*Romeo and Juliet*: A New Context for *Victory*

Conradiana, 2007

2018

Shakespeare is a genius, and Romeo and Juliet, one of his four great tragedies is loved by readers, especially the favorite of the youth, and had been edited to a series of films and plays. This paper tries to investigate his key to success in Romeo and Juliet writing. It lies in his skill of using metaphor. Metaphor, or conceptual metaphor, is a cognitive term, a systematic way of human thinking, action and expression. Metaphorical expressions are displayed in this work based on his bodily experience.

Across the centuries, people have raised a question over and over again, yet no answer has ever been articulated. Romeo and Juliet, is almost a household name for most children when they are still growing up. They learn of the tragic deaths of the two lovers long before they even read the play. Often have I heard people say (and more often than not, these are people who not read the play) " You cannot know love unless you know about Romeo and Juliet. " The story is captivating and it grows within the consciousness and remains a part of it as a tale that completes one's understanding of love. It is an epoch, a milestone, in the acquisition of our knowledge of love. Yet, reading the play causes a pleasure, which though typical to reading most tragedies, that years of listening to the story could not have ever provided. What is this pleasure? Where does this pleasure come from? This paper seeks to find an answer through what Franco Moretti calls a 'distant reading' of the play. Inspired by Moretti's idea of mapping plots, as he does in Network Theory, Plot Analysis, which is the last article in his book on distant reading, this paper makes use of multiple text mining tools to analyze the text of Romeo and Juliet in such a light. The purpose of this paper is to first trace a history of the emphasis and importance of plot construction when it comes to tragedy. Starting with Aristotle, this paper shall lay the foundation for my primary argument by revisiting Elixabeth Belfiore's question regarding pleasure and tragedy. Following this, I shall use Peter Brooks' Freud's Masterplot to arrive at an intermediate conclusion to state that the Prologue of Romeo and Juliet sets the ground for this pleasure. However, Martin Bruckner and Kristen Poole's The Plot Thickens: Surveying Manuals, Drama, and the Materiality of Narrative Form in Early Modern England explains the attention that was paid to plot and the science of plot construction. Thus, it becomes clear that there is more to the plot than story. The primary argument of this paper is to claim that language is an essential component of plot. Through repetition, juxtaposition and the positioning of certain clusters of words around the innuendos that are typical of Shakespeare, he builds a pleasure that is almost sexual. This pleasure augments the climax of the play. In his 324 BCE treatise Poetics, Aristotle defines tragedy as " an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its katharsis of such emotions. " Aristotle also includes that " Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which

2021

The present article attempts to trace the elements of change in the early and late Shakespearean tragedies from the viewpoint of style and the writer’s ideological stance. Shakespeare’s tragic writing undergoes certain modification as he moves further in his career. One aspect of this modification is the change in the protagonist’s dynamism. Although Romeo and Juliet both show certain signs of development which separates them from comic characters, they still lack the psychological depth which is witnessed in Shakespeare’s late tragic heroes. It is true they realize their tragic fate, yet they fail in gaining full consciousness of their situation and their contribution to their own destiny. Another aspect is the change of diction toward a more ‘natural’ employment of language and rhetorical devices. In Shakespeare’s mature tragedies, we do not see the experimental lyricism we witness in Romeo and Juliet, as the playwright seems to adopt the classical notion of decorum, according to ...

Romeo and Juliet: Critical Insights

This study is conducted to explore the artistic values

Facta Universitatis Series: Linguistics and Literature, 2017

Some of the most influential studies written about Joseph Conrad in the 1950s (by Douglas Hewit, Thomas Moser and Albert Guerard) established a critical paradigm that continued to dominate Conrad studies for decades to come – especially with regard to his later novels, which according to these critics represented a decline after the achievements of his major period. The principal reason for this decline, as Moser argues, was Conrad's altered choice of subject matter from the novel Chance onwards – i.e., his newly-discovered interest in romance and female protagonists. Conrad's failure in representing intimate erotic relationship in his later novels, as Moser maintains, is inseparable from his inclination to create melodramatic and inauthentic heroines, incomparably less complex than the striking male protagonists of his earlier works. More recently, critics such as Robert Hampson and Susan Jones have proposed a different approach to the romances of Conrad's later period. A case in point is Hampson's analysis of Lena's character in Victory. Unlike the earlier critics, who accused Conrad of sentimentality in female characterizations, Hampson argues that it is Lena herself who views her own being and her role in Heyst's life through a prism of sentimental romance. Lena's subjective perception of reality amounts to writing a script for herself (Hampson 2004), which casts her in the role of a sacrificial heroine. By using free indirect style, Conrad allows us to see Lena presented through her own idiom, in a manner comparable to Joyce's treatment of Gerty McDowell in Ulysses. The paper draws on Hampson's contention, exploring Conrad's narrative strategies in Victory, while also referring to the theoretical frameworks such as Genette's Narrative Discourse and Bakhtin's Dialogic Imagination.

