Question

Discuss whether Shakespeare's adaptation of the historic love story Romeo and Juliet places an emphasis on moral behavior. Use evidence from the text to support your response.

Answer 1

Unlike Arthur Brooke’s narrative poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, which starts with a moralizing preface, Shakespeare’s version of the story does not dwell on moral behavior. The play does not make it sound like the act of falling in love against the families’ wishes is a sin. Shakespeare makes it clear in the prologue to act I that Romeo and Juliet are not to be blamed for their tragedy, which is caused partly by fate:

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;

The only moralizing in this play comes from Friar Laurence, who is portrayed as a flawed and imperfect man who cannot follow his own advice despite being a trusted man of faith. He tells Romeo that a hasty love will end in tragedy, but then he goes on to perform Romeo’s secret and hasty marriage to Juliet:

These violent delights have violent ends

And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,

Friar Laurence makes other hasty decisions such as giving Juliet the sleeping potion, which ultimately causes the tragedy at the end. By not condemning Romeo and Juliet and revealing Friar Laurence’s shortcomings, Shakespeare shows that real humans are flawed and make mistakes. The only overt moralizing that the audience can take away from this play is that the feud between the Capulets and Montagues is unnecessary and is responsible for the tragedy. The Prince notes that the ongoing feud has resulted in tragedy:

See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate,

That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.

Answer 2

An emphasis on moral behavior (and the questioning of it) is at the core of "Romeo and Juliet". The main conflict revolves around it: how ethical it is to fall in love with my family's enemy? During the course of the drama, this moral question transforms into another one: How ethical it is to hate other people in the first place, based only on their surname?

The ethical question gets especially complicated when Juliet thinks about marrying Paris. To her, it seems as if she would betray Romeo, which she would never do; but the paradox is that if she betrayed Romeo, she would undo the betrayal of her family. In spite of that, she doesn't want to give up on her loyalty to Romeo. In Act 4, Scene 1, she says:

JULIET 
O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,
From off the battlements of yonder tower,
Or walk in thievish ways, or bid me lurk
Where serpents are. Chain me with roaring bears;
Or shut me nightly in a charnel house,
O'ercovered quite with dead men's rattling bones,
With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls.
Or bid me go into a new-made grave
And hide me with a dead man in his shroud
(Things that, to hear them told, have made me 
   tremble),
And I will do it without fear or doubt,
To live an unstained wife to my sweet love.