THE TRAGEDY OF ROMEO AND JULIET
by William Shakespeare
Title: Romeo and Juliet
Author: William Shakespeare
Release date: November 1, 1998
Language: English editionREAD THIS BOOK (Free)
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Introduction
According to the opinion of most researchers, Romeo and Juliet was written between 1594 and 1595.
Writing this play, Shakespeare adapted a rhyming story (about 3,000 sentences) by a young English poet, Arthur Brooke, published in 1562. Bruc adapted a story in prose written by an Italian Written by Matteo Bandello, published in 1554, or rather, according to the French translation of this story by Pierre Boisteau, published in 1559.
In fact, the main features of this love story date back even earlier, in the short stories of Luigy da Porto published about 1535, by Adrien Sevin published about 1542, and so on.
Each writer or translator adds, edits to make the story more interesting, or paints the characters to make them stand out. For example, Sevin added the character of the healer, Brooke made the character of the mother clear…
But it is through Shakespeare’s work that the story of the Verona lovers has been saved for posterity.
Synopsis of the play
Once upon a time in the Italian city of Verona, between two great families, the Capulet and the Montague, there was a long-standing enmity. The feud was so deep that whenever the two of them, even servants of the two families, met, there was an argument or a murder.
One night, the patriarch of the Capulet family opened a banquet. Romeo, the son of the Montague patriarch, is in love with Rodalin, a girl from the Capulet family, so he and a few masked friends come to this banquet to meet Ro dalin. But when he arrived, Romeo met Juliet, son of the Capiulet patriarch, and the two fell in love from the very first meeting.
At midnight, the party ended, Romeo jumped over the wall and jumped into the back garden of the Capiulet’s house. Juliet appeared on her balcony, and the two exchanged vows of fidelity.
The next morning, Romeo went to see his godfather, Monk Loran, and asked the priest to marry them. The monk agreed because he hoped that this relationship would help the two families turn enemies into friends. After the wedding, Juliet returns, Rome promises the night will come again.
But that same day, something unfortunate happened. Tiban, Juliet’s cousin, meets Romeo and makes a rude statement. Romeo resists, but his friend Mokiuxio causes trouble with the other party. The two sides fight and Mokiuxio is stabbed to death. Avenging his friend, Romeo killed Tiban, and was thus sentenced to exile from Veronice.
After killing Tiban, Romeo hid in the monk Loran’s room. He comforts him and advises him to come or say goodbye to Juliet at night. When leaving Veronice, find a way to Mantua, waiting for the day to return.
That night, with the help of a nanny, Romeo and Juliet met. But the next morning when the two sides parted, both had a premonition that something bad happened.
Indeed, Juliet was forced by her family to marry a nobleman. Desperate, she went to the monk to ask for a solution. He gave her a pot of fake death medicine, after taking it, her body would stiffen, but after a few days she would wake up. That night she took medicine. Her family thought she was really dead, and put her body in the family tomb.
But Romeo’s servants thought Juliet was dead, rode to Mantua to report the news. Receiving bad news, Romeo despairs, buys a dose of poison and intends to return to die beside his lover’s corpse.
In the middle of the night, Romeo arrived at the Capulet’s crypt. Paris also went there to mourn her. Two people fighting. Paris was murdered by Romeo. Romeo goes into the catacombs, drinks poison, then kisses Juliet and dies.
Monk Lawrence, when monk John told him the news was not contagious, also rushed to Juliet’s tomb that night to wait for her to wake up. But by the time they got there, it was too late. Romeo is dead.
Juliet wakes up. The monk advised her to take refuge in a convent. But she did not listen and used Romeo’s knife to commit suicide.
The news spread, and the whole city of Verona was in an uproar. The king and the people of the two families came. A tragic story told by a monk.
And “next to the child’s body, the parents forget their enemies”.
Content
THE PROLOGUE.
ACT I
Scene I. A public place.
Scene II. A Street.
Scene III. Room in Capulet’s House.
Scene IV. A Street.
Scene V. A Hall in Capulet’s House.
ACT II
CHORUS.
