The Story of Romeo and Juliet [antikvár]

THE MOTIVES CFA LOVE STORY m '"T^he story of the two J. young lovers of Verona - Romeo and Juliet - is universally known. The world over their story has H^^^^H come to be a symbol of passionate but doomed and tragic love: great, but at the same time unhappy. In fact it has become a sort of ideal paradigm for all crossed love affairs from their times (about the thirteenth century) right down to our own day. It is just Romeo and Juliet this Universal quality of the story of the young lovers, the instinctive affinity which people feel with it, which is why so many lovers visit the scene of the different episodes of the drama almost as if on a pilgrimage dedicated to the search for that all-powerful strength and devotion to each other which led Romeo and Juliet to death rather than separation from one another. Two factors above all have contributed to the widespread appeal of the story.The first is the enormous and continuing popularity of the tragedy by William Shakespeare, the great English playwright who dramatized the story. The second reason for its success on the other hand lies at the heart of the story itself, the matrix of sentiments which dominates the whole drama; the continual presence in it of opposing elements - love and hate, life and death. Shakespeare took the basic oudine of the narrative from already published literary sources, but it was his special genius which enabled him to retell the story on an altogether different plane, to imbue the simple outline with that wider universal vision, thus ensuring that the story