Romeo and Juliet | Tragic Design

In the first excerpt, Franklin Dickey asserts that fate, divine will, and the lovers' passion are inseparably linked in Romeo and Juliet and all of these agents contribute to the catastrophe. In the second excerpt, Lorentz Eckhoff maintains that Romeo's and Juliet's tragic deaths result from their own impulsiveness. Irving Ribner, in the third selection, provides a Christian interpretation of Romeo and Juliet in which he contends that the lovers' deaths are ordained by God to reconcile the feuding families. In the last excerpt, Harold Wilson asserts that the feud is the central concern of the play. Wilson argues that Shakespeare marred this design, however, by making his hero and heroine so attractive that the audience loses interest in the dramatic action once they are dead, thus ignoring the true culmination of the play in the resolution of the feud.

Franklin M. Dickey
[Dickey asserts that fate, divine will, and the lovers' passion are inseparably linked in Romeo and Juliet and all of these agents contribute to the catastrophe. According to the critic, the work is "a carefully wrought tragedy which balances hatred against love and which makes fortune the agent of divine justice without absolving anyone from his responsibility for the tragic conclusion." In this sense, Dickey contends, Romeo and Juliet reflects the Elizabethan concept of moral responsibility, a tenet which stressed that all sinners must...

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