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“Tragedy of the Lack of Communicative Action: Romeo and Juliet.”

According to Habermas and Jaspers, communicative action is very important factor in human relationships. Romeo and Juliet, a single tragedy on love written by Shakespeare, can be read as a tragedy caused by the lack of communicative action. By refusing to call their own names, Romeo and Juliet have built their own world of love and decided to marry, but their decision works as a refusal to communicate with their society. Though Romeo denies his father, he kills Tybalt, a cousin to Juliet, which shows that Romeo doesn’t deny his bloodline. After Romeo is banished, Juliet pretends to be dead, evading marriage to wed Paris. Her deceit results in the death of Romeo, and she kills herself. Even in the moment of death, Romeo as well as Juliet seems to be immersed only in their own emotion, as an isolated self, not enable to move towards each other. Romeo and Juliet have impetuous passion for love but they don’t have mutual cognition, the real power needed to maintain the relationship. Therefore, their inability to stop the doom is largely due to the fact that their relationship is lack of true communicative action. Through the lack of true communicative action, Shakespeare means to communicate a certain universal characteristics throughout the time.