Term Paper on "Shakespeare's Play: Romeo and Juliet / Film"

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In 'Romeo and Juliet,' whose climax closely resembles that of Pyramus and Thisbe, Shakespeare does not shy away from artifice and contrivance. His tragedy is unusually dependent on coincidence, mischance, and accident" (Greenblatt 865). The young lovers are victims of parents and family members who cannot make peace, and despite the adolescent's impetuous behavior, the lovers are in a way more mature than those adults who would kill others merely because they bear the name of Montague or Capulet. "The story of the ill-fated lovers from bitterly feuding families had been told many times in the 16th century by Italian and French writers. Shakespeare's direct source is Arthur Brook's [poem] 'The Tragicical History of Romeus and Juliet' (1562)...Shakespeare follows the main outline of Brooke's narrative" (Greenblatt 865). But Brooke's tale takes nine months, Shakespeare's takes a few days. The story is given extra, mythical intensity through its compression. Also, Shakespeare adds characters, like the satiric Mercutio to add humor and also a sense of distance in the play, as Mercutio deflates Romeo's romantic passions.

Likewise, Bernstein adopted a previous tale to suit his own purposes, taking what had become Shakespeare's now-classic story of violent, warring lovers who are able to use love as a vehicle of compassion in a cruel and uncaring world. Bernstein did not select a far-off land, as Shakespeare selected Italy to add to the romance of the narrative. Shakespeare's hot-blooded, feuding Italians would have seemed foreign to his original English audience, but Bernstein selects a setting close at hand, that of New York City. Bernstein attempts to show that the sort of compassion evoked by Shakespeare for the young lovers in a never-never land of Italy is relevant to his own viewer's contemporary era and the racial strife of his day. The types of seemingly meaningless violent discord between Italian clans in Shakespeare are parallel to the struggles of Puerto Ricans and Anglos in New York, and ultimately just as empty and brutal in its consequences. Bernstein's evocation of "America," both in the song "America" suggests that the tragedy of Tony and Maria is not simply a sad event of circumstance and mishaps, but also a fundamental betrayal of the American dream of integration and that "everyone free in… READ MORE