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Thesis: Berry analyzes of the language of Romeo and Juliet in order to show that the play is a piece of social criticism. He reviews the place of sonnets in the culture of Shakespeare's time and the appearance of "sonnet-material" in the play, then asserts that the mode of thought and feeling portrayed in the sonnet tradition dominates the portrayal of the characters and society in the play: The young lovers feel intensely that which the mode incites them to feel. Confronted with the image of the ideal lover, each reverts to stereotype. What we have here is an existential drama of sonnet-life. The world of Romeo and Juliet, shared by Benvolio, the Montagues and Capulets, and the Prince, is a world of fixed relationships and closed assumptions. They appear as quotations, and they speak in quotations: the cliché, of which the sonnet is exemplar, is the dominant thought-form of Verona. (137)Because of this situation, says Berry, it is the society of Verona which bears responsibility for the tragedy: Verona is a wrong-choice society. It is a community fascinated with names, forms, rituals. Its citizens are passionate, impatient, intolerant, impulsive. It lacks a capacity for appraising its own values. Its Prince does not tell the community that the Montague-Capulet feud is an absurdity, he merely forbids brawling in the streets. The fatal chance of the thrust under Romeo's arm is bad luck: true. But someone would get killed in a duel, sometime; it was inevitable. Fate, then, is diffused back into the entire society. The seeds of tragedy are present even in the apparently comic world of the first two Acts -- a world of young lovers and friends, comic servants and go-betweens, doddering seniors. To create a totally credible situation, which is habitually Shakespeare's objective, a much greater degree of social determinism is required than is generally understood. What we have in Romeo and Juliet is a complete social context for an action, a society that is unable to cope with consequences of its own deficiencies. (143) Bottom Line: Well-written and thoughtful, but distant from any emotional experience of the play. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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