Melancholy as Romeo

Love is eternal. Too often, it’s depicted as a fleeting emotion, an ephemeral feeling of affection. Love isn’t continually blissful, and it definitely isn’t easy. But is love to be associated with melancholy? Could Shakespeare’s Romeo depict melancholy to be his tragic flaw, as stated by Aristotle?

In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo is a young man, barely sixteen, who learns to fight for what should rightfully be his. There are many scenes in which he is wistful, yearning, or even blatantly weeping. Through melancholy, he personifies a serious, yet passionate nature, as well as perhaps a slight thirst for love—the Elizabethan era was not always kind to it’s young men. Melancholy is not Romeo’s downfall, however, despite the fact that he illustrates several examples of it, and quite well at that.

When he believed himself in love with Rosaline, Romeo was downcast and depressed. His love caused him more agony than joy, and he was somewhat confused by that: “Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, Too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like a thorn.” (Act 1, Sc.4, //25). His glumness was so evident that even insensitive Mercutio noticed, and tried to tease him out of it: “You are a lover, borrow Cupid’s wings And soar with t

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And but thou love me, let them find me here. For example, in Act 2, Scene 2, Line 75, Juliet warns Romeo that should the guards see him at her bedroom’s balcony, they wouldn’t hesitate to kill him.

Romeo’s tragic story leads up to and includes his death—Aristotle’s third and final criterion. It brings about violence and guilt and haste, all in overwhelming proportions: “The time and my intents are savage-wild, More fierce and more inexorable far, Than empty tigers, or the roaring sea.

Romeo’s fortune follows a frenzied downhill path to adversity through the story (Aristotle’s second criterion). Romeo was, indeed, a tragic hero, for the ensuing reasons:

He exhibited a strong-willed, passionate character, despite the fact that Elizabethans prized reason above all else.

The aforementioned examples, however, prove only that Romeo was melancholic—not that melancholy was his tragic flaw. His despair at finding Juliet ‘dead’ is overpowering.

According to Aristotle’s thesis, a tragic hero is “a man of higher than mortal worth, exhibited as suffering a change in fortune from happiness to misery, because of an act to which he is led to by ‘harmatia’, or tragic flaws (in this case, melancholy)”. But they do not attest that melancholy was his tragic flaw, as Aristotle might have suggested.

To say that melancholy is Romeo’s downfall would be fallacious because of it’s inconsistency.

Approximate Word count = 1053
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

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