Romeo's Tragic Downfall

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On the surface, Romeo & Juliet is a simple tragic love story: boy meets girl, they fall in love, time elapses, things go wrong, and an end is met. But if you ask why was the end met, well there's where you get into the details of the story and the individual aspects of the mostly nondescript characters, in particular Romeo himself. Look into his ridiculously romantic lines, and you'll notice either the flaw in his character, the mistake he made, or the way fate plays with its toys.
From the text itself, you can glean all three ideas of how Romeo fell from atop his tower of happiness and love, but the prologue states crystal clear as crystal that:

Two households, both alike in dignity/
(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene),/
From ancient grudge breaks new mutiny,/
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean./
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes/
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;/
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows/
Doth with their death bury their parents' strife./
The fearful passage of their death-marked love/
And the continuance of their parents' rage,/
Which, but their children's end, naught could remove,/
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;/
The which, if you with patient ears attend,/
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.(Prologue)

It says in plain English that the children of the fighting foes will die to end the malice between the families. It also says that nothing else could have possibly brought the peace to the Montagues and the Capulets. Shakespeare makes it painfully obvious that fate is not looking down on the two kids with kindness. He blames nothing but fate for the death of the two young and delightfully naive lovers.
Despite Shakespeare's intentions, people ...

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...tually self-destructive.
Romeo is a classic tragic hero. He's either perfect and made a mistake, ideal except for one little problem that messes him up completely, or fate is a fickle mistress who just really doesn't like him. The play, the Zeffirelli version, and the Luhrman version all have different ideas about what exactly made him and Juliet die. The original text leans more toward the latter idea, while the Zeffirelli and Luhrman versions showed hamartia and tragic flaw respectively. In all actuality, to see what causes Romeo's downfall, it's all in how you interpret Shakespeare's words. Personal experiences and thought processes will lead to different ideas. Look at Zeffirelli and Luhrman; two directors using the same text as the inspiration, and they pulled away from it understanding it in entirely different ways.

Works Cited

Romeo and Juliet, Prolouge

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