pathetic rather than really tragic (Dickey, 1957, p. 63).
It is not nonetheless a class tragedy, like every number of workings from the Romantic era. Sociologically, they ar scarcely mismatched. They are respectively the word of honor and daugher of prominent families; there is no question of either cosmos from the sixteenth century equivalent of the wrong side of the tracks. Their happening proceeds to work its way out through a series of missed communications and panicky misapprehensions. Altogether, the plot, save for its hard-pressed ending, is more suggestive of Shakespearean comedy at its approximately madcap than of high Shakespearean tragedy: "Structurally, it is a tragedy by fiat, that is, not yet clear of comedy" (Gibson, 1978, p. 176).
heretofore Romeo and Juliet is undoubtedly one of the close to ordinaryly beloved of Shakespeare's work. Its popular accessability perhaps stems, at least in part, from precisely those factors that do work its limitations in critical terms. The star-crossed lovers, lacking a tragic flaw, are so much the less profound as characters, just so much the more sympathetic than, say Hamlet, whose august treatment of Ophelia is a study in cruelty. Young love thwarted by parental pride evidently has a powerful draw, not only for teenagers, notwithstanding evidently in like manner for those whose teenage years are distant memories.
Romeo and Juliet is a singularly modern story. It presupposes, or at least to
alive or Laura dead will mete out equally for brooding
The social factor--one that can scarcely be overestimated--was that of privacy. done the sixteenth century, it essentially did not exist in any class. Even the architecture of the age conspired against it; the great houses of the aristocracy and higher(prenominal) gentry might have numerous rooms, but these normally interconnected, rather than opening separately off a hallway, so that people were constantly passing through rooms, including the bedchambers of all but the highest-ranking members of the household.
Sir Thomas Seymour was not barred, by a lock or any other effective means, from entering Princess Elizabeth's bedchamber early on in the morning before she had risen; Catherine Howard evidently do no attempt to hide her "puffing and blowing" with her early lovers from the other young women who shared her chambers. In the sixteenth century, the poor lived in barns, and the rich in warrens; in either case, very microscopical could have been hidden from the eyes and ears of the young even if the attempt had been made, which it evidently was not.
Rowse, A. L. (1971). The Elizabethan Renaissance. New York: Scribner's.
Sharpe, J. A. (1987). Early Modern England. Baltimore: Edward Arnold.
'sympathized' young lady who replaces the idealized golden-
Did Shakespeare, then, condition her as a daring take exception to conventional assumptions about young women, their love lives, and their decision-making powers? Did he intend her as purely a fantasy figure? Or did he intend her and her predicament to reflect, in a dramatically heightened way, circumstances with which many in his audience would identify? She seems the most real of young heroines; how did she appear to the Elizabethans?
Catherine Parr was a firm Protestant and an intellectual, who wrote and had published devotional books, one of very few sixteenth-century women to do so (Fraser, 1992, pp. 378-79). She was evidently no Puritan, however, and was pas
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