The play in a nutshell: The guy meets the girl and falls in love. “Plummets” might be a better word than “falls.” Regardless, their love is so deep that when the girl dies (or appears to have died), the guy kills himself. Then the girl wakes up, sees the guy dead, and kills herself. Fin.
If offing yourself out of grief isn’t love, I don’t know what is.
Things the nutshell didn’t mention: The girl is thirteen years old. The entire romance takes place over only a few days. Several people (other than the girl and the guy) end up dead because of this love.
I guess my problem isn’t really with the suicidal couple. I’ll even overlook the fact that there wasn’t enough time for the guy to really know the girl, and at thirteen, the girl didn’t really know herself. The stopper for me is that the play ends up implying that romantic love is the highest form of love.
Both lovers defied the love of their parents, the love of their friends, and the love of God for their romance. (To explain the last point, killing yourself out of grief is a pretty clear statement that you loved the dead person more than God, who hasn’t died and left you alone.) It’s my humble opinion that if the whole world acted like Romeo and Juliet, the world would be a terrible place. People would be putting their lives and the lives of their sole love above everything else.
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