Shakespeare is an impure dramatist who writes both comedies and tragedies
and mixes comic and tragic elements in the same play. At about the same time when
he composed the comedy of A Midsummer Night's Dream with a tragic play-within-the-
play performed farcically (i.e., the Peter Quince play of Pyramus and Thisbe),
he wrote the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, which echoes the theme and tone of the
comedy in such a way that we can regard it as the Dream's "play-without-the-play."
Romeo and Juliet has been very popular on the stage and on the screen. But it is
often criticized as a bad tragedy for its abuse of chance in plot and of rhetoric
in language. In order to judge the play well, we need to understand that the play
is in fact a "comitragedy." Hence, it is natural for Shakespeare to use
coincidences and play with words in it. Actually, like Mercutio in the play and
Peter Quince in the Dream, Shakespeare has a comic vision to make light of serious
matters. The comic vision is also an ironic vision. It enables the playwright and
his characters to see the necessary co-existence of mutually opposing things.
Consequently, they have to accept the fact that hate co-exists with love; death
co-exists with sex, etc. This ironic vision is best expressed in the wordplay of
uttering oxymora and puns. Even the hero's name contains such wordplay. If we
want to consider the play in terms of "comic relief," we have to adopt an
expressive theory of vision. Only by considering the play in the light of the
playwright's comic or ironic vision can we then fully appreciate it
