Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
The Forcefulness of Love
Romeo and Juliet is the most famous love
story in the English literary tradition. Love is naturally the play’s
dominant and most important theme. The play focuses on romantic
love, specifically the intense passion that springs up at first
sight between Romeo and Juliet. In Romeo and Juliet, love
is a violent, ecstatic, overpowering force that supersedes all other
values, loyalties, and emotions. In the course of the play, the
young lovers are driven to defy their entire social world: families
(“Deny thy father and refuse thy name,” Juliet asks, “Or if thou
wilt not, be but sworn my love, / And I’ll no longer be a Capulet”);
friends (Romeo abandons Mercutio and Benvolio after the feast in
order to go to Juliet’s garden); and ruler (Romeo returns to Verona
for Juliet’s sake after being exiled by the Prince on pain of death
in 2.1.76–78). Love is the overriding theme
of the play, but a reader should always remember that Shakespeare
is uninterested in portraying a prettied-up, dainty version of the
emotion, the kind that bad poets write about, and whose bad poetry
Romeo reads while pining for Rosaline. Love in Romeo and
Juliet is a brutal, powerful emotion that captures individuals
and catapults them against their world, and, at times, against themselves.
The powerful nature of love can be seen in
the way it is described, or, more accurately, the way descriptions
of it so consistently fail to capture its entirety. At times love
is described in the terms of religion, as in the fourteen lines
when Romeo and Juliet first meet. At others it is described as a
sort of magic: “Alike bewitchèd by the charm of looks” (2.Prologue.6).
Juliet, perhaps, most perfectly describes her love for Romeo by
refusing to describe it: “But my true love is grown to such excess
/ I cannot sum up some of half my wealth” (3.1.33–34).
Love, in other words, resists any single metaphor because it is
too powerful to be so easily contained or understood.
Romeo and Juliet does not make a specific
moral statement about the relationships between love and society,
religion, and family; rather, it portrays the chaos and passion
of being in love, combining images of love, violence, death, religion,
and family in an impressionistic rush leading to the play’s tragic
conclusion.
Love as a Cause of Violence
The themes of death and violence permeate Romeo
and Juliet, and they are always connected to passion, whether
that passion is love or hate. The connection between hate, violence,
and death seems obvious. But the connection between love and violence
requires further investigation.
Love, in Romeo and Juliet, is a grand
passion, and as such it is blinding; it can overwhelm a person as
powerfully and completely as hate can. The passionate love between
Romeo and Juliet is linked from the moment of its inception with
death: Tybalt notices that Romeo has crashed the feast and determines
to kill him just as Romeo catches sight of Juliet and falls instantly
in love with her. From that point on, love seems to push the lovers
closer to love and violence, not farther from it. Romeo and Juliet
are plagued with thoughts of suicide, and a willingness to experience
it: in Act 3, scene 3, Romeo brandishes a knife in Friar Lawrence’s
cell and threatens to kill himself after he has been banished from
Verona and his love. Juliet also pulls a knife in order to take
her own life in Friar Lawrence’s presence just three scenes later.
After Capulet decides that Juliet will marry Paris, Juliet says,
“If all else fail, myself have power to die” (3.5.242).
Finally, each imagines that the other looks dead the morning after
their first, and only, sexual experience (“Methinks I see thee,”
Juliet says, “. . . as one dead in the bottom of a tomb” (3.5.55–56). This theme continues until
its inevitable conclusion: double suicide. This tragic choice is
the highest, most potent expression of love that Romeo and Juliet
can make. It is only through death that they can preserve their
love, and their love is so profound that they are willing to end
their lives in its defense. In the play, love emerges as an amoral
thing, leading as much to destruction as to happiness. But in its
extreme passion, the love that Romeo and Juliet experience also
appears so exquisitely beautiful that few would want, or be able,
to resist its power.
The Individual Versus Society
Much of Romeo and Juliet involves
the lovers’ struggles against public and social institutions that
either explicitly or implicitly oppose the existence of their love.
Such structures range from the concrete to the abstract: families
and the placement of familial power in the father; law and the desire
for public order; religion; and the social importance placed on
masculine honor. These institutions often come into conflict with
each other. The importance of honor, for example, time and again
results in brawls that disturb the public peace.
