Romeo and Juliet’s Open Rs

Over the past twenty years, Romeo and Juliet has become the Shakespeare play assigned to more US high school students than any other. Julius Caesar has been usurped; the sexual revolution has replaced the civics lesson. Yet, given the conservative nature of most high school curricula, one can only assume that the play is taught in formalist terms (the young vs the old, night vs day, love vs society, etc.) and toward a valuation of a kind not limited to high school lesson plans. Typical in this regard might be these sentences from Brian Gibbons’s ‘Introduction’ to his Arden edition of the play (1980): ‘The lovers are from the outset withdrawn in an experience of sublime purity and intense suffering which renders them spiritually remote from other characters and the concerns of the ordinary world. The single clear line of ideal aspiration in love is set against the diversified complex intrigues which proliferate in the ordinary world, and contact between the two has tragic consequences.’1 In such an estimation (it recurs as the thesis in the thirty-five pages of his ‘Introduction’ given over to — ominously — ‘The Play’), Gibbons would seem to be doing little more than echoing the closing lines of the play, in which the prince intones, ‘never was a story of more woe/Than this of Juliet and her Romeo’ (V.iii.308–9) as his response to the offer of Montague and Capulet to raise a monument to the dead pair of lovers: