Romeo has a main advisor and two main friends. These are Bevolio, Mercutio, who are his friends and Friar Lawrence, who is his advisor. They also each contribute to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet. Benvolio is a close and sensitive friend of Romeo, who is sensible. He advises Romeo that he should ‘forget to think of’ Rosaline ‘By giving liberty unto thine eyes’. Romeo does this and meets Juliet. Without Benvolio, Romeo and Juliet may not have met or at least could have met with more time. Also, after the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, he is the one who advises Romeo ‘away’ and to ‘be gone’ as ‘The citizens are up, and Tybalt slain’. He does this, as he knows the likely reaction from the Prince, to order the death sentence to Romeo.
Romeo’s other main friend is Mercutio. Mercutio is witty, lively and loyal. He brings life and fun into the play. In Act 3, Benvolio tells Mercutio that as Italian summer afternoons are hot, he should take a brake in the shade. This is because members of the Capulet family are about, ‘And if we meet we shall not scape a brawl’. They do see Tybalt and when Romeo declines a fight with Tybalt, as he has just got married, Mercutio sees it up to him to keep his own pride and the respect of the Montague family by fighting. Mercutio challenges Tybalt as the ‘king of cats’. Romeo tries to stop Mercutio and during the confusion, Mercutio receives a fatal stab wound from Tybalt. He dies in Romeo’s arms with the curse ‘A plague o’ both your houses’, a curse that is soon to be carried out. When Tybalt returns, Romeo feels he has to avenge the death of Mercutio and show that marrying Juliet hasn’t softened him. He kills Tybalt and then realises he is ‘fortune’s fool’. He is then banishment. Tybalt was trying to kill Romeo but hit Mercutio. Because, Mercutio is such a proud man and he was angry he had to fight. He may have been angry as he was so hot, which made him argumentative. Without him Romeo probably wouldn’t have met Juliet at the ball and Romeo wouldn’t have been banished for killing Tybalt, although it wasn’t even meant to be Mercutio’s fight.
The Nurse acts like the mother of Juliet and is very compassionate. Both her and Friar Lawrence are the only other people that, apart from Romeo and Juliet know everything. The Nurse isn’t very well educated and is sexual. We see that she is sexual from her saying that ‘A bump as big as a young cock’rel’s stone’. She acts as the messenger and helps Romeo and Juliet to marry. She tells Romeo, after he told her he will marry Juliet, that she will ‘be a joyful woman’. She does this as she wants Juliet to be happy, and she likes to feel important. The Nurse, unlike the Friar, does not have a public position, so when things start to go wrong, she lacks the courage to face the consequences of her actions. Once, she hears of the death of Tybalt and that Romeo is responsible, she turns against him. She then betrays Juliet by advising her to marry Paris. She says ‘Shame come to Romeo’ to bring Juliet to his defence, and Juliet fears she may be ‘maiden-widowed’. The Nurse calls Romeo a ‘dishclout’, and says that Paris is ‘a lovely gentleman’. Juliet then finds it hard to talk to her. This is the part where Juliet no longer sees the Nurse as her friend and feels betrayed. This reveals the Nurse’s weakness of character. The deaths could be blamed on her, as without her their love couldn’t flourish into marriage, meaning they may have just split up. Helping to marry them wasn’t even right of her to do, as she’s not the father. As the Nurse betrays Juliet, she is left with no option. ‘Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain’, Juliet says and then turns to the Friar.
