Romeo and Juliet：A Story of Love in Hatred

Abstract

Romeo and Juliet is the most famous play of Shakespeare. The romantic love and the tragic fate of its characters are mainly revealed by conflicts of love and hatred, which have high literary aesthetics and artistic values. Based on the Shakespeare’s view of tragic fate, this paper mainly tries to analyze the causes of tragedy from three aspects—family contradiction, personalities of characters and feudal society. Through the full analysis, the paper finds out that various reasons are contributing to the tragic ending such as the two households’ resentment and rage, Paris’ love to Juliet, Romeo’s pursuit for idealistic love, Juliet’s insistence on free love, the old and patriarchal society and so on. At last, the conclusion is that at the very start of writing Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare would like to express his indignation to the feudal society and the patriarchal rules by telling the tragic fate of Romeo and Juliet, with which he also criticized the decadent and feudal system at that time.