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Introduction: Love, Sex and Power
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About the lecture
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).
About the lecturer
John McRae is Special Professor of Language in Literature Studies and Teaching Associate in the School of English at Nottingham University, and holds Visiting Professorships in China, Malaysia, Spain and the USA. He is co-author of The Routledge History of Literature in English with Ron Carter, and also wrote The Language of Poetry, Literature with a Small 'l' and the first critical edition of Teleny by Oscar Wilde and others.
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). Scene-by-Scene - Introduction: Love, Sex and Power [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/options/scene-by-scene-df964086-2ba7-43e3-83d8-b8dfeb8284a0?auth=0&lesson=9392&option=13462&type=lesson
MLA style
McRae, J. "Scene-by-Scene – Introduction: Love, Sex and Power." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 07 Oct 2022, https://massolit.io/options/scene-by-scene-df964086-2ba7-43e3-83d8-b8dfeb8284a0?auth=0&lesson=9392&option=13462&type=lesson