Friar Lawrence has a parallel role as the Nurse but with Romeo. Romeo often seeks advice from him, as he is intelligent. He marries Romeo and Juliet as he hopes to turn the ‘households’ rancour to pure love’. Although this does happen, it also leads to the deaths. When Romeo is banished the Friar sends him a message with the plan of the sleeping potion. But it is too late as Romeo has heard that Juliet is dead and plans to buy poison in order to kill himself. He examines Romeo’s reasons for abandoning Rosaline in favour of Juliet with some rigour, and is quick to point out the inconsistencies of behaviour. Nethertheless he is persuaded that what Romeo had felt for Rosaline was not love but love ‘read by rote that could not spell’. He shouldn’t have married them, as he knows that Romeo is rash. He advises Romeo to slow down. The Friar’s apprehensions about the suddenness of Romeo and Juliet’s love, ‘violent delights’ which have ‘violent ends’, remind us of the Prologue. Their deaths are partly his fault and in order to feel important he develops complex plans, which end up not working. He does this as he wants to be in control and as he feels it up to him to end the feud between the two families. His plans don’t work, which puts him partly at fault for their deaths. He comes forward at the end to reveal the truth. We expect a dire punishment to follow, but the prince excuses him with ‘We still have known thee for a holy man’. It is a rather gentle punishment. Yet Friar Lawrence’s real punishment is that he has to live with the consequences of his own actions for the rest of his life. As the Nurse betrays Juliet, she is left with no option. ‘Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain’, Juliet says and then turns to the Friar.
Like other characters, the prince is a victim of circumstances. He is always just too late to do anything other than react. He is angered by the families feud, but lacks the strength to reconcile their differences. After the street brawl at the beginning, he threatens the death punishment. When he goes to the scene of the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, he has the power to order the death penalty on Romeo. On one side, he claims that ‘Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill’, suggesting kindness is no deterrent, yet he banishes Romeo in a strange act of kindness. It is up to him at the end of the play to sum up the consequences of the families’ feud. He accepts some responsibility for their deaths by ‘winking at discords’. He, however, claims some respect for forcing the two families together by reminding them, ‘what a scrouge is laid upon your hate, / That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love’.
Romeo and Juliet also both have some part to blame in causing their own deaths. Romeo is described as a nice man, but he is immature and impulsive. He is ‘fortune’s fool’ meaning he is a pawn of fate. Juliet is quiet and obedient with respect to her family, at the start, but she however is vulnerable. She likes to get what she wants. She gains in confidence as ‘love give me strength’. They are both young, with Juliet being a bit younger and around the age of thirteen or fourteen. Romeo is often confused, when he is in love with Rosaline. We are shown this by the use of oxymorons. He uses oxymorons, as he can’t make sense of his predicament, of Courtly love with Rosaline. He compares her with the simile ‘she hangs upon the cheek of night/ As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear’. As he sees Juliet he takes her hand and their first opening moments together are celebrated in a sonnet. When Romeo sees her at the balcony he uses the metaphor ‘what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun’. Juliet changes him as a person, from being confused and low spirited to being direct. When he is next seen again he is with Mercutio and Benvolio, and as he has found love is more sociable. We see this when Mercutio notices his improved humour and says; Why, is not this better now than groaning for love’/ Now art thou sociable; now art thou Romeo’. His new character is shown again after the wedding, as he is not losing his temper as others are in the heat. When he turns his back on the fight with Tybalt. Tybalt kills Mercutio, resulting in Romeo having a split second rage and killing Tybalt and then blaming it on fortune. We see this when he says ‘I am fortune’s fool’. He suffers from grief when he is banished and contemplates life without Juliet. He sees banishment as ‘torture and not mercy’. When Balthasar sees him, Romeo tells of his dreams that him and Juliet are to be reunited. When Balthasar tells him that Juliet’s ‘body sleeps in Capel’s monument’ Romeo’s mood drops. He finds poison from an Apothecary and rushes to Verona. Romeo in rage kills Paris, as he is the way of the tomb. He then takes the poison. His death can, therefore, be blamed on many people, including him, as it was his own actions, although he would have believed it was fortune.
