Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet: Comedy Subverted, Tragedy Reinvented

“For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

William Shakespeare’s The Tragedie Of Romeo And Juliet reinvented theatrical Tragedy by taking standard Comedic elements and subverting them, with unhappy outcomes. This makes Romeo & Juliet less a Tragedy than a Comedy-Gone-Wrong.

While it is strange today to think of Shakespeare as being a subversive playwright, from the first he built his playwriting career not just on terrific wordplay, violence, high poetry, and low humor. He also made a point of subverting theatrical tropes and norms dating back centuries.

It is unlikely Shakespeare set out to be deliberately subversive, but instead set his sights on drawing in audiences. It is clear that he looked at what plays were selling well in the early 1590s, and thought to himself “What if we gave them more of that?” By examining both popular and enduring theatrical tropes, he then attempted to outdo those tropes by taking them to their utmost extreme.

After cutting his literary teeth on a collaboration with either Christopher Marlowe or Thomas Nashe (or both) on the three Henry VI plays, Shakespeare tried his hand at a Marlovian villain in Richard III (1592–93). The eponymous Richard is very much in the style of Barabas, Marlowe’s villain of The Jew Of Malta. As Jonathan Bates writes, “The remark which begins innocuously but has a stinging aside in the tail…