Rather (as often with Shakespeare) the point is the language itself: the dazzling, disturbing rhetorical force of old/young, corrupt/innocent, experienced/naïve. From this perspective, the point of the play isn't so much the exhilaration of young love or the dunderheadedness of young love.

Or manipulated by Rosenberg, to denigrate that same swooning. Or manipulated by Shakespeare to sweep (adults?) into a romantic swoon. Or manipulated by the nurse to give force to her affection and nostalgia. They're devices manipulated by Juliet or Romeo to give force to their sense of indignation or specialness. Rather, the point is the language itself: the dazzling, disturbing rhetorical force of old/young, corrupt/innocent, experienced/naïve.įor Romeo and Juliet, in other words, youth and age seem less like solid, immutable categories than like tropes. The point of the play isn't the exhilaration or the dunderheadedness of young love. And- if having sex is considered to be adult behavior-vice versa. Adults behave like children with some frequency. is Capulet really childish? Is the nurse? Surely, you don't have to be young to be precipitate or fickle. Rosenberg might argue that even the adults behave like kids in Romeo and Juliet because the play itself is childish. And Romeo's affections aren't any more changeable than those of the nurse, who, having cheerfully helped Juliet marry Romeo, just as cheerfully advises her to forget that first marriage and turn polyandrist by wedding as her father wishes. Juliet's hasty marriage to Romeo, for example, isn't much more precipitous than Lord Capulet's sudden decision to marry her to Paris. old folks, many feign as they were dead /Unwieldy, slow, heavy and pale as lead.'Īnd then there are moments where it seems like old and young don't really act all that differently.

There are passages where old and young are presented as almost different species, as when Juliet irritably declaims, '. Sometimes, it means being a hope for the future-as when the Friar marries the couple to try to end the feud between Montagues and Capulets. Sometimes, being young means being rash and changeable, as when Romeo switches his hyperbolic affections from Rosalind to Juliet. Old/young remains an obsession throughout the play-but that obsession does not, interestingly, work in any single way. Juliet's youth, then, is adamantly established, and also adamantly presented as a source of fascination for the elderly. Moreover, the first time Juliet appears on stage, her aged comic Nurse launches into a rambling anecdote about when her charge was a toddler, an anecdote that Juliet clearly finds both tedious and embarrassing. The fact that Juliet is 13, for example, is not just mentioned once. But the play is also, and insistently, about age. but it also seems to be one of the main points of the play itself.Ī number of Rosenberg's commenters noted that Romeo and Juliet is deliberately about young love. In short, now that I'm an adult, I appreciate the young lovers a good bit more than I did when I was their age. 'Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer' has to be one of the archest lines in all of literature. That is some searingly saucy banter, there. JULIET Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer. ROMEO Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss. ROMEO If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle ﬁne is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

Romeo and juliet romeo rash decisions