LINDA omg
Shakespeare companies seem to have a magical talent for finding the absolute most boring person you've ever met in your life to play Romeo in every production of Romeo & Juliet. Just, the most bland, uninspired, lifeless characterization, and just when you think you've seen the weakest, you go see another production the next year and the guy can't even say 'dost' correctly. Juliet's acting in circles to try to be convincing, but it's like watching someone act opposite a piece of bread, and not even artisan bread.
my bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as V A S T Y D E E P
At first, I was confused when I got cast as Juliet in a staged reading of Romeo and Juliet because I look like the back end of a truck, but then I realized that that just makes the play even more of a senseless tragedy of wasted potential. Like, not only did Romeo throw his life away over a girl, she wasn’t even that hot
Anonymous asked:
Romeo looks like a fuckboi and that is all
I completely understand why you feel that way.
When I directed Romeo and Juliet, though, I told the actor who played Romeo that ideally, the audience’s feelings toward Romeo should be a constant refrain of, “Oh no, baby, no.” Like, judgmental but loving. This is a Romeo-positive blog, but not blind to his silliness.
Tell me how you picture one or more of the following characters: Hamlet, Romeo, and Prince Hal/Henry V
Just for fun!
Romeo and 19.
19. People they’ve hurt or indirectly killed, and how it affected them
Ooohhh, poor Romeo. Romeo never wanted to hurt or kill anyone, and I think that’s such a tragedy because he winds up killing more characters than anyone else in the play. From the very beginning of the play, Romeo resisted the idea that masculinity means violence. He never gets involved in his family’s feud or the fighting in the streets. He has a gentle nature and isn’t afraid to get emotional.
Mercutio dies because Romeo tried to get between him and Tybalt, blocking him with his arm and trying to keep him safe, but it’s Romeo’s very presence that causes Tybalt to stab him. We know how Romeo is affected by this, because he becomes so overwhelmed with emotion that he kills Tybalt– something that I always imagine being an absolute ‘crime of passion,’ an outburst of strength that Romeo didn’t even know he had.
I think it’s worth noting that he never wanted to hurt Tybalt or take his life. As he says when Tybalt approaches him for the fight:
“I do protest, I never injured thee,But love thee better than thou canst devise,Till thou shalt know the reason of my love:And so, good Capulet,–which name I tenderAs dearly as my own,–be satisfied. “
The fact that Tybalt responds with violence to the whole situation makes Romeo reciprocate the violence. And he feels incredibly guilty about having killed Juliet’s kinsman and hurt her in that way, weeping on the ground in a piteous heap. The Nurse and Friar constantly tell him to rein it in and be a man, but poor Romeo is clearly incredibly damaged by what he has done.
When he erroneously hears of Juliet’s death, though, we see Romeo’s emotional disarray lead to even more violence– violence that is shocking to think of. When Balthasar accompanies him to Juliet’s grave, the once-gentle boy snaps at Balthasar:
“But if thou, jealous, dost return to pryIn what I further shall intend to do,By heaven, I will tear thee joint by jointAnd strew this hungry churchyard with thy limbs:The time and my intents are savage-wild,More fierce and more inexorable farThan empty tigers or the roaring sea.“
YIKES. Clearly, he feels so broken by loss that he has lost any sense of anything beyond blind emotion– no sense of right or wrong or anything besides his obstacle. He already plans to die. And when he kills Paris, it’s really for not any reason other than that he’s in his way. Something that once would have destroyed him is now just something to get out of his way before he ends his own life.
After doing so, though, he becomes a little more reflective:
“ He told me Paris should have married Juliet:Said he not so? or did I dream it so?Or am I mad, hearing him talk of Juliet,To think it was so? O, give me thy hand,One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book!I’ll bury thee in a triumphant grave;A grave? O no! a lantern, slaughter’d youth,For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makesThis vault a feasting presence full of light.Death, lie thou there, by a dead man interr’d.“
He isn’t jealous of or angry at Paris– instead, he commiserates with him– but it’s also clear that he is not totally in his right mind after this excess of grief and guilt Romeo has been through.
So I would say that the deaths he causes throughout the play affect him so much that you wouldn’t have the play at all without them. Romeo, the sensitive character who wanted to make love, not war, fuels the entire plot through acts of violence. Now that’s a real tragedy for you.
You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain
The show on the left was Pride and Prejudice almost exactly ten years ago (I played Lydia). I don't see much reason for pride, but I see lots of reasons for prejudice! On the right is me as Juliet in Romeo & Juliet. Funnily, my character is one year YOUNGER than my character in P&P.
SO, because I'm appearing as Juliet in a staged reading of Romeo & Juliet this Saturday, this is my planned post about why I love Juliet and this play. I do think she is one of the more misunderstood literary characters, and R&J itself suffers from a lot of oversimplification nowadays.
(NOTE: This post deals fairly heavily with themes of suicide and other dark topics.)
I get why people are all like “Romeo & Juliet is a terrible relationship, all those people died” and “R&J is not a love story, it’s about kids making stupid decisions” and everything– but I feel uncomfortable with how those people are putting all the blame on the kids themselves.
I think the play makes it pretty clear that the kids were unable to overcome the violence and hatred rampant in their environment in which they grew up, and that the adults in their lives were not supportive or willing to listen or help them. The parents have no idea what their kids’ hopes, dreams, or interests are, and their kids don’t feel comfortable talking to them about their lives. Romeo & Juliet is a great tragedy because every tragic event within it was completely preventable. The lovers may have taken their own lives, but the ‘tragedy’ is that the other characters disregarded their feelings and their words, and ignored them because they’re just stupid teenagers… much like a lot of the more jaded readers of the play.
