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Who Is To Blame In Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet

Decent Essays

In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, death is a frequent subject. Whether it’s Romeo comparing “light and dark” or Juliet threatening to kill herself, death is always the topic of conversation. At the conclusion of the story, Romeo and Juliet tragically die. This brings up a drastic question: who is to blame for the deaths of Romeo and Juliet? Based off of textual evidence, the feuding families are to blame as everything happened because they were fighting in the first place. To begin with, Shakespeare stated in the prologue, “Two households, both alike in dignity...a pair of star-crossed lovers take their life, doth with death bury their parents’ strife.” (Shakespeare.Prologue.1-6). This means that it was fate that Romeo and Juliet’s relationship could never work out since the vendetta between the two families. In fact, in Kerschen’s critical essay, Kelley Griffith states, “if the plot is only part of a larger or ongoing story, then the characters are more likely to seem at mercy of …show more content…

Denton Snider, an American Scholar claims, “Romeo and Juliet are destroyed by their own love...just as the passion of hate, the intensity of love’s passion blots out reason and self-control and leads to destructive behavior.” (Kerschen 2). To put it briefly, Snider believes Romeo and Juliet are in fault for their own deaths. Love can make people do strange things, but there is a bigger picture in this situation. Romeo and Juliet’s affiliation was forbidden. Inevitably, something big, maybe even death, would’ve happened as a consequence to them being together. It was their love that made Juliet acquire help from Friar Laurence to fake her own death. In the same way, when Romeo asked the Apothecary to sell him an elixir, to end his life by the side of Juliet. Their love did have a part in their death, but they wouldn’t have had to end their lives, if their relationship wasn’t

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