Despite its many comic characters and situations, 'Romeo and Juliet' is known as one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies.

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Romeo & Juliet Coursework

Despite its many comic characters and situations, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is known as one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies. This is mainly because the two main characters are victims of their own predetermined fate and can do nothing to prevent the inevitable end coming about. How far do you agree that ‘Romeo & Juliet’ is a tragedy and not a tragicomedy?

Romeo & Juliet was written in 1594-5, before all Shakespeare’s great tragedies. Hamlet wasn’t until 1600, Othello 1604, Macbeth and King Lear 1605-6. It appears that because this was a very early tragedy that Shakespeare hadn’t established a set way to write tragedies. In Shakespeare’s famous tragedies usually there is one single main character and the tragedy comes about because of a flaw in their character. For instance Othello is destroyed by his jealousy and Macbeth is destroyed by his ambition. Romeo and Juliet isn’t like this.

This is made obvious from the beginning. The first thing the audience sees would be a chorus, a single figure dressed in black who came to the front of the stage. The Shakespearean stage (usually the Globe theatre) was designed so that the stage extended out into the audience pit where the common audience paid to stand. This is would be a good use of stagecraft on Shakespeare’s part. This chorus figure (not an actor) then continues to recite a sonnet, which is a fourteen line poem with an ancient line structure which Shakespeare and every other writer and poet in his day was very familiar with. The most important thing about this sonnet is that it tells the audience exactly what’s going to happen at the end of the play.

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   “A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,

    The fearful passage of their death-marked love,

    Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,

    Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage.”

Shakespeare never uses either this chorus figure or a sonnet to introduce any of his other tragedies. My opinion is that Shakespeare wanted to make sure that the audience knew that this play – despite being about love – is a tragedy. The key word in the sonnet is ‘star-crossed’. This Elizabethan word underlines their ...

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