Romeo and Juliet is actually my favorite play to read of his. If you don't get it, it seems like slush. But his point is that adolescent romance is risky and da

Romeo and Juliet is actually my favorite play to read of his. If you don't get it, it seems like slush. But his point is that adolescent romance is risky and dangerous, and that youth makes bad decisions. It's a critique of slush romance. Pinter and Sophocles could not write as well as Shakespeare did. The man wrote absolute poetry, line by line. It's difficult stuff, but then, the best art always is. Find an actor capable of reading Shakespeare and the hair on the back of your neck will stand up. That's not to say Pinter isn't good. (Sophocles isn't at all bad, but his writing dates terribly.) The problem with Pinter is that he doesn't write for aesthetic. A common misbelief is that Shakespeare only wrote in iambic pentameter and used weird language because his stuff is old. That's not the case. People in Shakespeare's day wrote plays that look and feel like normal plays. Shakespeare believed, though, that he could write plays so grandiose that they transcended everyday reality to become timeless. He wrote challenging lines to force people to dedicate themselves to his performances. His stuff is absolute poetry in a way that writing almost never is. I hated Shakespeare when I was 16. I was lucky enough to get a teacher good enough to explain why Shakespeare is as acclaimed as he is. Since then I haven't said a bad word about him. He's so incredible that it's hard to look at his stuff objectively, so it's easy to criticize him unless you actually look at what he did.