"Romeo and Juliet". William Sheakspeare.

The first book I want to discuss is "Romeo and Juliet". Without doubt, it is one of the most famous plays written by an outstanding writer William Shakespeare. His works were collected and printed in various editions in the century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life, but the dearth of biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare’s personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded from this fact that Shakespeare’s plays were really written by someone else—Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidates—but the support for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory is not taken seriously by many scholars.

The essential plot of the play is original, complicated and tragic. It deals with the story of two young people from warring families. Romeo is Montague’s while Juliet is Capulet’s. They fall in love with each other. The play scene by scene shows how the heroes are building up their relationships and making their own way of life.

 

Romeo and Juliet is the most famous love story in the English literary tradition. Love is naturally the play’s dominant and most important theme. The play focuses on romantic love, specifically the intense passion that springs up at first sight between Romeo and Juliet. In Romeo and Juliet, love is a violent, ecstatic, overpowering force that supersedes all other values, loyalties, and emotions. But, in my opinion, their "love at a first sight is not so real. I find the main heroes too windy and too young for such love.

So, the setting takes us to Verona during the 14^th or 15^th centuries. Here we meet the main heroes.

Romeo is a passionate, intelligent and moody young man. He is loyal to his friends, but his behavior is somewhat unpredictable. At the beginning of the play, he mopes over his hopeless unrequited love for Rosaline. In Juliet Romeo finds an object for the extraordinary passion that he is capable of feeling. His love for her takes control of him. Juliet, on the other hand, is an innocent girl. She is startled by the sudden power of her love for Romeo. I think that she is naive, romantic and windy person. The attraction between young people is immediate and overwhelming.

As for me, I do not like the play, because the end of the action is quite crumpled. In my opinion, all the doings of the heroes are thoughtless. However, I think everybody should read it, because the play gives much food for thought. It shows us the true and strong love, that nobody can stop it. Moreover, the play teaches us, that the enmity destroys everything…I can't deny, that it is possible to see Romeo and Juliet as a battle between the responsibilities and actions demanded by social institutions and those demanded by the private desires of the individual. Romeo and Juliet’s appreciation of night, with its darkness and privacy, and their renunciation of their names, with its attendant loss of obligation, make sense in the context of individuals who wish to escape the public world. But the lovers cannot stop the night from becoming day. And Romeo cannot cease being a Montague simply because he wants to; the rest of the world will not let him. The lovers’ suicides can be understood as the ultimate night, the ultimate privacy.