Romeo and Juliet

I started a Shakespeare Club on campus, because I have forty students graduating from an English Literature department having only read Hamlet. We covered a few sonnets in class, but the main focus of our course is the British Romantic poets--this term, anyway--so I felt like my students needed more exposure to Shakespeare before they graduated. Many of them didn't even know how Romeo and Juliet ended. Can you imagine?

So in the Shakespeare Club we watch Shakespeare's plays on film (in English with English subtitles), then discuss them. The first one we watched was Romeo and Juliet. It was fantastic. We watched the Franco Zeffirelli version (1968), and I loved watching it and remembering the beautiful quotes, the impossible, passionate teenage love, and even the horrifying end. When I'd read it the first time, I don't think I'd had enough perspective to realize what a statement it was about young love, and the dangerous foolishness that can result from its lack of perspective. (Yeah, I know, I'm such a downer, belittling Romeo and Juliet's love...)

We chatted about it for a bit afterwards, and we talked about teenage love, and how dramatic it can be.  It actually reminded me quite a bit of the Twilight series, a love story that both sucked me in (forgive the pun) and also totally disturbed me with its emphasis on the perfect love that creates the obsessive, co-dependent love affairs so common in our teens and twenties.

I've been told that boys in Turkey will commonly tell girls that they'll die for them, but I thought it was just talk, not something any of them would actually do. (Really, the methods of courting women here would horrify most American/Western guys.) Anyway, after we finished Romeo and Juliet, one of my students opened my eyes about the lengths men will actually go to here.

"Hojam," she said (which means "my teacher"), "I got really emotional when I watched the end of the movie. It really made me start to cry." She grabbed my arm and pulled me near her. "You know it's like that in Turkey sometimes. It even happened in the village near where I live. There was a girl who fell in love with a boy. Her father refused to let them get married, so she hung herself." She paused, emotional and enraptured at the same time. "And then the boy went to her grave, and he shot himself as he lay on her grave." She paused again. "So it's like Romeo and Juliet, hojam. Just the same."

Twilight's really huge here too, by the way. I don't wonder why.