Romeo and Juliet - Love's Power

David P. Stein
Mary Gallucci
Shakespeare l
April 22nd, 2015

Love: The Opiate of Human Emotions

        Arguably William Shakespeare’s most celebrated play, Romeo and Juliet offers its consumer with a deep literary representation of love. Ultimately, through the development of his characters, and via the evolution of his plot, the reader gets a true sense of the multifaceted implications that love can have on the individual. This text confirms that love is the most intense emotion known to mankind, and its multifaceted effect is on display throughout the reading. Just like an opiate junky, we see that a lover is deeply enthralled in an isolated state of mind, and cannot even fathom living life with any other perspective. Just like an opiate addict, a lover is dangerously addicted to the highs associated with being in love. By critically assessing this subject matter from various pedagogical outlooks, it will be seen that love is the most powerful, non-chemically induced feeling known to mankind. In this paper, the academic disciplines of psychology, history, and philosophy will be applied in order to support this claim.

        As was on display throughout Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, love and its impact on human behavior is a dominant underlying theme. To this, we see love from different angles, beginning with a close view of the immediate injection of deep affection into Romeo’s heart as he laid his eyes on Juliet for the first time at the home of the Capoulets. This notion of love at first sight, and the falling in love process altogether, is depicted as this warm and beautiful sense of euphoria, but really, it is difficult to describe. This feeling, which can only be understood if you’ve experience it for yourself, is even a struggle for Juliet to put into words how strong true love is, “But my true love is grown to such excess / I cannot sum up some of half my wealth” (3.1.33–34).

        The passion affiliated with love is so intense, that any challenging obstacles can shift this positively charged emotion towards violent behavior, hatred, and death as we inevitably see at the conclusion of this story. Ironically, there is a connection to be made with Tybalt wanting to murder Romeo at the same moment that Romeo fell for Juliet. This proves noteworthy because the power of their love would seem to be accompanied by violence from that point forward. Romeo and Juliet were both cognizant of the fact that their romantic relationship was a burden to those around them, and despite numerous attempts from Capoulet to sway his daughter from Romeo, the potency of their love was always stronger. In my opinion, evidence of this is displayed by Juliet’s openness to the idea of committing suicide when Capoulet decides that Juliet will marry Paris, “If all else fail, myself have power to die” (3.5.242). Further to this, the story’s climactic conclusion involving the double suicide of Romeo and Juliet is likely the most glaring sign of love’s overwhelming power. The simple refusal to live life without one another is also an indicator that they are addicted to this emotion, kind of like an opiate junky.