Sample Feature Article: Romeo: Play Boy or Drama Queen

Romeo: Play Boy or Drama Queen


Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone.
I'll be waiting; all that's left to do is run.

In this modern day is there room to run? Or are we so caught up in the expectations and restrictions of society that we don’t realise that to run is to reject society and the ideological glue that holds us together. Romeo Montague is an enigma, on the surface a hedonistic playboy living off his parents ‘dignity,’ but an emotional being seemingly pushing his family name away. Is Romeo just running from the ‘star crossed’ ‘civil blood’ of a ‘new mutiny’?

 

Ohhhh brawling love

Can you really do love wrong, is lust a mistake, just a random conflux of emotion. Romeo Montague has been called a play boy, a Casanova, the ultimate bachelor, but yesterday that was ended when he was married in a secret ceremony. We I met him for our interview yesterday, his smile reached across his face. His hair was folded neatly across his face but there was an air of excitement in his eyes. He was in love. ‘Ohh brawling love’ Romeo told me. We have seen how Romeo becomes absorbed by the love in his life. His love consumes him, every sense of his being is put into connecting with his adoration. He ‘sacrifices the name Montague’ and becomes something else. His identity tied to another. For Romeo Montague the power of love is everything. Romeo wouldn’t divulge the subject of his love to us however.

 

Oh loving hate.

But Romeo is a Montague and he is a part of the feud. It will follow him wherever he goes. Perhaps ‘the continuance of [his] parents rage’ could be buried by the ‘fearful passage’ of his love, his lasting impact on Verona condemning the ‘ancient grudge’ to a ‘vault to die.’ As Romeo told me ‘doth much excuse the appertaining rage’ he now sees ‘good Capulet… as dearly as’ his own. Seemingly for someone so explicitly tied to this feud, Romeo seems able to extricate himself from the ‘misshapen chaos’ of expectation and ‘pernicious rage’ (A line he seems to have picked up from television). Clearly Romeo is a man of his own, consumed by love, but blissfully free and in control of ‘sweet discourses.’ Someone might say that his resistance of social expectations has left his reputation ‘dead in the bottom of a tomb’ but at least he has his personal convictions, his hope and future arising in ‘the east’ to ‘kill the envious moon.’ Romeo is perhaps the model of a contemporary man, both vicious in their convictions yet tempered in their lust.

 

Some consequence yet hanging in the stars.

But I wasn't so sure. I asked Mr Montague ‘What is in a name?’ and he told me that his name means everything. His life, his future, his love. He may have said the last bit with a sense of disconsolation, his smile briefly wavering beneath his perfect hair, however the sentiment was there. Within Verona our characters are ultimately controlled by the world around them, Mr Romeo by his family and the gendered and social expectations. Despite Romeo’s insistence that he is a ‘feather of lead’ in reality he is simply a ‘rebellious subject’ and his ‘consent is but a part.’ The real ‘stars’ governing this world, dictating the fate of our characters is the social and cultural expectations of our ‘noble households.’ The ‘civil blood’ being spilt is the freedoms and liberties of our own people, the ‘mistempered weapons’ the conventions enforced up the ‘enemies to peace.’ This is something Romeo seems to understand ‘star-crossed lovers’ he mumbled as we left the interview, perhaps not just an off-hand cliché but a reflection of the dispowered existence endured by all of Verona and particularly by our protagonist.