romeo and juliet by charles and mary lamb

The connections between the two plays are, in some ways, rather remarkable. Romeo and Juliet is apparently (the datings are never completely stable) from approximately 1595, the same year as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream

We have a sense that the outcome, whatever it is, must be a natural outgrowth of the ingredients of the story - character, perhaps, or at least the plot - but in any case, not something superadded when everything else has run its course.īut if that is a criterion, then we have in turn to ask - does the crisis and climax of Romeo and Juliet actually come out of its basic material? Or is it instead an accidental set of mishaps that respond to the tonal tension of the earlier part of the play, but don’t really grow out of it in any kind of narrative sense? How we think about this question, and what conclusion we come to, will have a lot to do with what we make of the play in the long run.Ī narrative retelling of Romeo and Juliet from Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb is linked here at the Eldritch Press Site. Would a play be a tragedy if a random gunman entered and shot everyone in the last scene of a play that was otherwise a comedy? Is it a tragedy if the hero falls down the stairs and is killed? Instinctively we want to say no. But in a dramatic sense, “tragedy” means something more.

You may agree or not as you like.īut if we reject that position, it does leave an important gap - we need to ask, what makes a tragedy a tragedy? We are used to hearing the word “tragedy” bandied about by newscasters as if it were a synonym for “calamity”, and so we may be immune to the overtones of such a claim. I don’t particularly think it addresses the fundamental issues even of Greek tragedy, let alone later types of tragedy. Not all people subscribe to this theory, which has its origins in the Poetics of Aristotle. One theory of dramatic composition holds that tragedy grows out of a fundamental character flaw - sometimes called a “tragic flaw” - in the principal character or characters. But it’s a question we can - and must - begin to wrestle with here. This is the first of our tragedies - and we’ll get more deeply into the question of what makes up a tragedy later. Romeo and Juliet Things to consider while reading Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and juliet by charles and mary lamb