Juliet is innocent and young. Her father is keen to protect her and she is obedient, although she goes behind their backs. Girls stayed at home, and learnt domestic and social skills. If they were lucky, as Juliet probably was, they got to learn to read and write. She tells Romeo that he kisses ‘by the book’. Juliet uses iambic pentameter, when she asks Romeo, ‘what’s in a name? That which we call a rose/ By any other word would smell as sweet. / So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, / Retain that dear perfection which he owes/ Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name, / And for that name, which is no part of thee, / Take all myself’. In these lines, Juliet can’t understand why Romeo’s family name, makes him un-suitable for her. The soliloquy is used so Juliet can show her feelings out loud. She plunges from high excitement to depression when she tries to contemplate life without Romeo. The Nurse fetches him and they enjoy a single night together before Romeo has to part. Once Romeo is banished, she is just left with the Nurse. When the Nurse advises marrying Paris, Juliet feels there is no one that she can talk to. She turns to the Friar, who comes up with the sleeping potion plan. He tells her ‘Take this vial, being then in bed, And this distilling liquor drink thou off’. As she takes the potion she says her what could be her last words to a distant Romeo ‘Here’s drink-I drink to thee’. She hides her feelings from the Nurse and her family and agrees to marry Paris, before showing her maturity and recognising the dangers of taking the potion, thinks and takes it. When she wakes and sees Romeo dead next to her she refuses to leave with the Friar and joins Romeo in after-life by stabbing herself. Juliet is also responsible for her death and that of Romeo as he sees her thinking she’s dead and kills himself and her own actions kill her. They both love each other greatly.
Romeo is in courtly love with Rosaline, as he knows he’ll never have her. Courtly love takes Romeo to Capulet’s ball, as Rosaline will be there. Romeo has sexual love with Juliet, when he first sees her he is infatuated by her, and sees true love. The true love of Romeo and Juliet shines out against the other types of love in the play. In the prologue, Romeo and Juliet are described as ’star-crossed lovers’ and in one way it means their love is in control by fate and fortune. But in another sense it suggests the choice of stars is appropriate to capture the quality of their love. Romeo’s first reaction to Juliet is that ‘she doth teach the torches to burn bright’. When he sees her in the orchard, she is the ‘light through yonder window’. Juliet shares this view of their love. Initially, she is suspicious of the suddenness of the feeling, yet by the wedding night she is making a comparison to the glowing quality of Romeo’s love. She says that when she dies, if he to be cut into little stars, ‘he will make the face of heaven so fine/ that all the world will be in love with night’. They love each other so much it was inevitable that if they couldn’t be with together they would commit suicide, as they couldn’t live without each other.
The idea of the deaths of Romeo and Juliet being down to fate and fortune, means that it would be impossible to blame anyone. The Elizabethan’s idea of fate and Fortune is similar to ours of chance, but stronger. They say fortune is a wheel that is spun, resulting in some good fortune or bad fortune, but the wheel would spin again and land a new fate. It was tied up in the idea that the future is written in the stars and that there is not a great deal you can do. That you’re not responsible for your actions, and that if fortune has planned for you to die or anything you can’t change its course. Yet Fate itself is seen to be the result of divine workings: as the play nears its conclusion, Friar Lawrence reports that he has begged Juliet to leave the vault and ‘bear this work of heaven with patience’. Whilst the Prince echoes the sentiment in his final rebuke to the families that ‘heaven finds means to kill your joys with love’. Capulet and Montague shake hands to signal the end of the feud, securing what the Friar had always sought to achieve, ‘To turn households’ rancour to pure love’. In Greek and Roman mythology, there are three goddesses who determine human destinies, and in particular the span of a person's life and his amount of misery and suffering. From the time of the poet Hesiod (8th century BC) on, however, the Fates were personified as three very old women who spin the threads of human destiny. Their names were Clotho (Spinner), Lachesis (Allotter), and Atropos (Inflexible). Much later, some fanciful writers assigned different tasks to the three goddesses: Clotho spun the “thread” of human fate, Lachesis dispensed it, and Atropos cut the thread (thus determining the individual's moment of death).
In my opinion I think the fault lies more with chance than anything else. Although I think there were many mistakes made by people in the play, they didn’t want to end with Romeo and Juliet dying and that it is just chance that it ended up that way. If I were to put the blame on any characters, it would be on Romeo and Juliet as no one forced them to take their own lives. I think if it were the Elizabethan era now, I would have put it down to fate and fortune. Another possible idea is that Romeo and Juliet die as a direct consequence of the hatred from the society in which they find themselves. Their deaths show the power of love, which comes through between them. Their love is now destined to symbolise forever the waste in any divided society. Their deaths are the inevitable outcome, so the play is a tragedy in a looser sense than a strict interpretation of Aristotle’s definition would indicate. Aristotle was the Greek philosopher who analysed tragedy and defined the characteristics of tragic drama.
