Although we touched on it in discussion, the biggest confusion in Romeo and Juliet for me is the concept of time. The entire play takes place over a three-day span (possibly more, depending on how long we believe Romeo was away in Mantua). However short the time is, the characters of Romeo and Juliet develop a love that would take years to develop in reality. I wonder what Shakespeare is trying to accomplish by portraying their love in this way. When I first read the book, I thought it was the most romantic love story ever. However, this time around I think it could be something else. Either Romeo and Juliet are incredibly immature and Shakespeare wants to show his audience how naïve they are, or it is a parody on the concept of love. I can’t help but compare their love to present day Vegas weddings. Although crude, I feel that one could easily compare two people who meet in Vegas and have a shotgun wedding to Romeo and Juliet. It is spontaneous and there is not much thought that goes into the marriage. I would like to see what others think about this. Maybe I am completely out of line and “dumbing down” the romance that Shakespeare is trying to portray. Thoughts?
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My take on the “shot-gun wedding” was that it doesn’t really matter whether it was real love or not, as long as Romeo and Juliet both believed it was. Their love was more of a means to an end, rather than the center of the story. (I personally think the story is more about the feud between the two families than the marriage of Romeo and Juliet.) The timeline was so short because Shakespeare had so much information he wanted to impart with this play that there was no time for the fluff that would be needed to extend the timeline and their courtship. In the end, whether they were really in love or not, their belief that they were in love was the catalyst to a long chain of events that ended in their suicides, and those suicides were what was needed to finally end, or at least improve, the bad relations between the two families.
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