Romeo and Juliet, a tale of love and woe, or else a tale of lust and woe. Anyway, it’s

definitely a tale of woe.

As the play begins, Romeo is telling us that he is completely in love with a girl and will

never love anyone else. And her name is Rosaline. And a day later--A SINGLE DAY--he has married

an entirely different girl. And the whole thing is forbidden in a desperate

and exciting way. “My only love sprung from my only hate,” etc.

And that makes me wonder, does romantic love benefit from--or maybe even require--these

kind of obstacles in order to feel intense and real?

Mr. Green, Mr. Green. Yes. Truly spoken like a teenager, Me from the

Past. Because from where I’m sitting, true love is when you’re standing in line at

Chipotle and you say, “I shouldn’t get guacamole,” and the great love of your life

says, “You know what? Just get the guac,” and then you go home and you watch TV together

while eating burritos. That’s true love, Me from the Past, of a

depth and quality that you can only imagine and poor Romeo and Juliet will never know.

And not least because there were no Chipotles in medieval Verona,

(Intro.) So, it’s telling to look at the way that

Juliet describes her own feelings and the reasons for them. She calls their romance:

“too rash, too unadvised, too sudden; Too like the lightning, which doth cease to

be Ere one can say 'It lightens.'”

But then in the same scene, she says: 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.

The lightning is over in a flash, but the sea is infinite. Juliet also famously speaks

of her “true-love passion,” which conflates two very different ideas--

As previously noted, true love is eating burritos together on the couch in your sweatpants,

whereas passion never involves burritos. What’s that? What’s Rule 34? Really? Okay. Yes.

Apparently passion occasionally involves burritos. By the way, this play is full of bawdy jokes,

usually told in prose courtesy of the Nurse or Mercutio, so it’s not like Shakespeare

wasn’t aware of sex without love. Are Romeo and Juliet making themselves believe

they’re in love to excuse their sexual desire? Would Juliet have gotten tired of Romeo? Stan,

I thought that we established that these were real. How is this? [a][b]Why is this happening?

Ah, it’s a metaphor, isn’t it, Stan? Get rid of the metaphor.

Possibly. Romeo can be a little bit intense. Like, sword fight murder intense.

And although Juliet violently rejects Paris, the man her father wants her to marry, he

seems like a pretty stand-up guy and in many ways a better match for her than Romeo.

So Romeo and Juliet’s flirtation follows the traditions of courtly love, a medieval

concept still popular in the Renaissance that advocates love at first sight and forswearing

all for love. But vitally, you aren’t supposed to sully

courtly love with sex or marriage, as Romeo and Juliet clearly do.

You’re supposed to sit around and pine and be miserable for the rest of your Edith Wharton-ing

life, like Petrarch and Dante did. All these supposedly amorous Italians but all they ever

do is write poems. Right, so you can really read the first couple

acts of Romeo and Juliet as a potential comedy. Girl falls for the wrong boy and they’ve

got to figure out what to do. So far, that’s the plot of A Midsummer’s

Night Dream. But with those characters, there was not skoodilypooping.

Romeo and Juliet do skoodilypoop, and sullying their love with sex—even post-marital sex--proves

kind of deadly. Oh, it’s time for the open letter.

An Open Letter to Literary Sex But first, let’s see what’s in the secret

compartment today. Oh, it’s Shakespeare socks. Perfect because Stan won’t let me

wear shoes because they just painted the set. Dear literary sex,

Why you gotta be so fatal? Here’s an interesting fact: until about

40 years ago, every single human who was ever born was born as a result of sex.

But to read the great novels and plays of human history, you would think that the mere

act of having sex is fatal like 65% of the time.

How did we acquire all these Montagues and Capulets if just having sex is so dangerous?

And I’ve noticed that having sex is particularly fatal to young ladies.

And that doesn’t seem very fair. After all, it does take two to fandango.

Best wishes, John Green

Okay but as always in Shakespeare, it’s not quite that simple, and there are indications

that Romeo and Juliet may be, at least in Shakespeare’s conception, really in love.

I mean, in their first conversation, they speak a total of 14 lines to each other. And

those 14 lines, when combined, form a perfect Shakespearean sonnet.

So this isn’t some random hook up at a party; this is literally instant poetry.

And Shakespeare bestows many of his most gorgeous lines on them--Northrop Frye calls this play,

“word magic.” Not only that, but remember, through their

death this intractable conflict between two families is ended.

And in that story of transcendental suffering and sacrifice, one can’t help but recall

the more famous story of transcendental sacrifice: that of Jesus.

Romeo and Juliet don’t actually do much together. If you think about it, they don’t

even actually die together. Only a few days separate their meeting and their deaths.

We can see the play, then, as a tragedy about time, how little there is of it, and also

about youth, how we assign passionate importance to things and people when we’re young, because

we don’t have the breadth of experience to behave more moderately--which is maybe

the tragedy of adulthood. “Old folks,” Juliet maintains, are “unwieldly,

slow, heavy, pale as lead.” But for me the play is ultimately about having

to make difficult choices with limited information. This love, which feels real and I would argue

therefore is real, has to be balanced against responsibilities to your family and to the

state, in the form of the Prince of Verona. And to the church.

