In which Alyssa Rosenberg scolds like it's 1562

[reposted]

Alyssa Rosenberg* does not find Romeo and Juliet dramatically satisfying or morally wholesome:

Romeo and Juliet—a play about children—is full of terrible, deeply childish ideas about love. And as much as I want to see more interracial couples in pop culture and more diverse casts on stage and screen, I don’t want to see them cast in material that is so horribly depressing.  

Romeo and Juliet itself hasn’t aged well. The story follows Juliet Capulet, who is 13 when she meets Romeo Montague at a party, falls head over heels in love with him, and marries him within a day of meeting him. Romeo's age isn't specified in the play, but the quickness with which he throws over a former flame for Juliet doesn’t suggest a particularly mature man. ..

..the vision of Romeo and Juliet's deaths uniting their families is an adolescent fantasy of death solving all problems, a "won't they miss me when I'm gone" pout. There's a reason that, in the best modern riff on Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, Maria lives after Tony's death to shame the Sharks and the Jets, her survival a seal on the truce between them. Dying is easy. Living to survive the consequences of your actions and to do the actual work of reconciliation is the hard part.

Perhaps inadvertently, Rosenberg has reproduced the moral judgment first leveled by the author of Shakespeare's source story, Arthur Brooke, whose Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, published in 1562, begins with a preemptive strike against any reader tempted to identify with the star-crossed lovers: 

Alyssa Rosenberg thinks Romeo and Juliet "hasn't aged well," but her complaints are ageless

[reposted, with postscript]:

Alyssa Rosenberg* does not find Romeo & Juliet dramatically satisfying or morally wholesome:

Romeo and Juliet—a play about children—is full of terrible, deeply childish ideas about love. And as much as I want to see more interracial couples in pop culture and more diverse casts on stage and screen, I don’t want to see them cast in material that is so horribly depressing.  

Romeo and Juliet itself hasn’t aged well. The story follows Juliet Capulet, who is 13 when she meets Romeo Montague at a party, falls head over heels in love with him, and marries him within a day of meeting him. Romeo's age isn't specified in the play, but the quickness with which he throws over a former flame for Juliet doesn’t suggest a particularly mature man. ..

..the vision of Romeo and Juliet's deaths uniting their families is an adolescent fantasy of death solving all problems, a "won't they miss me when I'm gone" pout. There's a reason that, in the best modern riff on Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, Maria lives after Tony's death to shame the Sharks and the Jets, her survival a seal on the truce between them. Dying is easy. Living to survive the consequences of your actions and to do the actual work of reconciliation is the hard part.

Perhaps inadvertently, Rosenberg has reproduced the moral judgment first leveled by the author of Shakespeare's source story, Arthur Brooke, whose Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, published in 1562, begins with a preemptive strike against any reader tempted to identify with the star-crossed lovers: 

In which Alyssa Rosenberg scolds like it's 1562

Alyssa Rosenberg* does not find Romeo & Juliet dramatically satisfying or morally wholesome:

Romeo and Juliet—a play about children—is full of terrible, deeply childish ideas about love. And as much as I want to see more interracial couples in pop culture and more diverse casts on stage and screen, I don’t want to see them cast in material that is so horribly depressing.  

Romeo and Juliet itself hasn’t aged well. The story follows Juliet Capulet, who is 13 when she meets Romeo Montague at a party, falls head over heels in love with him, and marries him within a day of meeting him. Romeo's age isn't specified in the play, but the quickness with which he throws over a former flame for Juliet doesn’t suggest a particularly mature man. ..

..the vision of Romeo and Juliet's deaths uniting their families is an adolescent fantasy of death solving all problems, a "won't they miss me when I'm gone" pout. There's a reason that, in the best modern riff on Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, Maria lives after Tony's death to shame the Sharks and the Jets, her survival a seal on the truce between them. Dying is easy. Living to survive the consequences of your actions and to do the actual work of reconciliation is the hard part.

Perhaps inadvertently, Rosenberg has reproduced the moral judgment first leveled by the author of Shakespeare's source story, Arthur Brooke, whose Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, published in 1562, begins with a preemptive strike against any reader tempted to identify with the star-crossed lovers: