And I think if it was taught this way, and maybe taught just a couple of years later, not in middle school but in high school, students would actually understand and get a lot more interested. Helping them understand HISTORY through the lens of art? Showing them how it relates to their own lives? Major big deal.
Young folks understand family pressure, the pressure to fill a role...they feel it in different ways, but they feel it. My god the pressure to choose a career and get into college when I had only been driving a car for a year, could not vote, had no control of my finances, and was basically property of my family according to the laws and customs of my culture, that was INTENSE. Pretty much every child goes through that!
These days younger folks usually understand "ew, Juliet was too young". My generation was pretty sexually and romantically rebellious, most other teens I knew were not bothered by it. Teens today are more likely to be. They just need to be told that yes, that is the point. It's a fantastic way to teach how an author's choices to do troubling things is often social commentary, and that all works of art exist in a context. That they can be timeless, but also, sometimes to see those timeless themes we need to know a little about when they were made.
Kids understand not feeling valued by their parents (even the ones treated well at home often feel this way, it's just part of being a teenager, they are becoming new people but their family is slow to adjust and parents especially cling to the child they knew and not the adult that child is rapidly becoming).
They understand family being overly invested in them and their success.
They understand the repercussions they might experience from a family member's actions, often resulting in more pressure to do better somehow, or in rejection because they have been tainted by proximity.
Many do understand that they will eventually be under a lot of pressure to have kids even though they are not allowed deep romantic connections yet. They understand that dismissal as unjust, and the double standard.
And honestly, they usually understand despair and suicidality when what they wanted, the only thing they feel like they actually chose, is taken away. When the tiny bit of agency they scrounge up is destroyed. They get it.
For sure they understand rivalry, throwing shade, and throwing hands, those were my favorite parts.
Futility, the struggle to have something for yourself, the pressure to do what adults want you to do at the cost of you finding out who you are, adults dismissing your feelings, especially romantic ones, struggles with your peers, your decisions isolating you, teens live all of this. Being shown that their stories are not unique, but have been understood so well that a truly great artist devoted a whole play to say how fucked up it is to make kids go through this...that William freaking Shakespeare wrote about this hundreds of years ago. That he told their stories to make people care, and see how their behavior has to change. That is powerful.
It isn't a bad play! But it is not a romance! It is a tragedy! It just isn't usually taught that way.
Yes the protagonists are kind of stupid, and even people their age can see that. You can acknowledge that while also seeing that it wouldn't have mattered if they had been brilliant. It wouldn't necessarily have changed anything. It was the adults who were the fucking problem.
Taught well, it could be extremely validating for young people.
It could also teach adults a thing or two, if we encouraged and helped adults to continue learning and didn't just burn them out and then suck all their life away with debt and two jobs and no time to reflect.
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