If the video doesn’t load please try refreshing the page. If the problem persists make sure you have the latest version of the Flash player or watch the videos on our RecAPP iPhone and iPod application.

William Shakespeare did not write plays like The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet for the benefit of historians, or literary scholars, or even kids in high school. No, he wrote his plays to entertain the ticket-buying mobs that crowded his theater and paid his bills. He packed his stories with symbols, but not necessarily because he wanted to make a literary statement. No, he just wanted to make sure that the people who bought tickets to his plays could follow his often-convoluted plots. And sometimes a symbol really is worth a thousand words. Or, at least, 60 seconds.

Video Transcription:

Poison.

Even the word sounds ominous. But in Romeo and Juliet, there’s more to poison than you might think. That’s why it’s a symbol.

Some things in life are good and some are just plain bad, right? For example:

Love equals good
Poison equals bad.

The Friar in Romeo in Juliet would have to disagree.

Remember what he has to say when he makes his entrance in Act II: Everything in nature has good and bad properties. It all depends on how you use it.

Let me put it another way: Poison is a natural substance that becomes deadly only when humans use it for malicious purposes; it’s not inherently evil.

Poison is an important symbol in Romeo and Juliet for exactly this reason: It shows the way good becomes corrupted by human weakness, human error, human evil.

Like Romeo and Juliet’s love. It’s poisoned by the stupid feud going on between the two families.

Of course, you could also say that their love is poisoned by their rashness—their headlong, consideration-free rush into love.

In the end, poison is like everything else in this play—it leaves you, the reader, struggling to know whom to blame.

But maybe that’s the point. There is no single whom—but a group of characters whose good qualities and intentions are poisoned by a messed-up world.