Romeo and Juliet (Vol. 87) | John F. Andrews (essay date 1996)
John F. Andrews (essay date 1996)
SOURCE: Andrews, John F. “Falling in Love: The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.” In Classical, Renaissance, and Postmodernist Acts of the Imagination: Essays Commemorating O. B. Hardison, Jr., edited by Arthur F. Kinney, pp. 177-94. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996.
[In the following essay, Andrews discusses the effect of Romeo and Juliet on contemporary audiences.]
What happens in Romeo and Juliet?1 What did a dramatist of the 1590s want the “judicious” members of his contemporary audiences to see and hear, and how did he expect them to feel, as they attended the play2 a later age would laud as the most lyrical of all love tragedies? Before I hazard a response to what is admittedly an unanswerable question, I should make it clear that what I'm really posing is a query about the “action”3 of Shakespeare's drama, and more specifically...
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