yknow if romeo had just Cried on juliets corpse for a couple hours instead of drinking poison Right Then they would have been Fine
The moral of the story is: always take time to cry for a few hours before making important decisions.
So I’m more or less being facetious here, but this is actually a thing.
Hamlet is genre savvy. Hamlet knows how Tragedies work, and he’s not going to rush in and get stabby without making absolutely certain he’s got all the facts.
Except once he thinks he has all the facts – once he’s certain that it really is the ghost of his father and Claudius really did kill him, he rushes in and stabs the wrong guy, which starts a domino line of deaths and gets Laertes embroiled in his own revenge tragedy and ultimately results in the deaths of nearly every character other than Horatio.
That’s the irony and the tragedy of the story. Hamlet knows his tropes and actively tries to avoid them, and the tropes get him anyway. It’s inevitable, the tropes are hungry.
I want a sticker that says the tropes are hungry so I can put it on my laptop
i met a scholar once who said that tragedies aren’t about a silly “flaw” or anything, it’s about having a hero who’s just in the wrong goddamn story
if hamlet swapped places with othello he wouldn’t be duped by any of iago’s shit, he’d sit down & have a good think & actually examine the facts before taking action. meanwhile in denmark, othello would have killed claudius before act 2 could even start. but instead nope, they’re both in situations where their greatest strengths are totally useless and now we’ve got all these bodies to bury.
The tropes are hungry and the hero is in the wrong goddamn story.
I know it’s fun and edgy to say that if Romeo and Juliet had lived they would have had a miserable marriage but I super disagree.
They share a poetic, romantic sensibility that no one else in the entire play has. Everyone else is either bawdy (Nurse), or witty (Mercutio, Benvolio), or practical (mom and dad Capulet, Rosaline – even though she never appears). Romeo and Juliet, however, experience their feelings at 11 without judging themselves. They are incredibly present and self-aware about their feelings, and they are the only two people in the play that are the same level of Extra, and that’s what they immediately recognize in each other.
They have fun together in a way that is more in line with Shakespeare’s comedy couples than his tragedy couples. They tease each other and play word games even in dire circumstances. They balance each other’s idiosyncrasies and compliment one another’s senses of humor.
But most importantly, it’s a matter of “What’s the Stronger Choice?”
Which I’m constantly harping on about. It’s sad if two people die young. It’s devastating to witness the deaths of two people about to share a beautiful life-long love.
You have to make the audience believe that they are perfectly suited (and Shakespeare does help you with that). You’re making for a lukewarm production if you dull the tragedy by letting the audience walk away thinking: “oh well. It never would have worked anyway.”
Part of me thinks “Surely this isn’t true” but another part of me is like “This is not the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard”
There’s part of me that can’t possibly believe this is real, bit I’ve read parts of the Old Bailey records, and this is … not exactly normal, but not that far from it. People stole lots of shit, and drunk theater people are a very odd lot.
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 