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Introduction: Love, Sex and Power
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Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet
In this thirty-three part course, Professor John McRae (University of Nottingham) explores Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. We begin with a broad introduction to the historical, political and intellectual context of late 16th-century England, before going through the play scene-by-scene, providing close reading and detailed analysis, with commentary on character, plot, themes and motifs, language, symbolism, and more.
Note: We use the Arden edition of the play (Third Series, ed. René Weis). Students using a different version of the play may encounter slight differences in both the text and line numbers.
Introduction: Love, Sex and Power
In this lecture, we begin our introduction to Romeo and Juliet, focusing in particular on: (i) its focus on love and sex, and its bawdiness; (ii) some of the key themes in the play: love, power, the patriarchy; (iii) the role of violence in the play, and the extent to which the kind of violence that we witness (gang violence, revenge killings, etc.) remains relevant today; (iv) its setting in a Verona, a city which had already formed the setting of an earlier play by Shakespeare: The Two Gentlemen of Verona (written between 1589-93); (v) the extent to which Romeo and Juliet is a ‘typical’ tragedy; and (vi) the position of Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare’s career: a relatively early play, but written very close to two of his greatest works: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (written in 1595 or 1596) and The Merchant of Venice (written between 1596-99).
Hello, I'm John McCrae. And today we're talking about Romeo and Juliet.
00:00:05It's one of the stories that everybody knows. It's almost the great
00:00:11symbolic story of young love. Tragic love, of course. Sexy love. Of course.
00:00:15There's no question. Did they sleep together? Of course they did.
00:00:23It's a very sexy play. In fact,
00:00:27um, this guy here, Eric Partridge,
00:00:29who writes about the dirty bits in Shakespeare and makes quite a big book of it.
00:00:32Shakespeare's body.
00:00:37He reckons that Romeo and Juliet contains the
00:00:38rudest single line in all of Shakespeare's works.
00:00:43Uh, so keep watching
00:00:48so you can find out what that is.
00:00:51It's a play about love. Of course it is. It's a play about power.
00:00:54It's a play about romantic love, sexual love, forbidden love. It's a play about
00:00:58the patriarchy,
00:01:09the society that is governed by
00:01:12usually older men and their wishes.
00:01:15The role of women is not
00:01:18normally to be independent and to make their own choices,
00:01:21And one of Juliette's
00:01:25problems is that she makes her own choice and good on you go
00:01:27and it's got villains and heroes. It's got lots of violence.
00:01:32The violence can be updated.
00:01:39There are lots of productions that update this
00:01:42story from the 15 hundreds
00:01:46and put it in the absolute now 20 twenties.
00:01:49Because gangs and violence because of corrupt, patriarchal governments,
00:01:52it's endemic.
00:02:00Of course, violence is endemic.
00:02:02Violence will always be endemic where there is
00:02:05frustration where there is a lack of advancement,
00:02:09as Hamlet calls it.
00:02:13So I think we can identify,
00:02:15like mad with the young characters in this play who are frustrated, who are
00:02:18gangs, the Capulets and the Montagues.
00:02:26It turns even into the musical West Side Story,
00:02:28which is exactly the story of Romeo and Juliet
00:02:31transposed to New York and turned into musicals.
00:02:34It can be transposed into any time.
00:02:40It's not Shakespeare's first tragedy, but it was his first huge hit.
00:02:46It was a huge hit.
00:02:52It comes in his career
00:02:54about 15 95. It's about the 10th or 11th of his plays.
00:02:57It comes after another romantic story set in Verona,
00:03:03which is called Two Gentlemen of Verona.
00:03:08Verona does seem to have this romantic aura about it.
00:03:12If you go there, which I recommend you do. It's a lovely, lovely city.
00:03:16You'll see what is supposed to be the original Juliet balcony,
00:03:20where she came out and said, Oh, Romeo, Romeo,
00:03:26wherefore art thou Romeo things like that.
00:03:29There is an idealism about the love here,
00:03:32and there is also the constant association between Romeo and Juliet
00:03:38and tragedy.
00:03:45So if two gentlemen of Verona is a romance with no deaths and tragedy, what makes this
00:03:49Romeo and Juliet such a tragedy?
00:03:58Well,
00:04:03the death of the protagonist is the main thing,
00:04:04but this is a particular form of a tragedy.
00:04:09So let me do a little moment about
00:04:15Shakespeare's production all the way through his career.
00:04:18One of the things that I insist about Shakespeare
00:04:21is that every play is a bit different.
00:04:25They're usually experiments, and this is a real experiment in tragic form.
00:04:28You know how many plays he wrote, don't you?
00:04:36This is your first test.
00:04:39I asked this often.
00:04:41And people, no matter how often I say it,
00:04:43people seem to forget how many plays did Shakespeare write?
00:04:45That's correct. Note not five, not seven. Know
00:04:49about 36 or 37 is the recognised cannon,
00:04:53and we can't be sure of which plays were first or second.
00:04:58We normally think that Henry, the sixth part two. Strangely, it was the first one.
00:05:02But the first ones include Henry, the six part one, Part two,
00:05:08part three of which he wrote Part two, we think.
00:05:12And then the prequel and sequel, Very Hollywood,
00:05:16he wrote Titus Andronicus, a very bloody Roman tragedy with lots of blood and guts,
00:05:19tongue being cut out on stage.
00:05:26It's the Quentin Tarantino won, Uh,
00:05:29he wrote the Comedy of Errors just to show that he could do a straightforward,
00:05:31complicated, not straightforward but straight comedy with no tragedy.
00:05:37He wrote The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which I just mentioned,
00:05:42he wrote The Taming of the Shrew.
00:05:46Very controversial still, because it's about the role of women
00:05:49and powerful women.
00:05:53Shakespeare writes a lot of powerful women, and Juliette is one of them.
00:05:55And he wrote King Richard,
00:06:00the third of the tragedy of the historical villain figure.
00:06:02He wrote King John a bit of a tragedy about a useless king.
00:06:07Love's Labour's lost. He wrote another sort of
00:06:13romantic pastoral, but with the presence of death everywhere.
00:06:16And then
00:06:21he suddenly moves into top gear
00:06:23because the next three plays hell right about 15. 95 are
00:06:26and you know these.
00:06:31Romeo and Juliet,
00:06:33A Midsummer Night's Dream
00:06:34and The Merchant of Venice.
00:06:36Wow, bang, bang, bang Three enormous hits
00:06:39in a period of a year or only two years.
00:06:44
Cite this Lecture
APA style
McRae, J. (2022, October 07). Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet - Introduction: Love, Sex and Power [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/shakespeare-romeo-and-juliet-john-mcrae/act-5-scene-2-i-could-not-send-it-here-it-is-again
MLA style
McRae, J. "Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet – Introduction: Love, Sex and Power." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 07 Oct 2022, https://massolit.io/courses/shakespeare-romeo-and-juliet-john-mcrae/act-5-scene-2-i-could-not-send-it-here-it-is-again