• SCB@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    My favorite things about Shakespeare as an English teacher was explaining the innuendos and explaining how Romeo and Juliet was absolutely not a love story lol

    I had a young woman who was a freshman yell at me, crying, that Romeo and Juliet was the greatest love story of all time and it was adorable.

    • MightBeAlpharius@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I feel like some of that comes down to… Well, us, the adults. For some ungodly reason, we’ve been calling it things like “a love story” and “a tragedy,” and now people just don’t know what to expect.

      We’ve also somewhat sanitized it. The pop-culture focus on it tends to be the lengths they go to in order to be together, or the families coming together at the end; but we tend to ignore that the couple is just trying to be together to bone, it’s full of dick jokes, and at the end they basically get cockblocked so hard that they die.

      Actually, now that I think of it, Kenneth Branaugh is great and all, but I’d love to see a Seth Rogen adaptation of this one.

    • SheeEttin@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s sort of a love story, but it’s obviously a tragic love story. I’m not sure I’d use the word “adorable” but it could certainly be touching, especially to a teen girl.

    • angrystego@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m a bit confused. Do the inuendos prevent it from being a love story? I always found it to be a tragic lovestory of two horny teenagers. I think hornyness is a common part of being in love.

      • SCB@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s a tragedy about two teens in who know each other for 4 days, get married after 24 hours, and cause the deaths of 6 people.

        The story opens with Romeo pining after a totally different young woman, which is why his friends take him to the party in the first place

        Ultimately, it’s a warning about foolish love

        • angrystego@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I agree with most of this. I differ in that I think foolish love is a Natural and integral part of the age of the protagonists. The teenagers are not ať fault in my eyes. So to me, it seems more like a warning about foolish adults with the prime example being friar Laurence - seriously, wtf man, what were you thinking, you were supposed to know better!

          • WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, Romeo and Juliet is the story about how two naive but innocent kids ended up as the victims of their families’ senseless feuding.

        • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’s pretty fucked all around. It’s not just any two teens, but the children of two powerful families who are feuding for no reason. I think we can generalize it as a warning against foolishness in general. In the end, all of them were Fortune’s fool, not just Romeo.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It may not be a real love story, but Romeo and Juliet definitely go to bone town. And it was played by two men when Shakespeare wrote it.