REVIEW
Nevo, Ruth. "Tragic Form in Romeo and Juliet."
Studies in English Literature 9 (1969): 241-258.

Abstract (as printed at the head of the essay):

     Embedded in the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, in the characters of the Friar and of Romeo himself, are two opposing traditional views concerning the origin of suffering, hence of tragedy, in human life. The play however eludes both the "providential" and the "fatal" formulae and offers us an early, but fully articulated Shakespearean tragic structure. This is marked by a characteristic emphasis on the opacity of appearances which the protagonists fail to penetrate, by tragic heroes whose high distinction is to be understood in terms of their embodiment of the forces whose collision provides the dynamic of the action; by a finely turned peripeteia in which coincidence and inevitability meet in a nexus of ironies; and by the evolving affirmation, made both dramatically (through action and character contrast) and poetically (through the light imagery) of the high value of idealized sexual love.     (241)

Persuasive Points:

A Note: In the bound volume of Studies in English Literature for 1969 there are misprints in Nevo's essay. Both pages 253 and 254 end in the middle of a sentence.

Bottom Line: The essay is a lot better than the abstract.