Teaching Romeo & Juliet for the 4th time recently has got me wondering -are we the audience supposed to think Romeo &...

Teaching Romeo & Juliet for the 4th time recently has got me wondering -are we the audience supposed to think Romeo & Juliet are morons? Or is this some change in cultural values where their behavior wouldn't have seemed nearly as ridiculous in Shakespeare's time? It's hard to have any sympathy for them when all they ever do is threaten to kill themselves.
Shakespeare's poetry holds up centuries later but I'm growing increasingly critical of his narratives, particularly this one. Am I missing something here, or is everyone in this play just a fucking idiot?

Mr. Barbee?

Congratulations, you finally realize that plot is a gimmick and crutch

It is based on Tristan and Isolde

One, it's fiction. Two, they're fucking teenagers, teenagers are REALLY dumb.

Are you actually this retarded, or are you pretending

The plot is obviously expressionistic. It's using exaggerated external responses to portray internal states. (Young people in love feel very strongly about things.)

Having said that, I think people in Shakespeare's time were indeed closer than we are to the characters in his plays.

These days most people live incredibly soft, easy lives with almost no physical exercise or hardship and as a result have decayed into corpulent infantilized slugs, lacking any strong feelings and lacking even more the courage to act on them.
To pick one statistic, for example:

Male sperm count in the western world has dropped by 50% in the past 50 years.

So, yeah, I think people in Shakespeare's time were far more violently passionate than people now, and that's not something we should be proud of.

I teach high school. Teenagers aren't nearly that dumb. No one is.
Also fails to explain why the Friar and the Nurse are also fucking idiots.

Ignore the weird, fedora-tipping >when men were men! bullshit in your post, I think the expressionism argument has some merit, except if you intend your work to be expressionistic, you can't have the characters downfall be the result of very minor, would-be trivial details. It seems to clash horribly.

How did you even find Veeky Forums if you read for the story
Go read anime or something

If plot is irrelevant why do even the most experimental pieces of literature contain some kind of plot?

It acts as a vehicle for the actual literature

It’s like you don’t eat your plates, but they’re necessary to transport the fucking meal

>bullshit

Are you saying male sperm count in the West *hasn't* dropped 50% in the last 50 years?

Are you saying people in the West today *don't* live less physically arduous lives than in the 16th Century?

Or are you just dismissing my point without argument because you don't have one?

In answer to your comment about trivial details, of course you can.

The point is that if you're very high-strung and you act very passionately and impetuously, small misunderstandings/whatever will have drastic consequences.
A more "reasonable" view of the world will be less brittle, less susceptible to these things, but it will also get less done.
In the last analysis, people who do stuff, rather than people who wait until they're 100% sure, are what make the world go round.
You might as well argue that Othello was silly to rush ahead as he did, and if he'd just been a bit more sober and measured about it, things would have ended better. Yes, but that's not who Othello is.

>when reading, you should ignore the plot and only focus on the meaning
>Veeky Forums

>I have no argument, so I’m just going to use meme faces
Okay m8

>for the actual literature
>actual literature

d i s a b l e d

almost got me

>Are you saying male sperm count in the West *hasn't* dropped 50% in the last 50 years?
Yes. What the actual fuck. How would you even begin to measure a collective sperm count, let alone with 1960s technology? That's some Alex Jones-tier shit

>actual analysis
I can buy this, except that you personally seem to be treating it as though Romeo & Juliet are better off for being the way they are, which seems to be pretty clearly the opposite of the actual message of the play.
Unless you're just buying so much into the violently passionate cultural norm that you expect the audience in that time would have treated Romeo and Juliet as simply unable to help their personal passions, and their tragedy just a sad consequence of the realities of the world, which could very possibly be what Shakespeare was going for, but is also fucking stupid.

>plot is a plate
>just a gimmick

Boo, you stoopid

What is it that you don't understand? Their behavior seems very understandable to me.
The only particularly far fetched bit is Juliet faking her own death, but all else seems straight forward

>teaching
>not knowing the answer to a simple fucking question
Let me guess, American public school?

Tip harder