Romeo And Juliet Be Taught In Schools Essay

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Romeo and Juliet deserves to still be taught in schools today because of the literary value within the play, and its immaculate portrayal of young love and old love. In Noah Berlatsky’s argument, It’s Not Childish, It’s About Childishness, he comments on elements of the script after reading it the second time, the first when he was in high school, “That is some searingly saucy banter, there. ‘Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer’ has to be one of the archest lines in all of literature. I’m with Romeo. I’d fall in love with that,” (Berlatsky). Besides the cheesy-lover but golden lines from Romeo and Juliet—which serve as delicious quotes for the audience to eat up—Berlatsky also points out the intentional establishment of a young-old …show more content…

Rosenberg also ends with the thought that it doesn’t translate well into today’s theatre and that “...Dying is easy. Living to survive the consequences of your actions and to do the actual work… is the hard part” (Rosenberg). But, like Berlatsky’s article argues, the play instead uses the story of the Capulets and the Montagues to simulate the tension between families and helps Romeo imagine young love, and for the audience to experience a delightful and thought-provoking mural of today’s societal values. Berlatsky ends it perfectly, “If, in our own day, we have pushed the onset of adulthood past the tweens, past the teens… that makes the play’s insights and its… exasperating perversities more relevant, not less,” (Berlatsky). Again, with the modern viewpoints of relationships and marriages, while age is slowly falling off the table, Shakespeare’s writing becomes more relevant. In full, a step-out and view of the whole picture will help to see the literary and psychological value of Romeo and Juliet, and then humans will be able to appreciate the art that it is, and further, use it to explain phenomena that Shakespeare does such an astonishing job