Yes, the over-romanticization of the play is a problem, but it also contains some of the most beautiful and vivid love poetry in the English language, and shouldn’t be dismissed as 'haha, stupid kids, Romeo can’t keep it in his pants.’ Romeo and Juliet themselves are no more 'stupid’ than Shakespeare’s other tragic heroes (Macbeth and Othello come swiftly to mind), and Juliet in particular is a very well-developed, intelligent, and interesting heroine, one of Shakespeare's most complex.
She is not quite fourteen years old and has had very little freedom in her life. (What were you like at age 'almost fourteen?' I was writing Voldemort's blog on MuggleNet and obsessing over Pirates of the Caribbean.) Up to this point in the play, she's only been seen by others as a daughter of the Capulet family, who talk about her as if she's not there and don't seem to know how to talk to her without the presence of her garrulous nurse. She barely speaks around her family and mostly just obediently listens as they make plans for her. Nobody has ever really questioned what Juliet wants.
This is why she and Romeo connect so quickly. It's not just a romance thing-- it's the first time they've ever met someone who sees them as themselves, not just an extension of their family, not with preconceived notions about who they are and what they want. (Romeo, I'd argue, has the opposite problem from Juliet-- too much freedom to do whatever he wants, and no direction in life. But neither he nor Juliet are taken seriously by the people around them.) She has no friends her own age, no freedom to leave her house. She is STARVED for human connections without even really realizing what is missing when she meets Romeo.
Juliet is the one who keeps questioning whether they should be more cautious. She is the one that tries to slow things down... but though she knows that's what she SHOULD want, that's not really what she wants, and when the time comes, she is the first one to bring up the topic of marriage. She is such an eager, earnest portrayal of young desire, without it being vilified.
For the first time, the future opens up for Juliet, and no wonder she is radiantly happy to rush into marriage with Romeo.
But for the entire second half of the play, Juliet experiences a narrowing of her future, from a broad horizon to a single point. When she thinks she and Romeo are finally bound together, she learns about his banishment-- the human equivalent of buying an ice cream cone and dropping it on the way to the car before you can enjoy it. Then she learns that her parents want to marry her off to Paris immediately. She had a glimpse of a future that she could control, and now it's being taken away. And it's not just that she doesn't love Paris-- it's that she's already legally married, and she fears she will be damned forever if she gets married a second time. She's from a very Catholic background. I can forgive her theatrics.
Her father doesn't just order her to marry Paris. He screams at her for a long, protracted, disturbing scene in which he says he wishes she was never born and that he doesn't care if she hangs, begs, starves, or dies in the street if she doesn't marry Paris. He threatens to physically harm her and the nurse for defending her. When she begs her mother not to make her marry Paris, her mother tells her "I have done with thee" and leaves her. Even the Nurse finally counsels her to listen to her father and marry Paris. Juliet is shattered, and she sees that her family doesn't REALLY care about her or what she wants-- they only see her as an extension of themselves, and all of the jolliness that Lord Capulet usually displays is conditional on how good she is at living up to his expectations, nothing else. She really believes nobody else in the world loves her except Romeo, that her life is not important to anyone else.
If Juliet's father hadn't been so terrifying, if Juliet's mother hadn't sided with him, if the Nurse hadn't resigned herself to capitulating to Lord Capulet's plan, none of this would have happened. If Juliet trusted Tybalt enough to tell him about her love for Romeo and if he cared about his cousin to support her choice, none of this would have happened.
Her future narrows again when she wakes up in the vault, Romeo dead beside her. The plan didn't work. Somehow, through confused messages, Romeo is dead BECAUSE of her. The Friar tells Juliet to leave in haste, that he'll conceal her in a nunnery. That is the LAST thing that she wants after being locked away and forced to be quiet and obedient her whole life-- not to mention never being allowed to love again. When she tells the Friar to leave without her, she hears the watch coming and panics again. If they catch her, it'll be worse than if the Friar takes her to the nunnery-- they'll take her home, and she's already seen her father at his worst. How can she bear to go home to him? Neither of the futures that present themselves give her enough room to move freely. The only way to fight against them is the worst thing that a person can do to herself. Suicide is NEVER pkay and is never the answer, but I think Juliet's is oversimplified into being 'over a guy.' It is a little more complicated than 'over a guy' to me.
This play is so special to me because it is one in which teenage lives, male AND female, are portrayed as valuable, and one in which the 'tragedy’ in question is the loss of ordinary young people, not a great kings or war heroes.
Juliet is witty, imaginative, innocent, sometimes a bit of a brat, hopeful, sensitive, and loyal. She is a dream of a character to get to play, even in a staged reading, and I think she deserves to be taken seriously. I only hope I can do her justice.
Romeo: From now on, we will be using code names. You can address me as Eagle One. Rosaline- code name, "Been There, Done That." Juliet is "Currently Doing That." Mercutio: "It Happened Once in a Dream." Benvolio, code name: "If I Had to Pick a Dude," and Friar Laurence is... Eagle Two.
Friar Laurence: Oh, thank God.
Ah! Then I see Queen Mab hath been with you!
Mercutio in the production of Romeo & Juliet that I directed in 2013.
schmergo reblogged
Today, I did video auditions for five characters for a staged reading of Romeo & Juliet. Here's my Romeo balcony scene soliloquy.
Would you rather be stuck as roommates with Hamlet or Romeo during exam week?
Consider: Romeo would be out of the room more, but he might sexile you. Hamlet would never shut up but might help you write a philosophy or psychology paper.
Both are equally likely to randomly kill someone and get expelled but sneak back in to the dorm anyway.