Customer Reviews

Romeo and Juliet

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Two teenagers from rival families fall in love, marry secretly, and take their own lives rather than live without each other. Despite the teenage melodrama, "Romeo and Juliet" remains one of Shakespeare's most enduring and popular plays, even if it wasn't his best -- lots of death, teen lovers and enchanting dialogue.

In the city of Verona, the Montagues and Capulets are locked in a deadly feud. Then a Montague teen named Romeo, infatuated with a Capulet girl named Rosaline, sneaks into a party to see her.... but instead encounters another Capulet girl named Juliet, and the two immediately fall in love. Since their families hate each other, their love must be expressed in secret.

Hoping to unite the two families, the kindly priest Friar Lawrence assists the two in marrying in secret. But then Juliet's cousin Tybalt challenges Romeo to a duel, leading to the death of two men -- and Romeo's exile from Verona. Even worse, the Capulets have decided to marry Juliet to Count Paris -- leading to a desperate plan that goes horribly awry.

This edition also has Jacqueline Ritten's "Juliet's Story: A Retelling of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet," a rather nice if excessively "teenagerish" short story that tells of Juliet's memories and inner thoughts.

"Romeo and Juliet" is a play that is hard to pin down -- some see it as the poetry-laden embodiment of romantic love, while others view it as Shakespeare's witty jabs at fickle teenage infatuation and how melodramatic the kids are (Juliet is only thirteen!). But whatever you think it is, it's undeniable that it's a beautifully written, often-wrenching story.

Despite the simplicity of the story, Shakespeare spins it in a silken web of lush poetry ("O swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon/That monthly changes in her circled orb") and the famous speeches where Romeo and Juliet speak at night on a balcony. The mostly romantic play takes a dark turn towards the end, when only a few minutes might have changed the fates of "Juliet and her Romeo."

And Shakespeare seems rather fond of his characters here, depicting Romeo as a passionate young boy and Juliet as rather sweetly insecure young girl; there's also a fairly good cast of young men whose spirits are more elevated than their brains, and the kindly friar who rather naively hopes to use the kids to create peace.

But Shakespeare was also clearly aware that passionate teenage love is not necessarily the truest love ("Young men's love then lies/Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes"), and leaves you wondering what might have happened if Romeo and Juliet had lived.

Whether a gentle mockery of young love or a passionate, idealized romance, "Romeo and Juliet" is a timeless and lovely little play. Not the best of the Bard, but still quite good.

It didn't have the exact format I needed to read in class, liek act, line number,
and I have to order a different version of the play....

This is definitely the best play of all time! If you have never read it, then you should as soon as possible!

A Classic, What Else is there to Say.....a new cover, the old story with a new component. A story from Juliet written by Jacqueline Ritten.

The book is quite unique with the special features included in it. The new cover is also quite pretty. This play has a lot of cultural context for English speaking people; its often taught in school and as a result it has to be one of the most well known Shakespearen plays.

The character cast is quite diverse in this play. Two rivaling families and two lovers who should have never fallen in love due to their family ties. It's a fairly passionate play as Romeo and Juliet had to meet in secret because of the fact their families hated each other.

I think Shakespeare wrote the play to warn against teenage fatuation. Romeo and Juliet's fate could have been spared if they had just waited a long time. It's kind of sad.

WARNING! SPOILERS! Most people know that the play is about two households (the Capulets and the Montagues) that have been fighting for so long that they've forgotten why they're fighting in the first place. Juliet Capulet and Romeo Montague meet at a masquerade and within a day they decide to get married and not tell anybody but the priest, Romeo's servant, and Juliet's nurse. On the same day they get married, Tybalt (Juliet's cousin) kills Romeo's best friend. Romeo then kills Tybalt out of revenge. Romeo is banished and Juliet fakes her death to get out of marrying another man. However, Romeo thinks she's really dead and he kills himself. When Juliet wakes up and finds him dead, she kills herself. Then the priest tells both heads of households what happened and they call a truce.
Unless you really need a good laugh, don't bother to read this.
It's about two teenagers who think that if someone knows a person for a couple of hours, those two people know each other well enough to get married and later kill oneself over that person. It is not 'true love' as some people call it; it is stupidity. Had they lived, their relationship would have ended with Romeo getting Juliet pregnant and either running off on her, or whoring himself out to a bunch of other women because he realized that 'love at first sight' is just lust. The only sane/logical main/secondary character in the play is Benvolio (Romeo's cousin). Otherwise it's nothing you can't get by remembering incidents from your highschool days.

This is a review of The original Romeo and Juliet, not this specific edition.

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. A book so rooted in popular culture that in all likelihood you knew the plot, the characters and the ending years before you picked it up, or if you were like me, were required to read it for educational reasons.

I wonder if I really know what I'm getting into by criticizing this book. In all likelihood I'm going to get a wave of negative comments because of what I'm about to say. To badmouth The Bard is almost to badmouth literature itself, and I don't want to do that.

Thomas Jefferson once said "I cannot live without books", If anything is true about me, it's that.

But thats the thing, technically, RAJ isn't a book, it's a PLAY. This means that it relies on those playing the parts of it's characters to provide any and all emotional depth, without whom it feels completely deadpan and flat. Maybe I'm wrong, as I've yet to see a live performance, and would be interested in seeing on. Without seeing one, Its hard to find what the characters were trying to get across to one-another when each one is trying to be poetic and overly dramatic. you really have to dig to find for example, the phrase "I love you" in a five minute monologue.

But this is just my opinion. Maybe I would have liked it if I hadn't been forced to read it in High school, if you do read of your own free will, judge it after you've finished it, not because of what the back cover says.