Romeo and Juliet are not just characters, but real people, just like the people in the audience. Many of them have seen drive-by shootings, gang fights, and teenage love gone awry, but such things have never seemed so meaningful, so sensible, so purposive. Such atrocities always seemed wrong somehow, until now. When heroes like Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes help to spread ideals such as anti-intellectualism, glorified violence, and suicide, the impressionable of society are quickly moved to strike intellectual endeavors from their agendas and anything and anyone who gets in the way of their desires.
<Tab/>Certainly, as the reader is aware, there are many movies that glorify violence and portray atrocities not nearly as graphic as Romeo and Juliet. However, it is important to note that those movies are not based upon the work of a genius who is a part of the literary canon. His works, particularly Romeo and Juliet, have been used as a didactic tool for centuries, enabling school children to learn about another culture, think critically, read closely and with a purpose, draw inferences, make connections with their own culture to better understand themselves and the human condition, to express themselves by playing the part of other people on stage, improve their speaking skills, and appreciate the value of theatre in our culture and other cultures. The play remained the creation of genius, a fiction that they admired as much for the rich, aesthetic language, poetic imagery, syntactical variety, and recondite tropes, as for the themes. …