Scene I. An open place adjoining Capulet’s Garden.
Scene II. Capulet’s Garden.
Scene III. Friar Lawrence’s Cell.
Scene IV. A Street.
Scene V. Capulet’s Garden.
Scene VI. Friar Lawrence’s Cell.
ACT III
Scene I. A public Place.
Scene II. A Room in Capulet’s House.
Scene III. Friar Lawrence’s cell.
Scene IV. A Room in Capulet’s House.
Scene V. An open Gallery to Juliet’s Chamber, overlooking the Garden.
ACT IV
Scene I. Friar Lawrence’s Cell.
Scene II. Hall in Capulet’s House.
Scene III. Juliet’s Chamber.
Scene IV. Hall in Capulet’s House.
Scene V. Juliet’s Chamber; Juliet on the bed.
ACT V
Scene I. Mantua. A Street.
Scene II. Friar Lawrence’s Cell.
Scene III. A churchyard; in it a Monument belonging to the Capulets.
Literary commentary
Romeo and Juliet, the play of love
That’s right, Romeo and Juliet is a play of pure and sincere love. As Flobe (Flaubert) said: "Virgin created the love girl, Shakespeare created the love girl. All the other young women and girls in love are modeled after the characters Didon and Juliet.”
But simply saying that the theme of Romeo and Juliet is love is not enough. The theme of the play has two sides: the love of the young couple and the long-standing enmity between the two. The play opens with a fight between the servants of the two families. It ends with reconciliation between the two families. The enmity between the two makes the love affair of Romeo and Juliet unfinished, but it is the death of the wild friends that ends the long-standing feud.
Their deaths do not give us a feeling of surrender. They won. The narrow and mean feudal society had to admire their pure love. They did what the authority of a monarch could not: put an end to a long-standing feud.
Romeo and Juliet’s fierce struggle to protect their beloved is the fierce struggle of Renaissance humanitarian ideas against the barbaric and foolish prejudices of the Middle Ages. The theme of the play is: love and loyalty conquer hatred.
The love between Romeo and Juliet is a sincere, faithful, pure, very earthly love, far from fanciful, metaphysical, religious, or encephalopathic notions. The relationship between Romeo and Juliet is one of balanced harmony between matter and spirit, a poetic but not illusory romance, a passionate love that is not reduced to the level of low desires. As one Soviet researcher put it: “There is absolutely no contradiction between Juliet’s passion and her virginal integrity. When she says to Romeo, “I’m caressing you too much, I’m dying,” we don’t feel a single out-of-tone sound.
The Art of Romeo and Juliet
The first is the intense drama of the action. In the story of Acter Bruc, time stretches to several months. In Shakespeare’s play, time shrinks to just four hectic days.
The second is the vividness of the style and the richness of the language. Shakespeare is known as the magician of the English language. He uses a very large vocabulary, of which folk language plays a significant part. The proverbs he used were very flexible. In his work, prose and rhyme go hand in hand, sometimes intertwined. The slimy jokes of the nanny and Makiuxio are interspersed with the ecstatic self-love between Romeo and Juliet, and are immediately followed by the philosophical thoughts of Brother Lawrence! Romeo and Juliet in particular has a lot of puns, elaborate expressions, jokes with words with the same sound with different meanings. During the translation process, we tried to stick to the images of the original text. However, there are many cases where we have had to find equivalent images, more familiar to Vietnamese readers.
Regarding the slimy, sometimes obscene jokes of the two characters, the nanny and Mercutio, we would like to repeat the comment of Victo Huygo: 'In both liberal and bold aspects, Shakespeare is not inferior to Rabelais ".
This translation is mainly based on the English version of Cambridge University Press (1955) edited and annotated by J.D. Wilson and G.I.Duthie. During the translation process, we consulted a number of French translations such as those of Duval, Roth, Koszul and Victor Hugo.
License
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Romeo and Juliet
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Title: Romeo and Juliet
Author: William Shakespeare
Release date: November 1, 1998 [eBook #1513]
Most recently updated: June 27, 2023
Language: English