Hate In William Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet

For their final production of the school year, Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne produced William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The production promised a dual exploration of unexplained but deeply ingrained hate, and how that hate affects young relationships. It would be an interesting way of interpreting a play that has been produced in hundreds of different ways via stage and film, ranging from greasers to garden gnomes. A more political and almost documentary style to the play could produce thought-provoking reactions from the audience. What was presented was two and a half hours of the kind of Shakespeare that is most dreaded in high school: wordy prose that had no emotional meaning attached to it. The heavily color-coded

When first called for by Nurse, Juliet aggressively pulls her headphones off to respond. Again, this is another really fun element. It helps reaffirm the plays earlier clear emphasis of her being only 13. Once more, however, this is the only time that she is seen with the mp3 player. From the point of the narrative, it does not change the story in any sort of way, she still falls in love with Romeo and then they die. That being said, what the repeated appearance of the mp3 player could have done is made Juliet more grounded in a teenaged reality. It would have just been just as easy to have Juliet wearing her headphones during the balcony scene and also explain how she did not notice Romeo waxing poetically in her

The production automatically becomes more critical of the love story that is being set up, by signaling to the audience that Juliet is 13. It would be easy to ignore those lines that talk about Juliet’s age by running through them. However, there was a clear choice to make those lines clearly understood. It is a nice way to highlight her naïvety and her reckless passion. Unfortunately the same can not be said for Romeo’s antics with Rosaline. A large part of Romeo’s character in the first act before meeting Juliet is that he madly and passionately in love with Rosaline. Due to the performance of Mr. Daniel Moser however, those lines seem unimportant stepping stones for the much more charismatic Mercutio to get from one line to another. Mr. Moser felt like someone who had done a bit of character work and learned his lines but was too occupied with outside distractions to fully develop as an angsty lovestruck teenager for the entire