Romeo and Juliet (1595) by William Shakespeare

Romeo climbs Juliet's balcony in the play's iconic scene

I do have some recollection of reading the famous play Romeo and Juliet in high school, as most Americans do. We even took a field trip to see it performed live. However, like most students of teen age, I paid the great work little respect and thus recall almost none of my previous read, nor the experience of seeing the play itself, and thus was able to experience it again with fresher eyes.

I've always viewed Shakespeare's work as being rather stuffy and impenetrable. Probably this is due to the early modern English language in which his plays are written. Thankfully, I thoroughly destroyed this barrier in the past with a complete reading of the King James Version of the Holy Bible. No work of early modern English will ever intimidate me after completing such a slog as that, and I was able to experience Romeo and Juliet in a far more natural manner than I was probably ever able to while studying it in school.

Shakespeare's actually quite different from my previous view of him. The early pages of Romeo and Juliet left me staggered not from his poetic, creative, beautiful dialogue (although it does feature plenty of that), but with the experience of reading Romeo and Mercutio's sharp, barb-like dialogue between one another and pausing, dumbstruck, with the thought of: "Hold on a second... Was that a dick joke? In Shakespeare!?"

If love be rough with you, be rough with love;

Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.

Yes, yes it was. It was a dick joke. There are plenty of vagina jokes, too!

Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry 

Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

Surprisingly (at least to me—a Shakespearean neophyte), various clever, bawdy references are peppered throughout.

Reading such dialogue is amusing, mostly due to my previous notion that Shakespeare's work was utterly proper and academic, but also due to the everlasting notion that the generations before ours were always somehow better than us; more polite, more proper, more civilized. And it's nice to be reminded so often while reading literature that that's certainly not the case. That it never was. That even highly educated nobility, decked out in their expensive, colorful livery, were still shamelessly making dick jokes with their pals as they drank at a party.

And so I learned that Romeo and Juliet often reads as a modern romantic comedy. The first half of the play is strikingly casual, entertaining, and humorous. I swept through its pages with relative ease compared to how challenging I used to find his work—I attempted to read Macbeth several years ago and failed inside the first dozen pages. I can only imagine that Shakespeare's contemporaries would have greatly enjoyed such levity.

This kind of light, comic romance would be fully disarming to one who was not already aware of the play's conclusion. My reading of the play undoubtedly suffered at the spoiling of this reveal, as I expect most readers' must be. With hindsight, I came to admire the deftness with which Shakespeare sets up the tragic ending. The play's paciness also helps this along, as it moves quickly from scene to scene and wastes little time with unnecessary diversion.



As I read, I grew to respect Shakespeare not as some high-minded artist, but rather as an exceptional entertainer. Of course, some of this is lost on us modern day readers, as there's a bit of a time barrier. But I still enjoyed Romeo and Juliet far more than I expected to. If I had to level a criticism at the play, it would probably fall more on the medium with which I experienced it rather than any of the text itself. Reading a play in written form is always going to fall short of the full experience of seeing it live, and I found myself craving some exposition to help illustrate the scene for me; something which I would not have felt had I been witnessing the stage production rather than reading it.

Regardless; a worthwhile experience. And I look forward to reading more Shakespeare soon.

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