Romeo and Juliet

So our class just began reading Romeo and Juliet and so far, it's really not as scary as I thought it would be. I was not so sure about what to expect when reading this play by Shakespeare because, well, it was by Shakespeare and that should make any freshman Honors English student want to go cry in the corner. It's not like I thought it would be bad, it was actually quite the opposite. I thought it would be too well-written; so intricate and detailed that I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between lines of dialogue about love and lines about hate. However once we began to read it, I realized that it wasn't as bad as I had imagined and that I can actually read Shakespeare, or at least this certain play. Once I began to really read in depth and think about what it was I was reading, it all started to make sense and could get the gist of what was going on. But what has helped me the most through the adventure of reading this play so far is that you need to really read, not just skim, and that sometimes, reading it over twice will be the most effective.

However, what fourteen year old understands every single word that Shakespeare wrote? Definitely not this one. There are a lot of instances when what the characters are saying makes no sense, and probably more often than not. My strategy for these dilemmas is to reread the trouble spots and then, if I still don't understand, keep reading. If nothing seems to be making sense plot-wise because of not understanding that trouble spot, then I'll go back and analyze further. A lot of times, though, these trouble spots don't even matter and are just put in there for who knows what reason. Another aspect of this writing that gives me issues is syntax. Even though Mrs. Bross specifically told us that sometimes, Shakespeare uses different sentence orders to emphasize importance, it still tends to trick me here and there. A simple example of this is in Act 1 Scene 2, when Paris is speaking to Capulet and says, "Of honourable reckoning are you both;". Even though this line is not of much importance, it simply shows that everything Shakespeare wrote had a specific purpose and in this case, he wanted to show that "honorable reckoning" was the most important part of this sentence. Therefore, he put this first, even though he could have just written, "You are both of honorable reckoning." The fact that he chose to write this entire play like this may bring some confusion, but it altogether shows how great of a writer Shakespeare was.