Skip to main content

How does Romeo and Juliet offer valuable insight into human behavior?

This play can teach its audience about the terrible lengths to which we will often go for love, for pride, or for power.  It isn't just about the teenagers who fall in love at first sight; although their story has value, too.  The play also focuses on the terrible, but human, behavior of the Capulets and Montagues in terms of their feud, a grudge that is so long-standing that no one even seems to discuss the disagreement with which it began.  For family pride then, the feud continues, and it is responsible, ultimately, for Tybalt's death, as well as the deaths of Mercutio, Paris, Romeo, and Juliet.  Were it not for the ridiculous and proud fight between the family patriarchs, Tybalt would not have felt dishonored by Romeo's presence at the party.  He would not have challenged Romeo, and thus Mercutio would not have become involved (which he does, also, for honor).  Romeo would not be banished for slaying Tybalt, he would not have killed Paris and Juliet's tomb, and the tragedy could not have unfolded as it did.  


Further, Lord Capulet's proud insistence on his daughter's absolute obedience when he orders her to marry Count Paris denies her speech, opens a gulf between Juliet and her parents, and makes her desperate.  His need to rule over her, and his unwillingness to hear her at all, leads, ultimately, to her death as well as Romeo's and Paris's.  


In the end, most of adults behave immaturely and selfishly.  They think only of themselves and their own pride,  They have little care or concern for others, and they drive their children to desperate lengths.  In terms of human behavior, we see that humans will most often act in order to retain or acquire power or to preserve their pride.  We see how the practice of such selfish behavior leads only to tragedy and pain.  From this play, we learn that we often fail to consider all the possible repercussions of our selfish behaviors and how they can, and often do, return to plague us in the end.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more