e tracks. Their misfortune proceeds to work its way out through a series of missed communications and panicky misapprehensions. Altogether, the plot, save for its unhappy ending, is more suggestive of Shakespearean comedy at its most madcap than of high Shakespearean tragedy: "Structurally, it is a tragedy by fiat, that is, not yet clear of comedy" (Gibson, 1978, p. 176).
Yet Romeo and Juliet is undoubtedly one of the most popularly beloved of Shakespeare's work. Its popular accessability perhaps stems, at least in part, from precisely those factors that form its limitations in critical terms. The star-crossed lovers, lacking a tragic flaw, are so much the less profound as characters, but so much the more sympathetic than, say Hamlet, whose disdainful treatment of Ophelia is a study in cruelty. Young love thwarted by parental pride evidently has a powerful draw, not only for teenagers, but evidently also for those whose teenage years are distant memories.
Romeo and Juliet is a singularly modern story. It presupposes, or at least to the modern audience it seems to presuppose, the supremacy of romantic love (even on the part of teenagers) over the financial and family-status considerations that traditionally are supposed to have governed the arranged marriages of an earlier day. This reflects a sensibility which became prevalent only in this century. Yet Romeo and Juliet is after all one of Shakespeare's plays, written at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. It is the product of a late-Elizabethan dramatist writing for a late-Elizabethan audience.
It must, then, presumably--in some way or another--reflect the values and assumptions of that dramatist and that audience. Whatever Romeo and Juliet has to say about love, about family values, about the social order, must have originally been something that the sixteenth-century audience at the Globe playhouse was ready to hear, or at any rate what Shakes...