Episode #242 ... Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare

Hello, everyone. I'm Steven West. This is philosophize this. Patreon.com/philosophizethis. Philosophical writing on Substack at philosophize this on there. I hope you love the show today. So Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. Many of you were probably forced to read this when you were in high school. And little did we know back then how much philosophy there was underneath the events of the play. See, there's one of those stories where I think to understand the significance of a lot of the stuff that happens in it, you gotta know about a scene that goes on at the very end of it first. Because once you know about the ending of this play, then all the stuff before it starts to take on a whole new meaning. I'm talking about the scene where there are three people lying dead inside of a tomb in a churchyard. Two of these people are teenagers who've just taken their own lives. Their names are Romeo and Juliet. The other guy is named Count Paris, who's been stabbed to death by Romeo just hours before. Outside of the tomb, there's a friar from a local church named Lawrence, who's pleading with the authorities of the city. He's confessing to how all this that went on here is partially his fault that he had helped Romeo and Juliet plot the things that have led them to being in this place. Meanwhile, the fathers of both Romeo and Juliet are standing close by the tomb, mourning the loss of their children. They look over at each other. And as two people that have long hated one another, they say, you know what? Enough of this. Let's shake hands right now. Call a truce between us. Because look what all this fighting between our families has led us to. Two of our children are now dead. By the end of this episode, we'll understand how all these people got to this place. And we'll understand a bit more about what Shakespeare wanted to get across when he wrote this play. See, because something cool about this play in particular that makes it different from some of Shakespeare's other work is that we actually can reasonably take a guess as to the stuff you wanted to put a focus on here. You know, usually, it's not very smart to assume anything Shakespeare was thinking if we don't have him explicitly telling us about it. But the great thing about this play is that Shakespeare didn't write the original story of Romeo and Juliet. No, he rewrote this story that he first saw as a poem somebody else had written thirty years before. And even that poem he was drawing from was heavily building on details from stories that came before it. This reimagining of a story, by the way, where you put new things in, make it your own kind of thing. This was standard practice in the industry back in the fifteen nineties when Shakespeare …