Contrast Romeo And Juliet

When William “The Bard” Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet around 1596, he had no idea that hundreds of years later middle school students from around the globe would be reading it. There are many reasons why teenagers read his famous play, but one of the main ones is to tell them what not to do. Educators everywhere want to show that there is a better way out of things than death, while also teaching kids how to read old English, and introducing kids to one of the most influential writers of all time. Throughout the world, there are people looking at the same art, but interpreting it in many different ways. This happens with different movie versions of the same text. After carefully analyzing Romeo and Juliet (Luhrmann, 1996), West Side Story (Robbins, 1961), and Romeo and Juliet (Zeffirelli, 1968) one finds the most accurate, by far, is
He fully removes the soliloquy of Friar Laurence about plants, and Juliet before she drinks the potion. These are not addressed at all in the movie which severely cuts the quality. Another wildly inaccurate scene is when everyone is in the tomb at the end. In Shakespeare’s play, Paris is killed by Romeo, and readers are told that Lady Montague has died from the grief of Romeo’s banishment. “Grief of my son’s exile hath stopp’d her breath” (Shakespeare 105). In the movie, Paris is never seen in the chamber, thus is never killed by Romeo. We also never hear anything about Lady Montague’s death. Leaving two main characters alive is an inaccuracy that cannot be overlooked. A final unforgivable inaccuracy is when Zeffirelli almost completely cuts out the talk between Romeo and Benvolio about love. In the play, they have a long talk about what love is, and how Romeo is sad because of it, but this talk is barely present\in the 1968 movie. “I am in love,” says Romeo in the play (Shakespeare 6). The statement is never uttered in the