The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet with Alternate Endings
The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet with Alternate Endings Romeo and Juliet, written by William Shakespeare, is the story of a pair of star-crossed lovers that results in great tragedy. One may ask, “Why would Shakespeare choose such a tragic ending for his heroes?” Hopefully this essay will answer that very question for you. Over the years, Romeo and Juliet has remained one of the most popular and most studied literary works of all time. With this amount of popularity, hundreds, even thousands, have written alternate endings to the timeless classic. Shakespeare could have chosen many endings, but he chose the tragic one for Romeo and Juliet. We can never truly understand his reasoning, but in general, people agree with his well thought out decision. Times have changed, language has changed, and the world has changed since Romeo and Juliet was written, but one thing remains: love can be beautiful, yet it can easily become tragic. William Shakespeare most likely had many reasons for ending the play in such a tragic way by killing both of the main characters. One reason could have been that too many stories of his day were ending with the characters living happily ever after. Shakespeare might have just wanted his story to appear more realistic to the general population. If two families were constantly fighting, as the Capulets and Montagues were, even in the technology-free age that this story was set in, the young, star-crossed lovers would not have found such easy ways to be together. There most likely would have been a little more predetermined hatred between the teenagers when they revealed their identities after they met. The second reason that William Shakespeare might have used such a tragic ending could have been that he had the foresight to know that the story would not have been such a memorable classic if the lovers had simply lived happily ever after. There are probably a million other plays, songs, and poems about love in this “happily