Who's to Blame (R&J)

You are Prince Escalus, and you’re trying to figure out whom to punish for all of the deaths. Using the play Romeo and Juliet and its lines as your evidence, who’s to blame?

(This is a Student example)

Suggested Scenes:

Scenes showing Juliet’s relationships with her parents

Scenes showing Romeo’s impetuousness

Mercutio’s fight with Tybalt, and Romeo’s subsequent duel with Tybalt

All of Act 5

Who’s to blame for Romeo and Juliet’s death? Is it Friar Lawrence, who married them, and who orchestrated the plot? The parents, who began the feud between their two families in the first place? Friar John, who failed to inform Romeo that Juliet wasn’t actually dead? Paris? Mercutio? Tybalt? The list goes on. Logically, almost everyone who knew Romeo and Juliet could be held accountable, in some way, for their deaths. Logically, it was everyone’s fault, and at that same exact time it was no one’s fault at all. But if any single thing is to be blamed for the complex turn of events that led to the lover’s death, it’s fate.

Fate was the power driving everyone’s actions, in the end. How can anyone truly be at fault for something they had no choice in doing? If it wasn’t for fate, Romeo never would have met Juliet. Tybalt may never have died. If not for fate, the hatred between the Montagues and Capulets may never have existed in the first place. The people who did what they did never would have done it, if not for fate. The thing itself is more than just ever-present: it’s acknowledged. From the very beginning, Romeo and Juliet are referred to as “star-crossed lovers”, as in unlucky, opposing destiny, going against the stars. From the very beginning, Romeo seemed to be aware that some higher power was guiding him. He states it about as plainly as can be said, at the very party where he met Juliet: “I fear too early, for my mind misgives; some consequence, yet hanging in the stars, shall bitterly begin...but he that hath the steerage of my course, direct my sail”.

Romeo tells that force that controls his destiny to have at it, and it does, from that point on. Sometimes it is not referred to as fate, but as love, or the heavens, or the will of angels, but still it’s there. Romeo, when Juliet questions how exactly he found her bedroom, replies: “By love, that first did prompt me to enquire. He lent me counsel and I lent him eyes.” At the time, it didn’t seem anything more than an attempt to woo her, but who’s to say it wasn’t “love” that led him there? More and more, as the events that led to her death progress, is the dark theme acknowledged recognized. In many different ways and under many different names is it shown, but one constant undertone prevails- that no matter how much they fight it, Romeo and Juliet could not evade fate. Romeo tries to stop the fight between Mercutio and Tybalt, and still, Mercutio dies. Juliet tries to escape an unwanted marriage, and she ends up in what most would consider a worse situation. The more they fight it, the harder they fight back.

Foreshadowing, too, speaks of fate. Juliet watches Romeo descend from her bedroom window, and for a moment sees a dead man. As aforementioned, Romeo claims to know the party will result in his death, he refers to some kind of a dream, and the party turns out to be the beginning of the rest of his short life. Sometimes the characters speak of a heavenly power, one that may help them, and it kills them. Juliet says, after she learns that she must marry Paris, “Is there no pity sitting in the clouds, that sees into the bottom of my grief?”. They fight, they pray, they plot, and it never does them a bit of good.Even when Romeo proclaims vehemently, “I defy you, stars!”, he goes off to kill himself, and does exactly what fate meant to happen to him all along.

No single person killed Romeo and Juliet. It was fate, all along. They were all just acting out parts in a play that had already been written, like puppets on strings, and for all the fighting they did, it never did any of them a bit of good. There was no greater truth spoken than when Friar Lawrence said; “A greater power than we can contradict hath thwarted our intents”. Romeo and Juliet died because that was the way things were meant to be. That was what fate intended.