Upon finishing Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, many people react with distaste.
“This is what people call the greatest love story ever told? It’s about two stupid teenagers whose three-day relationship killed people.”
There are many things wrong with this interpretation. It is a very trite response to a complex story. Even calling Romeo and Juliet a love story is an incorrect oversimplification of the plot. Shakespeare didn’t write love stories. He wrote tragedies and this play should be read as one.
Something to keep in mind while reading Shakespeare is that his works require suspended disbelief. Suspended disbelief means having a willingness to believe in the unbelievable. We know that ghosts don't exist, but we accept that they do in the world of Hamlet. People don't naturally speak in iambic pentameter, but we accept that they do in Shakespeare's works. So why are people so unwilling to believe that teenagers can fall in love at first sight?
We must forget the idea that it was Romeo and Juliet's love that killed people. The play never says that and it never happens. It is the feud between the Montagues and Capulets that killed people. When Mercutio dies, he doesn't curse their love, he curses their houses. These families hated each other so much that they were willing to fight on sight, and the opening scene of the play even has the servants of either family looking to fight each other. If anything, Romeo and Juliet's love and death saved people, and it even says so in the prologue:
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove.
Their love ends the feud; love that was inexplicably tied to death, hate, and passion. Only they could have had the power to uproot the violence in Verona. These kids were ignored by adults the entire play, and yet they were the ones who could end what the adults could not.
That brings up an important component of the play: the adults. They range from careless to blithering, forceful to judgmental. They don't hold kids to a high mature and intellectual standard and brush off their wants and concerns. Think about when Juliet was forced to marry Paris, or when Tybalt's concerns were ignored when Romeo crashed the Capulet's party. Saying Romeo and Juliet are just dumb teenagers holds no merit in comparison to the people who were supposed to be rational adults.
The next argument that many people bring up is Romeo's pining for Rosaline. Romeo is seen mooning over Rosaline (who is never actually in the play) and soon after falls in love with Juliet. This leads people to the conclusion that Romeo is insincere or overdramatic. However, Romeo spoke of Rosaline in a way that does not compare with the way to spoke about Juliet. He pined after Rosaline with conventional, even boring descriptions, but when he meets Juliet he speaks with heightened speech and becomes more rash and passionate than he was before. This shows that Romeo's love for Juliet was real, though not perfect.
Our cynical perceptions of love refuse to allow us to believe their story. We blame teenagers for events that were not their fault, and most of all, we ignore the message this story is trying to tell: teenagers are capable and important. They have the power to change things. Ignoring them or thinking them powerless like Romeo and Juliet's parents did is narrow-minded and does nothing good. Romeo and Juliet changed years of hate through their love, and pushing aside this story as worthless disregards this message.