I am now a person who gets mad about people misinterpreting Romeo and Juliet. Yes, it’s a cautionary tale. It is NOT a cautionary tale about
- How dumb teenagers mistake crushes for love and should listen to their parents and go along with arranged marriages they don’t…
What people always seem to miss, and what I got intuitively as a teenager, is that Romeo & Juliet is a story about how adults break children.
Kids all over the world, every day, for most of recorded history, have been driven to self-destruction by the forces of their societies, their parents, the adults around them. And then the parents turn around and talk about ‘peer pressure,’ as if this is the other kids’ fault for doing the same thing the adults around them do. Suicide, self-harm, drugs, risky sex, dangerous behaviors—they’re all forms of self-destruction, and they happen because:
1: puberty is FUCKING HARD (and it’s not ‘stupidity’; it’s roughly three years of your own biology and brain chemistry going insane. If it happened any time other than puberty, it’d be a mental health crisis, and when it gets brushed aside as ‘stupidity,’ what you’re doing is dismissing real difficulties, emotional and chemical imbalances and sometimes traumas that these teenagers are going through)
2: the futures these kids can imagine for themselves have been narrowed down till all the options they’re left with seem untenable to them (there’s lots of talk about ‘kids can’t see a future,’ and no, it’s not that. They CAN, and it’s one they can’t bear to live with)
and 3: nobody’s listening when they try to object
And that is Romeo & Juliet in a nutshell, ladies and gents.
There’s a reason high school teachers so often feel moved to teach this play to their students—because teens can viscerally identify with this story. It’s THEIR STORY. And we know that, because we as adults remember it somewhere in the back of our brains. But then we’ve lost touch with the details of that memory, because in the majority of cases the play gets TAUGHT as if it’s about the dangers of teenaged passion. And what that does is shut students down and alienate them, because they KNOW, on a basic instinctive level, what those characters are going through, and they also know their teacher appears to be one of those adults from the story who don’t listen and try to blame them for everything.
One Hell of a Steep Learning Curve: The “moral” of Romeo and Juliet is boring