Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet

Introduction

Romeo and Juliet is the story of star-crossed lovers which is one of most affectionate dramas written by of William Shakespeare (Naden, 2009). Shakespeare is compassionate toward Romeo and Juliet, and in pointing their tragedy to destiny, more willingly than to a fault in their characters, he elevates them to heights close to perfection, in addition to running the threat of creating sorrow, not tragedy. Both of them are kind, sincere, brave, virtuous, loyal and badly in love, and their disaster is greater due to their innocence (Naden, 2009). The dispute between the families of the lovers represents the destiny that Romeo and Juliet are immobilized to triumph over.

Discussion

Roland Barthes was a French cultural critic connected with both post-structuralism and structuralism who, even more than most other French intellectuals, resisted disciplinary categorization. Barthes spent his early career teaching, convalescing from tuberculosis, and writing for left-wing literary journals. After his iconoclastic argument in Writing Degree Zero that no writing could stand apart from and comment on culture because it was always part of it, he went on to write about history, film, photography, language, art, music, and theatre, as well as poetry and literature.

Many of these themes crop up in the work for which he is most well known, Mythologies. This slim volume, which started life as a series of brief essays published in French magazines, has had an enduring appeal because it brings together a groundbreaking set of ideas about culture, politics, and modernity. Beautifully and sparsely written, Barthes' essays tell of a culture in transition from an elite, academic, hidebound set of ideas about the “arts” to an emerging popular, mass, everyday, and familiar consumer culture (Barthes, 1972). He took seriously the “low culture” of wrestling, striptease, Hollywood films and actors, and the mundane everyday culture of margarine, children's toys, plastic objects, and steak and fries. At the end of Mythologies is a longer essay, titled “Myth Today,” that introduces the idea of semiology that denotes the study of signs and their meaning, to a new audience (Barthes, 1967). In it, Barthes reformulates Ferdinand de Saussure's study of signs to give it an ideological and political edge. He argues that in addition to a system of linguistic signs, there is a second order of cultural signification, which he calls “myth,” that distorts meaning. At a second, less obvious, level of meaning, signifying systems such as ...