Romeo and Juliet (Vol. 33) | Marjorie Kolb Cox (essay date 1976)
Marjorie Kolb Cox (essay date 1976)
SOURCE: "Adolescent Processes in Romeo and Juliet," in The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 63, No. 3, Fall, 1976, pp. 379-92.
[In the following essay, Cox argues that Romeo and Juliet is "a story of the impact of adolescence, a process which each of the principal and secondary characters must deal with in himself or in those close to him," rather than a story of star-crossed lovers ruled by fate.]
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is commonly considered to be the story of two lovers caught in circumstances beyond their control: the feuding of their two houses. The play has been criticized as not tragic in an Aristotelian sense on the grounds that the outcome does not grow out of flaws in the main characters but results from fortuitous happenings. The thesis of this paper is that Romeo and Juliet is more profoundly a story of the impact of adolescence, a process which each of the...
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