Romeo and Juliet: Themes Relevant for the Modern Audience

Question: The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare has important messages for a young and modern audience. What are his themes and how are they portrayed? Despite the fact that it was written over four hundred years ago, Shakespeare’s play ‘the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet’ still has relevant themes for today’s contemporary youth. The play shows important messages and presents them to a young, modern audience. The message is that Shakespeare uses characterization, settings and the whole structure of the narrative to present a story about tragedy, love, romance, uncontrollable passion, and violence to the audience. The characterization used by Shakespeare really helps define the tragic story about two families that are arch nemeses to each other and this subsequently ends up in a loss of both of their children.
Love. Love is portrayed throughout the length of the play. Romantic love is a large and blinding emotion that plays a grand role in characters to describe who they are. Unfortunately love, passion and romance are the causes of most of the violence throughout the play. In fact it is the base of most of the story line. One of the first major pieces of love conflict in the play occurs when Romeo starts to fall in love with Juliet. Conflict from this point onwards was inevitable. That moment was the starting point for most of the story line. Mercuito’s death was ultimately caused by Romeo falling for Juliet, causing Tybalt to become enraged about that situation. Mercuito steps in when tybalt beats Romeo and is subsequently killed also for the love of defending his best friend.
As you are probably starting to see by now that love and violence are very involved and entwined with each other. Violence plays a key role in this play as it creates most of the tension and ever rising drama. The story of Romeo and Juliet is often thought to be about love but actually the readers/audience fail to realise that the love is just included in the piece. The main theme of the play is mainly about violence and chaos. From the very beginning of the play it is very evident that violence will occur. In the opening credits it is stated that “where civil blood makes civil hands unclean” meaning that citizens will have the blood of their fellow other citizens on their hands consequently saying that the citizens will end up killing or harming each other
The final main theme is tragedy in Romeo and Juliet is tragedy. After all the full title of the of the play is called the most excellent and lamentable tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. This play would not be known as what it is without this theme. Tragedy is what William Shakespeare is most famous for writing about. It is very, very evident that this play is one about tragedy as well. Once again right from the beginning the theme of tragedy is clear as cut diamonds. Juliet find out that Romeo is a Montague. She knew from that point on things will be bad because of the rivalry between the two families. Examples of this theme occur many times throughout the entire play. One of the most evident scenes of tragedy is also one of the final ones. This is when Romeo thinks that Juliet is dead so he commit suicide over the supposed death of his wife. Juliet was not dead and as she awoke to find her dead husband laying there she makes the decision to kill herself as well. She does so with Romeos dagger.
In summary, all though the play was written just over four hundred years and seven months ago. The play Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare has managed to portray still relevant themes that are still very much still alive and relevant in today’s modern society.