WITH A KISS I DIE (pag.111)

ANALYSIS

The present text is an extract from Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet". The scene belongs to Act V, scene III. The scene is set at night: there Romeo sees Juliet apparently dead so he gives his farewell to Juliet and the real world, then he drinks the poison and dies, next to his sweetheart.

The scene starts with Romeo speaking, wondering if "unsubstantial deat is amorous", so if death has taken Juliet. At this moement Romeo decides to kill himself to stay next his love for ever, but before he kills himself Romeo shows his sorrow to leave his life: he's conscious about what lìLove leads to, and his perception about love and life is perfectly combined with the lessical and fonological level of the speech, full of harsh sounds and words belonging to the semantic field of death, horror and sorrow, such as "death", "lean abhorred monster", "dim night". Now the reader understands what really does the speech consists in: it is a conception of the world based on "good" against "bad", and what comes into the reader's mind is that Love, generally associated to "good" and necessary to reach salvation, as human beings used to believe in the Middle Aged, is here associated to death, to something opposite to life. The new conception of Love made by Shakespeare testifies his most important innovative aspect: the subversion of values. The woman is no longer the means to reach salvation. Now death, so spiritual life appears as something negative, that doesn't leads to God, but it is "a dateless bargain to engrossing death!

In the following line Juliet wakes up and sees Romeo dying, after he has drunk the poison. As Romeo had expressed before, Juliets wants to die too, so she kisses Romeo's lips to drink the remaining poison. There is a difference between Romeo and Juliet perception about life: death is still considered a "dagger", but his something that Juliets really wants, contrary to Romeo. Now the reader can understand that death is somehow salvation to Juliet, in order to reach Romeo: it seems that the two lovers embody the two conception about life, Juliet during the Middle Ages and Romeo during the Renaissance, after a human beings' renovation in front of God and life.