On the surface, Romeo and Juliet is a simple and tragic love story: a boy meets a girl, they fall in love, time passes, things go wrong and you get in the end. But if you ask why the end was reached, well, that's where you get into the details of the story and the individual aspects of the mostly anonymous characters, particularly Romeo himself. Watch his ridiculously romantic banter and you'll notice the flaw in his character, the mistake he made, or the way fate plays with his toys. From the text itself, you can glean all three ideas about how Romeo fell from above. its tower of happiness and love, but the prologue states as clear as crystal that: Two families, both similar in dignity/(In beautiful Verona, where we set our scene),/From ancient rancor a new mutiny breaks out,/Where civil blood makes civil hands impure./From the fatal loins of these two enemies/A pair of ill-fated lovers take their lives;/Whose misfortunes pitiful reversals/Bury with their deaths the strife of their parents./The fearful passage of their death- marked love/And the continuation of their parents' anger,/Which, except the end of their children, nothing could remove,/It is now the two-hour traffic of our stage;/Which, if you listen with patient ears ,/What will be missing here, our labor will try to repair. (Prologue) It says in plain English that the children of enemy combatants will die to end the malice between the families. He also says that nothing else could have brought peace to the Montagues and Capulets. Shakespeare makes it painfully obvious that fate does not look down on the two boys kindly. He blames nothing but fate for the deaths of the two young and delightfully naive lovers. Despite Shakespeare's intentions, people... middle of paper... are actually self-destructive. Romeo is a classic tragic hero. Either he's perfect and made a mistake, ideal except for one little problem that messes him up completely, or fate is a fickle lover who just doesn't like him. The play, Zeffirelli's version, and Luhrman's version all have different ideas about what exactly caused him and Juliet to die. The original text leans more towards the latter idea, while the Zeffirelli and Luhrman versions showed hamartia and tragic flaw respectively. In reality, to see what causes Romeo's downfall, it's all in how you interpret Shakespeare's words. Personal experiences and thought processes will lead to different ideas. Look at Zeffirelli and Luhrman; two directors who took inspiration from the same text and distanced themselves from it by interpreting it in completely different ways. Works Cited Romeo and Juliet, Prolouge