Romeo & Juliet - Names

3 Pages 627 Words

When you are born, the first thing that you get without your choice is a family. Then this family names you... You don’t know that your future will depend on just those letters that your family gives to you... Your family decides how kind of a person they want you to be and gives you the name ‘Romeo’ for you to be a romantic boy and ‘Juliet’ to be a beautiful girl. According to Elizabethan time beliefs, this couple mustn’t have come together because they were star-crossed lovers. In Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, the theme of names indicates the endless feud between two families and the forbidden love of their children; in contemporary times, the names can be the source of stereo typing.
There is a feud between Capulets and Montagues. Even though Shakespeare didn’t tell us how the feud began, by looking at their situation we can guess that the first spark must have been an economical fight. Then this fight must have been spread out in every part of their lives. The workers and kinsman of Lady and Lord Capulet fights with the kinsman and workers of Lady and Lord Montegue. They fight a lot of times during the play, but they never had a reasonable reason for these fights. They fight because of names; names which are just abstract. In contemporary times, names are not a reason for fighting because there is no such feuds. There are some people who fight with others because they just didn’t like the way they look. A typical example is, the racist people fighting with black people.
In the last scene of act one, Juliet and Romeo fell in love with each other, but they can’t be together because of their names. Their names are the symbol of a feud, which doesn’t want any piece of love in it. During the balcony scene, Juliet says “O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name: Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love and I’ll no longer be a Capulet. ‘T is but thy name that is my enemy...