Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Abstract

Harold C. Goddard, in his The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951), remarked upon how much of Shakespeare turns upon the vexed relationships between generations of the same family, which was also one of the burdens of Athenian tragedy. Except for the early Titus Andronicus, which I judge to have been a charnel-house parody of Christopher Marlowe, Romeo and Juliet was Shakespeare’s first venture at composing a tragedy, and also his first deep investigation of generational perplexities. The Montague-Capulet hatred might seem overwrought enough to have its parodistic aspects, but it destroys two immensely valuable, very young lovers, Juliet of the Capulets and Romeo of the Montagues, and Mercutio as well, a far more interesting character than Romeo. Yet Romeo, exalted by the authentic love between the even more vital Juliet and himself, is one of the first instances of the Shakespearean representation of crucial change in a character through self-overhearing and self-reflection. Juliet, an even larger instance, is the play’s triumph, since she inaugurates Shakespeare’s extraordinary procession of vibrant, life-enhancing women, never matched before or since in all of Western literature, including in Chaucer, who was Shakespeare’s truest precursor as the creator of personalitie