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Lovers And Paris And Lady: The love that unites Romeo and Juliet springs from no worldly consideration; it is natural, spontaneous, all-absorbing. There is no moral error involved in their tragedy—at the best a tragic error. One of the best effects of the play is found in the contrast between these highly emotional lovers and Paris and Lady Capulet, to whom love is a mere conventional relationship; the Nurse, to whom it is a matter of pleasurable instinct and even vulgar comment; Friar Laurence, with his somewhat worldly counsels against the excess of it; and Mercutio, transfixing it with the shafts of his reckless and cynical wit.
Another way to work it out is to mul-ply centigrade degrees by 9, then divide by 5 and add 32. I remember ading, as a youth, the earnest inquiry of an "Old Philadelphia Lady" the Paris Edition of the New fork Herald, asking how to change centi-ade into Fahrenheit. The letter ran every day for some thirty years, I ;lieve, this being done on a bet of some editor, as I recall it. The mythi-.1 Old Philadelphia Lady got thousands of answers, over the years, from nocent readers eager to help. Perhaps the simplest of all the formulae, id I leave this with you as a bequest from the Old Lady, is this: Double e centigrade figure; reduce the result by 10 per cent and add 32. Take room temperature again. 21 X 2 = 42 — 4.2 = 37.8 + 32 = 69.8.
In the blending of comedy and tragedy, which is more marked in this tragedy than in any of his others except perhaps Hamlet, Shakespeare was following the demand of life in its more complex aspects rather than the laws of classic art. While the defects of the play already suggested tend to mar the complete unity, the final impression is that of the great scenes: the Balcony Scene with the beauty of the Italian sky at night and the softest music of lovers' tongues; the Dawn Scene, when the earth is a-quiver between night and day and the lovers breathe out in each other's arms the saddest of farewells; and the Grave Scene, where the old Friar unites above the graves of the lovers the two families from whose loins they sprang. Then we know that we are reading the greatest of love poems, if not the greatest of Shakespeare's tragedies. |
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