Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons^™

Child Soldiers Of Verona: The Antiauthoritarian Antiwar Subtext Of Romeo And Juliet, Carl L. Sage

SACAD: John Heinrichs Scholarly and Creative Activity Days

Common practice has Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet identified as a tragic love story, which has antecedents tracing back as far as Pyramus and Thisbe by Ovid. Though valid, this interpretation plumbs only a limited portion of the text. It is the position of this paper that, like Shakespeare’s later work Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet was written with a political subtext in mind. Both texts play on the social memory of the War of the Roses, as well as continuing sectarian strife between Protestant and Roman Catholic adherents contemporaneous to the era. However, while Macbeth served to prop up the …