Romeo and Juliet: A Means to a Beginning (original) (raw)

Across the centuries, people have raised a question over and over again, yet no answer has ever been articulated. Romeo and Juliet, is almost a household name for most children when they are still growing up. They learn of the tragic deaths of the two lovers long before they even read the play. Often have I heard people say (and more often than not, these are people who not read the play) " You cannot know love unless you know about Romeo and Juliet. " The story is captivating and it grows within the consciousness and remains a part of it as a tale that completes one's understanding of love. It is an epoch, a milestone, in the acquisition of our knowledge of love. Yet, reading the play causes a pleasure, which though typical to reading most tragedies, that years of listening to the story could not have ever provided. What is this pleasure? Where does this pleasure come from? This paper seeks to find an answer through what Franco Moretti calls a 'distant reading' of the play. Inspired by Moretti's idea of mapping plots, as he does in Network Theory, Plot Analysis, which is the last article in his book on distant reading, this paper makes use of multiple text mining tools to analyze the text of Romeo and Juliet in such a light. The purpose of this paper is to first trace a history of the emphasis and importance of plot construction when it comes to tragedy. Starting with Aristotle, this paper shall lay the foundation for my primary argument by revisiting Elixabeth Belfiore's question regarding pleasure and tragedy. Following this, I shall use Peter Brooks' Freud's Masterplot to arrive at an intermediate conclusion to state that the Prologue of Romeo and Juliet sets the ground for this pleasure. However, Martin Bruckner and Kristen Poole's The Plot Thickens: Surveying Manuals, Drama, and the Materiality of Narrative Form in Early Modern England explains the attention that was paid to plot and the science of plot construction. Thus, it becomes clear that there is more to the plot than story. The primary argument of this paper is to claim that language is an essential component of plot. Through repetition, juxtaposition and the positioning of certain clusters of words around the innuendos that are typical of Shakespeare, he builds a pleasure that is almost sexual. This pleasure augments the climax of the play. In his 324 BCE treatise Poetics, Aristotle defines tragedy as " an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its katharsis of such emotions. " Aristotle also includes that " Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which