t appreciate the story. But I really like the writer’s techniques and the way he expresses his personal feelings and thoughts, even if they are not realistic at all and are described with an exaggerated pessimistic vision. I also like how he uses words and plays with them. But I didn’t feel this suspense we usually have in reading a story because I already knew what was going to happen. The story is so sad that we feel we are in a continuous funeral. I don’t like the age given to our two heroes; they are too young to be able to understand the real meaning of love. As a reader, I feel that the tragedy was due to a stupid reason, or in other words, an adolescent’s fantasy and not a strong exceptional love. Also, unlike in the 15th or 16th century, a marriage between a fourteen-year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old boy is today more common. As a conclusion, opinions differ in these kinds of situations. Some people will agree with my critiques, and some people won’t. The reason that influenced my opinion is that I prefer realistic stories. In my opinion, every romantic person with a vast imagination should read this book.
Lust Versus Love
In ‘Romeo and Juliet’, by William Shakespeare, the two adolescents fall in love simultaneously and instantly; in other words, they experience love at first sight. This starts an intensely powerful, but brief relationship and marriage between the two. Often, love and lust can be confused as the same thing, and although they generally go hand in hand, they are not. This is shown through: Romeo’s love for Rosaline, which seemed to be around equal to that which he expresses for Juliet, vanishes as soon as he sees Juliet; the adolescents are brought together by lust, not love, since they built their relationship on sexual attraction; and they got married after one day, which is not enough time to fall in love. As powerful and beautiful as their relationship was, Romeo and Juliet experienced lust, not love.
In the beginning of the play, Romeo confesses his love for a girl named Rosaline to his kinsman Benvolio. He describes this love to be very intense and claims he cannot love any other woman. The emotion that he has practically takes up his whole life because it is all he can think about, and he mopes around in woe over the fact that she didn’t love him back. Despite this fact, the only trait he speaks of when talking about Rosaline is her beauty, and not any characteristic of her personality, other than her refusal to be with him, which is a negative trait if any. After he goes on for several paragraphs about his unbreakable love for this girl, he sees Juliet and instantly forgets about Rosaline, claiming that he had never loved before he saw Juliet. How, then, can we say that Romeo was truly in love with Rosaline if her existence slipped his mind in the instant that he gazed upon another girl? If he had mistaken his feelings for Rosaline for love, he could have been mistaken in his emotions for Juliet as well. It is also difficult to accept his emotion of love considering that the only thing he spoke of was their beauty.
Both Romeo and Juliet had broken hearts, which fueled their sudden changes in emotion. This is not what a healthy relationship should be based on.
The story of Romeo and Juliet is used by society to represent true love, but love is not the real name for what is felt between the two. The relationship between young Romeo and Juliet was rushed and immature. It was hormone-driven (those darn teenagers!) and fueled by their broken hearts. While the story is entertaining and classic, it is not an accurate representation of a healthy relationship, much less a good representation of love. This story is one of tragedy, conflict, and most of all, lust.