For few of William Shakespeare's plays is popular acclaim and critical opinion so widely at variance as for that tale of the star-crossed young lovers, Romeo and Juliet. Though it is one of the most popular of all of Shakespeare's plays, Romeo and Juliet seems to have attracted relatively little critical notice. The play comes in for a certain amount of praise, being identified as coming at just about the point in his career where he was fully hitting his stride: "For the first time, Shakespeare is gripped by his story" (Vyvyan, 1968, p. 141). Nevertheless, it is far from being a center of critical attention by Shakespeare specialists. The reasons, from a critical standpoint, are perhaps not difficult to fathom. Romeo and Juliet is not a profound work of tragedy. It has been a commonplace of criticism of tragedy since classical times that the essence of high tragedy is the tragic hero (or heroine): a character of noble and heroic qualities who is doomed through some internal flaw, a flaw typically associated with hubris, or excessive pride in some form or other.
In contrast, the doomed hero and heroine of Romeo and Juliet come to grief not through deep internal flaws of their characters, but because they fall in love with the wrong person:
Whereas Aristotle demanded a "glimpse into the nature
of things" beyond theatrical sensationalism and
required of tragedy "an overwhelming sense of inevit-
ability," Romeo and Juliet die, critics often tell us,
only as a result of a series of mistakes and mis-
understandings. In this light the lovers' death is
pathetic rather than really tragic (Dickey, 1957, p. 63).
It is not even a class tragedy, like any number of works from the Romantic era. Sociologically, they are scarcely mismatched. They are respectively the son and daugher of prominent families; there is no question of either being from the sixteenth century equivalent of the wrong side of th...