In your life, are you going to seek what you want, or are you going to listen to your parents

when they tell you want to want, or to the state when it tells you what to want?

Until the very end of the play, both Romeo and Juliet are trying to find ways to please

all these masters--the self, the state, the church, the family.

And that is what kills them. Had they run away together, or hooked up without getting

marrying in an unchurchly fashion, they probably would have survived.

Their love is an ardent and over-the-top response to the violent and unjust world in which they

live and the patriarchal authority that controls that would--but they can never really abandon

or reject that authority. And this is still a challenge for teenagers,

who are often dismissed as idealistic or melodramatic, and who must balance their intensity of feeling

against the expectations of the world around them.

Don’t drop out of high school to follow your dream of being a trapeze artist; honor

thy father and mother; register for the draft; don’t pass up a full ride to Harvard to

follow your girlfriend into the Marines; etc. Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

As Harley Granville Barker put it, Romeo and Juliet is ‘a tragedy of youth as youth sees

it.”

If you’re young or have ever been young, you know what it’s like to be pulled in

many directions while trying to discern whether feelings that are brand new to you are more

like flashes of lightning or an eternal ocean,

and you know what it’s like to want to live fully and fearlessly and maybe even a little

foolishly.

And the occasionally tragic thing is that you are just grown up enough for that kind

of thinking to get you killed.

Romeo and Juliet, to live the lives they want, must alter the world, or maybe even the cosmos.

They’re always looking for night to come quickly or to stay late. Juliet tells the

horses that draw the sun to

“gallop apace ye fiery footed steeds,”

a speech that was considered so racy that many 19th-century actresses wouldn’t perform

it.

And in the next scene, after their single night of wedded bliss, she tries to keep the

dawn from arriving, telling Romeo:

“It is not yet near day: / It was the nightingale, and not the lark, / That pierced the fearful

hollow of thine ear.”

Characters are constantly invoking light and dark imagery and calling out to the sun and

moon, to day and night, as though they were seeking some control over the universe.

Because it’s the only way that they can have all of what they want: their families

at peace, their faith, and a life together in their hometown.

But the universe will not bend to them. Or to anyone. No matter how real your love, you

can’t avoid fate and you can’t alter time. Well, except for daylight savings.

Thanks thought bubble.

So that’s one way to read the story. Romeo and Juliet’s hubris in believing they can

change the universe leads to their demise. But actually, how responsible are they? I

mean, there’s a lot of bad luck involved. There’s the messenger’s delay, the hastening

of the wedding between Juliet and Paris. Now, in the source material, Brooke’s Tragicall

History of Romeus and Juliet, Brooke makes it explicit that it’s their own fault and

they get what they deserve. But, Shakespeare is a lot more ambivalent.

The Friar, who marries them, worries that “violent delights have violent ends,”

which seems to imply that Romeo and Juliet are to blame for their own undoing.

Yet the play calls them “star-crossed,” which implies their sad end was written out

by fate before they ever even met. As with so much of Shakespeare, and great

literature in general, how you feel about this question says a lot about you.

And these meditations on fate, combined with the question of whether immediate attraction

can also be lasting love, have made Romeo and Juliet a story with legs.

These days, it might be race that separates the two loves--as in West Side Story--or religion,

as in a nineties Bosnian production that saw a Christian Romeo and a Muslim Juliet.

The obstacles may change, but the underlying problem of love in an unjust world isn’t

going anywhere. It’s tempting to dismiss the plot of Romeo

and Juliet as a sappy emo romance, but in truth, each of us will live out our lives

having answered--consciously or not--the questions at the heart of the play.

Do you believe that fate is inescapable, or that people forge their own lives?

Is the fault in the stars or in ourselves? And will you prioritize your personal wishes

over the wishes of your family, or your religion, or your country?

If you think about it, Romeo and Juliet aren’t offered an easy choice: They can hurt family

members they love, or they can hurt each other. Either way, there will be tragedy. And these

messy, ambiguous, ethically fraught, high-stakes questions are still part of all our lives.

Shakespeare’s gift to us is giving voice to them in all their maddening complexity.

Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next time. Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan

Muller. Our script supervisor is Meredith Danko. The associate producer is Danica Johnson.

The show is written by Alexis Solosky and myself. And our graphics team is Thought Bubble.

Instead of cursing, I use the names of writers I like. If you’d like to suggest writers,

you can do so in comments, where you can also ask questions about today’s video that will

be answered by our team of highly-trained Englishy people.

Thanks for watching Crash Course, and as I often say while sitting upon my golden throne,

don’t forget to be awesome.

RJ2 [a]Hey Stan is this something for us to handle

with characters or no? Thanks! [b]Hey Suz. I can't edit comment from my phone,

sadly. I'm handling this moment

Sent from my iPhone