Fortune and Fate in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

Fortune and Fate in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

"Romeo and Juliet " is a play more generally known for being a love

story, exploring how the passion between two people can over come the

complications of political disagreements between their families.

However, fate is undoubtedly involved in their meeting and falling in

love, and is a pivotal part of the story. The playwright, William

Shakespeare, makes this apparent from the very beginning of the play

in the chorus. He does this to create a sense of expectation from the

audience, which makes us feel more involved in the play, as we develop

a sense of pathos for the two lovers, Romeo and Juliet.

The play begins with a chorus in the form of a sonnet. Shakespeare

deliberately chooses to summarise the play in this way to illuminate

two of the main themes that run throughout, and to allows the audience

to identify subtle details in the dialogue later on in the play, which

otherwise may have gone unnoticed, increasing our understanding of the

dramatic irony within it. In traditional Greek tragedies, a person

would narrate to the audience at appropriate intervals to explain

exactly what was happening. In contrast, a sonnet, aside from being a

concise method of telling the story, is stereotypically a poem based

on love. Therefore, the audience become aware that the play is a

tragic love story.

Line six of the sonnet "A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life"

shows how Romeo and Juliet's lives are governed by destiny, as we

associate the phrase "star cross'd" with astronomy, and fortune

telling, the idea that they are not in control of their lives but that

they are alre...

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...re he killed himself.

Fate and fortune undisputedly plays a crucial role in the lives of all

characters. Even a character as small as Paris is affected by it to

the extent that he dies at the end of the play. He could have fallen

for any young women in Verona, but happened to fall in love with the

one girl who was in love with someone else, which led to him guarding

Juliet's tomb as a mark of love and respect and Romeo killing him in

order to see his wife in the tomb. Shakespeare also does this to

highlight to the audience the ferocity of the family feud of Montague

and Capulet, and to show just how much damage the hatred in society

can do to innocent people. It is the regular references to fate that

sustain the sense of dramatic tension amongst the audience, making the

death of Romeo and Juliet so unbearably tragic.