Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Is "Romeo and Juliet" a tragedy, or a comedy with tragic events?

Well, it's classified in the manuscripts as a tragedy - so the question is more about genre than about classification. That is, nobody really argues that "Romeo and Juliet", which ends with the death of two young lovers, is anything other than a tragedy.

But you're right to suggest that it absolutely does have elements that we might associate with a comedy. For example, The play seems to start as a comedy, and only twists into tragedy on Mercutio's (accidental) death. The youthful high-jinks of the first scenes of "Romeo and Juliet" seem closer to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in youthful high-jinks, rather than the ominousness of a "Macbeth" or a "King Lear". Is Shakespeare trying his hand at a different sort of tragedy?

The play also relies on fate (their love is "death-mark'd") and chance (and coincidence) for it to happen - look at the way Friar John cannot, randomly, deliver Romeo's letter to Mantua, which brings about the dual suicide of the final act. And chance, of course, is something far more associated with comedy: look at the reunion of the twins in "The Comedy of Errors" for only one of many examples in Shakespeare.

Perhaps one of the objectives of the play is to ask the question - why do bad things happen? What is "tragedy"?

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