The three plays of 1595, therefore, serve as an important bridge between Shakespeare’s apprenticeship and his mature achievements. The two parts of Henry IV and Julius Caesar would follow, along with the romantic comedies The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night and the great tragedies Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. With these three plays Shakespeare emerged from the shadows of his influences and initiated a period of unexcelled accomplishment. Then, around 1595, Shakespeare composed three extraordinary plays-R ichard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet-in three different genres-history, comedy, and tragedy-signalling a new mastery, originality, and excellence.
Both his dramatic and nondramatic writing show Shakespeare mastering Elizabethan literary conventions. From that year through 1595 Shakespeare had also composed 154 sonnets and two long narrative poems in the erotic tradition- Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Shakespeare’s first tragedy, modeled on Seneca, Titus Andronicus, was written around 1592. His stage credits included mainly histories-the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III-and comedies- The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, and Love’s Labour’s Lost. He had been acting and writing in London for five years. Shakespeare was then 31 years old, married for 12 years and the father of three children. Romeo and Juliet, regarded by many as William Shakespeare’s first great play, is generally thought to have been written around 1595. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human Romeo and Juliet is unmatched, in Shakespeare and in the world’s literature, as a vision of an uncompromising mutual love that perishes of its own idealism and intensity. There had to be one high song of the erotic by Shakespeare, one lyrical and tragi-comical paean celebrating an unmixed love and lamenting its inevitable destruction. Shakespeare, more than any other author, has instructed the West in the catastrophes of sexuality, and has invented the formula that the sexual becomes the erotic when crossed by the shadow of death.
Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
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