Compare and contrast Romeo and Juliet's love is different from that of today's teenage love.?

Question

Romeo and Juliet's and tony and Maria's (West Side Story) love is somehow similar and different from those of today teens' love but how are they similar and different??

Answer 1

I was really impressed with the Baz Luhrman 1996 movie version with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. It really updated the setting of the play without sacrificing any of the incredible poetry.

   Modern parents don't try and marry their daughter's off against their wishes when they are only fourteen. But many kids still feel the weight of their parents wishes and desires and feel as if they are being smothered. Young lovers still wish that they can ignore the world of anger and subterfuge and be free to pursue their dream

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Do you notice how everyone (both the good and the bad) slowly disappears from the play.

1) Gregory and the other smart-*** servants are gone.

2) Mercutio, one of the Shakespeare's greatest characters, is killed.

3) Tybalt, who Juliet loves, is killed.

4) Benvolio, Romeo's cousin and friend strangely goes away in the 3rd act without any explanation.

5) The funny nurse leaves in the 4th act.

6) Romeo's mother has only a few lines in the beginning. She seems concerned about him, but then she is gone until Romeo's father informs us that she is dead because of worry about Romeo's banishment (after Romeo and Juliet both die).

7) Juliet's mother and Romeo's father disappear until they must confront what they have done at the end of the play.

   The play goes from a world buzzing with people and action to a world where there almost no one else exists. By the end of the play the only other people in their world are Friar Laurence and Paris who both want something from the couple.

   Even Romeo and Juliet lose the ability to be together. Their final words together are only in the third act, long before the play is over.

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J:  O think'st thou we shall ever meet again?

R:  I doubt it not; and all these woes shall serve

      For sweet discourses in our time to come.

J:. O God, I have an ill-divining soul!

      Methinks I see thee, now thou art below,

      As one dead in the bottom of a tomb:

      Either my eyesight fails, or thou lookst pale.

R:  And trust me, love, in my eye so do you:

      Dry sorrow drinks our blood. Adieu, adieu!

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* That complete and utter loneliness where everyone seems to be gone is something a modern teenager can identify with. That feeling spans the 400 years.

Answer 2

well, today they'd just fly off together and call each other on their cellphones instead of bothering with the whole "fake my death"thing

and still today teenagers are just as foolish

does it disturb anyone else that juliet's not even 14 and so caught up in this stuff?

Answer 3

I say get to know the two and love the difference.  I have a young child and this is a good question.  A parent should know the person who loves their child.

Answer 4

i think the biggest difference is romeo is willing to die for love, but teens won't. Romeo's love is eternal, whereas teens comes and goes.

the biggest similarity is both romeo and teens are crazy in their cupid struck, emotion drunken affair, where they forget about all their other obligations, responsibility, and concerns.