Romeo&Juliet/Tony&Maria Essay

RJ Burson
3-15-12
English
The Forcefulness of Love

Is love forceful enough to make you betray everyone in your life? William Shakespeare and Arthur Laurents sure created characters in their stories Romeo and Juliet and Westside Story that made you believe so. In these two classic love stories of all time the characters Romeo and Juliet and Anton and Maria show intense love for one another. Through the actions of Romeo and Juliet and Anton and Maria, Shakespeare and Laurents prove to the audience that love is forceful enough to make you betray your family, friends and even yourself.

The characters Anton and Maria were so deeply in love with each other that they betrayed their best friends. Anton betrays his friends in the Jets gang by loving Maria, who is a part of the Sharks, their rival gang. Anton also betrays a friend when he kills his best friend, Rif. This happens when Anton listens to his true love Maria and tries to stop the fight between the Jets and the Sharks. Maria, like Anton, also betrays her friends in the Sharks gang. She is so in love with Anton that she sneaks around with him even though he is her Puerto Rican friends’ biggest enemy.

The characters Romeo and Juliet were so intensely in love that they ignored their families’ long standing feud and hatred for each other to be together. Romeo also betrays his family by trying to break up a fight that Juliet convinced him to stop. While trying to break up the fight, Romeo got in the middle of things and ended up getting a family member, Mercutio, killed. As for Juliet, she betrayed her father when she did not marry Paris. This was a marriage that her father had been arranging for a while. Juliet’s refusal to marry Paris was worse than it sounds because when Juliet told her father that she didn’t want to marry Paris, Capulet became very angry and threatened to disown her.

The characters Romeo, Juliet, and Anton were all so deeply in love that each one killed themselves when they realized...