Romeo and Juliet and Atonement

Romeo and Juliet has always been one of William Shakespeare's most popular and successful plays, even though critics have sometimes dismissed it as an immature or sentimental work. In that respect, Atonement is not sentimental at all but rather grimly realistic, although the love of Ronnie and Cecelia also ends tragically. Both the play and novel have a great deal of seemingly irrational and senseless violence that destroys the lives of the main characters. In Atonement, the violence takes the form of a system that convicts Robbie unjustly of a crime he did not commit, and then gives him a choice of either serving in a war as cannon fodder or staying in jail. Cecilia and Briony also experience the violence of wartime London with regular bombing and endless numbers of badly mangled bodies that flood into the hospitals where they work. In Romeo and...
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