Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This.

Patreon.com slash philosophize this, Philosophical writing on Substack at Philosophize This on there.

I hope you love the show today. So Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.

Many of you were probably forced to read this when you're in high school. And little do we know back

then how much philosophy there was underneath the events of the play. See, this is one of those stories where I think to understand the significance of a lot of the stuff that happens in it, you got to know about a scene that goes on at the very end of it first. Because once we know about the ending of this play, then all the stuff before it starts to take on a whole new meaning. I'm talking about the scene where there are three people lying dead inside of a tomb in a churchyard. Two of these people are teenagers who've just

taken their own lives. Their names are Romeo and Juliet. The other guy is named Count Paris,

who's been stabbed to death by Romeo just hours before. Outside of the tomb, there's a friar

from a local church named Lawrence who's pleading with the

authorities of the city. He's confessing to how all this that went on here is partially his fault

that he had helped Romeo and Juliet plot the things that have led them to being in this place.

Meanwhile, the fathers of both Romeo and Juliet are standing close by the tomb, mourning the loss of

their children. They look over at each other.

And as two people that have long hated one another, they say, you know what, enough of this. Let's shake hands right now, call a truce between us. Because look what all this fighting between our families has led us to. Two of our children are now dead. By the end of this episode, we'll understand how all these people got to this place, and we'll understand a bit more about what Shakespeare wanted to get across when he wrote this play. See, because something cool about this play in particular, that makes it different from some of Shakespeare's other work, is that we actually can reasonably take a guess as to the stuff he wanted to put a focus on here. You know, usually it's not very smart to assume anything Shakespeare was thinking if we don't have them explicitly telling us about it. But the great thing about this play is that Shakespeare didn't write the original story of Romeo and Juliet. No, he rewrote this story that he first saw as a poem somebody else had written 30 years before. And even that poem he was drawing from was heavily building on details from stories that came before it. This reimagining of a story, by the way, where you put new

things in, make it your own kind of thing. This was standard practice in the industry back

in the 1590s when Shakespeare's writing this. Anyway, what this means is that it becomes

uniquely possible with this play for scholars to consider the original sources we know Shakespeare

was building the story off of. And then we can know where his head was at because we can look at

what he chooses to add to the story. What he adds becomes a statement of what he thought was

important to include in his version of it. And from the very beginning, in a story that's typically

remembered by people as one of the most beautiful love stories ever written, there's going to be multiple layers to what Shakespeare

does in this play when he makes violence a central theme as well. He's going to give violence the

treatment things receive in a tragic play, where again, we try to consider it with complexity,

...