SWANK LITERARY LAW No. 014: Romeo and Juliet Were Killed by Triangulation, Not Love
A Critical Reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Most Misunderstood Play
Let us retire the illusion:
Romeo and Juliet were not victims of passion.
They were victims of external manipulation, emotional isolation, and generational ego.
What destroyed them wasn’t youth.
It was triangulation.
Laced into every scene.
Performed by every adult.
Enforced through silence, surveillance, and sanctimonious concern.
Let us name the players:
- The Capulets and Montagues: two lineages so obsessed with performance and status that they weaponised their children’s affection to uphold a feud.
- The Nurse and Friar Laurence: well-meaning, passive enablers who offered intimacy without protection, advice without strategy.
- Tybalt: the emotionally dysregulated enforcer of loyalty, whose honor was really just coercion in silk sleeves.
No one protected Romeo and Juliet from interference.
No one helped them create a direct, coherent relationship.
Every move they made had to be hidden, justified, mediated — until love was no longer love, but a coded performance within a hostile system.
They didn’t die because they were too emotional.
They died because everyone around them refused to let love exist unmediated.
At SWANK, we no longer call that a tragedy.
We call that what it was: relational sabotage via triangulated lineage.
And we do not romanticize it.
We rewrite it.
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