A romantic yet tragic story: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Reviewed

 By Mariana Uribe, 10/04/2024

When I heard about this book, I decided to read it since I had read the tempest, a play from the same author, before, even though I had expectations, such as a love story, a happy ending, shakespearean accent which I don’t understand and loads of comedy that I saw in the tempest that I thought would be there. After all, both books were written by the same author (William Shakespeare) and the tempest had a happy ending with a reconciliation between the protagonists, even if the book had comedy or tragedy, when I was about to read it, I asked myself: Can it be a happy and romantic love story like stereotypical romantic books have? 

Before I had read the book, in drama, when practising a comedy play, a classmate and I were supposed to be the main couple and the teacher said: You guys should be like Romeo and Juliet, just without killing yourselves. At that moment I thought, is it a tragedy then? Does it have a sad ending like loads of k-dramas? Will I like it despite the ending? That’s when I decided to find this book since intrigue would haunt me unless I read it. 5 months later, we had to read a choice book for English, which must be for our ages, in english but it could be any book we wanted, and I decided to read this one. I assumed it would be a long novel that would hit the topics about love, relationships and all that, but I opened it and I asked myself, Is it love or rivalry? Is this love dangerous? What’s this book about anyways? 

This book contains 11 chapters from the original play. Each chapter was short but described many elements of the original play. The story begins with 2 families in Verona: The capulets and the montagues had been fighting against each other for more than a hundred years, but the strange thing was that nobody knew why and everytime one of them lost, they wanted revenge, but amidst the dark, there was one Montague who never fought, Romeo, who was sad due to being rejected by the girl he loved, Rosaline, and he felt nothing could make him forget her, Benvolio gave advices though they would be useless.

Where’s the romantic part? The Capulets want to marry their daughter, Juliet with a man named Paris, even though Capulet wanted to wait 2 years due to Juliet being too young to marry. That night, the Capulets organised a party and Benvolio took Romeo to the party to dance with pretty girls so Romeo would fall in love again. Wearing masks, they dance with the girls and Romeo dances with Juliet and she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, that night after the dance, Juliet and Romeo realise that they fell in love and they are part of the families that are enemies, 

Why is it the start of a tragedy? Juliet tells him that it’s his name that makes him an enemy, Romeo says that if he can’t be with her due to being a Montague, he’ll change his name. Next day, Romeo tells Friar Laurence about his feelings towards Juliet and sends a letter to Juliet’s nurse, when Juliet reads it, she goes to Friar Laurence’s house at the afternoon to have a secret small wedding, it might have not had any bridesmaids or guests, but none of them cared as they had each other. 

And here, we remember that not all is happiness, It all seems happy but Romeo, due to killing Tybalt (because he killed Mercutio), was exiled from Verona and Juliet was forced to marry Paris, by desire of her father who thought she was sad due to Tybalt’s death, she didn’t want to marry Paris as she had Romeo so she asked Friar Laurence for advice, he gave her a poison that would make her sleep for 42 hours and many people would think she’s dead, she drinks it and ‘‘dies’’, her parents think she’s dead so they bury her at the tomb. 

So how does it end? After being exiled in Mantua, Romeo received a message from one of his friends that says that Juliet is dead and Romeo decided to go back, when he opens the tomb, Paris recognized him and tried to kill him but Romeo killed him first, when Romeo sees Juliet, he believes she’s dead and he drinks the poison, he kisses Juliet and dies; When Juliet awakens, she sees the dead bodies of Romeo and Paris, she feels shocked and due to the guard entering the tomb, she takes a knife and kills herself with it. When Montague and Capulet hear what happened, they realise that their children died because of them and decide to make peace. 

Is this book good for anything? This book is an oversimplified version of the original play, so it’s way shorter than the play which is divided into acts and scenes. It depends on the person’s perspective. The good thing is that the book is easy to read, you understand the plot, the events and the causes easily, as well as the language is simplified for english learners since the play is written in Shakespearean english.