*Romeo and Juliet: A Critical Reader,* ed. Julia Lupton (Bloomsbury, 2016), 2016

Where can the real Shakespeare be found? On the page-and if so, which version?-or in production-and if so, how faithful must a performance be to the original text? These questions have absorbed Shakespeare scholars of the past generation, who have responded by dismantling the assumptions that underwrite these very questions, and by posing new questions that have inspired new answers. Romeo and Juliet has proved an important test case in debates about authenticity and authority, as Wendy Wall demonstrates in 'Editors in Love?: Performing Desire in Romeo and Juliet', which examines the intersection of page and performance in the context of such debates. Throughout the'90s, scholars increasingly challenged the conclusions of editors and bibliographers about earlier printed versions of Romeo and Juliet, particularly the so-called 'bad' quarto of 1597, Q1, which was thought to be a memorial reconstruction of a performance, and thus suspect. In so doing, scholars worked to reverse the assumption that the written text always precedes performance, rather than vice-versa, and therefore matters more, as well as the assumption that a unified text exists. 'Today we commonly think of performances as mutating, while the text remains stable', Wall writes, but argues that this is a 'fantasy of textual production … at odds with the realities of theatrical practice in the Renaissance'. Wall surveys this critical shift, based on the work of critics such as Stephen Orgel, Jonathan Goldberg, Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen, who have disputed the primacy of the play text in the context of Romeo and Juliet. 'The written text … belatedly takes its meaning from theatre', Wall asserts and 'since the text is of a performance (rather than the other way around), the simple question "is a modern performance faithful to the text?" appears to be inadequate at best.' Wall's essay is indebted to Jonathan Goldberg's '"What? in a names that which we call a Rose": The Desired Texts of Romeo and Juliet', which reflects upon the differences between Q1 and Q2 Romeo and Juliet and the ways that editors and bibliographers have responded to them. Goldberg traces the editorial and bibliographic reception of Q1, deemed the 'bad' quarto in part because of its differences from Q2, versus that of Q2, deemed the 'good' quarto because it was thought to represent Shakespeare's 'foul papers' (or unedited draft) of the play. As Goldberg argues, however, this narrative reflects the desire of editors to 'clothe an interpretation with authority'. Instead of seeing Q1 as a performance text and Q2 as an authorial work, he contends that Q2 is 'an anthology of a number of productions of Romeo and Juliet', from which editors make their selections. Goldberg reconfigures the relation between page and performance, and in so doing exposes fantasies of authority as a product of our own desire.

2007

Canonical Iconoclasm: Baz Luhrmann's W illiam Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet as postmodern interrogation of authority __________________________________________________________________ In his seminal study of knowledge, The Postmodern Condition (1984) Jean-Francois Lyotard identified the challenge to traditional authority as the essence of the postmodern. Postmodern texts demonstrate this critique of authority in their composition or form, which often deploys a complex and relentless intertextuality i , referring to earlier texts in order to question their cultural role and value. These texts are sometimes criticised because their challenge to authority is seen as mainly aesthetic or formal, not substantive-and this may be the case with some texts. However, as most aesthetic theory now accepts, form and content are not separable-any more than our ideas are separable from our embodied experience of the world. Baz Luhrmannn's film, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996) is a canonical example of iconoclastic postmodernism, which directly addresses the issue of authority-textual, social and cultural-in a way that also exemplifies changing attitudes to contemporary media and textual production. Some readings of the film claimed, rather superciliously, that Luhrmannn was simply trying to make Shakespeare relevant to today's society. Their judgment is essentially about how the film compares with the more 'authentic' and 'valid' (from their point of view) stage productions of the play. For those readers the authority is Shakespeare, a Shakespeare whom, to borrow from e.e.cummings, '(bourgeois) man has made in his own image'. They compare the film with what they decide Shakespeare's play would have been like on stage and then make a judgment about it. This tells us a