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Romeo and Juliet and Renaissance Italy

In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare employed two specific aspects of life in Renaissance Italy to create the circumstances of his story. The first was the history of bloody inter-family quarrels that ravaged Italian cities during the Renaissance era. The second was the fashionable approach to love based on the poetry of Petrarch. But Shakespeare did not merely adopt the stories of chroniclers who "delighted in exaggeration and enjoyed recounting bloodcurdling deeds" (Plumb 33). Nor did he use the Petrarchan tradition uncritically. Instead he modified the civil wars of the period into a pointless family feud that takes place in a stable state and he contrasted the unreal pose of the Petrarchan lover with the experience of a young man who is truly in love. Civic peace and true love are two states to which human beings aspire. The two families' failure to achieve the first results in a world in which there is no room for the second.

By understanding the contrast between an orderly world and a disorderly one and the contrast between true love and the pretense of love, it becomes possible to understand the play's tragic quality. To the modern reader it often seems as though Romeo and Juliet are simply being punished for the behavior of others. The idea that they are fated to die for love seems contrived and false. But the play makes a great deal more sense when it is understood that the two families had created a world where something as important as love could not prevail over violence.

There is a significant difference between the violence described by Plumb and the situation found in the play. Plumb, for example, describes Perugia, one of the most violent cities of the fifteenth century with its decades of battles between the Oddi and Baglioni families. It was a story "horrifying in its utter cruelty and in its wanton disregard of human suffering" as the families "with their armed ruffians raged and stormed and slaughter...

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Romeo and Juliet and Renaissance Italy. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:14, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1680826.html