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5 - Beautiful death in Romeo and Juliet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2010
Summary
All creation is really a re-creation of a once loved and once whole, but now lost and ruined object, a ruined internal world and self. It is when the world within us is destroyed, when it is dead and loveless, when our loved ones are in fragments, and we ourselves in helpless despair – it is then that we must re-create our life anew, reassemble the pieces, infuse life into dead fragments, re-create life.
Hanna SegalIf Hamlet is, as Walter Benjamin suggests, Shakespeare's consummate exploration of death, melancholy, and mourning in a world seen as having become valueless, Romeo and Juliet explores a different context for and a differently inflected idea of death: its connections with desire. Romeo and Juliet has commonalities with the form of the Trauerspiel above all in the central role that chance and contingency (Benjamin's ‘fate’) play in its denouement, but it does not display the melancholic vision of a completely empty world that dominates Hamlet. It is another Shakespearean sui generis play, one that sees in death different aesthetic possibilities from those of the Trauerspiel proper. The play sets up a dynamic dialectic between desire – which dominates its largely comedic first half – and death – which dominates the second. But if the second half seems something of a Trauerspiel, it is one with a good deal more positivity about desire than is typical of the genre as described by Benjamin, so that the play magnifies the utopian potentialities of Trauerspiel to a much higher degree than is typical of the form.
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- Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics , pp. 193 - 224Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009