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Juliet's speeches to the Friar after learning that she must marry Paris in a week's time indicate this as she lists the horrors she would rather endure: "bid me leap... / From off the battlements of any tower...lurk / Where serpents are; chain me with roaring bears..." (Riverside 1130, IV.i. 77-80). She continues in much the same vein, and this is not her only moment of such emotional extremity. To see this as comedic, it must be remembered that Juliet is only twelve years old, and Romeo probably around fourteen, and although people married younger in those days it is ridiculous to assume that they could possibly have had the same emotional maturity as other of Shakespeare's heroes and heroines.
In Baz Luhrmann's 1997 film version of Romeo and Juliet, certain aspects of the storyline are also ridiculously overblown. Luhrmann does not attempt to approach comedy in the tragic moments of the film, but he does underline the superficiality of much of the love, especially by emphasizing Romeo's intoxication during his moment of love at first sight. His perception and judgment are both severely clouded, and the fact that he is something of a spoiled playboy with a marked libido is also made very clear very early in the film. Mercutio's character and death, too, are seen to be matters of arrogance and pride, which is definitely indicated in the script but which also serves as a turning point between comedy...
A true dedication to this interpretation would show Mercutio's death to be entirely of his own making (which, given Tybalt's attempts to get out of the fight, it is), and its senselessness could be seen as comic. The fact that the two lovers go to such lengths to be together, even in death, almost doesn't make sense with the backdrop of the rest of the movie, and if things were pushed just a little bit further all sense would disappear entirely -- and that's comedy.
The likelihood that a successful production of Romeo and Juliet as a comedy could be mounted is, admittedly, slim to none. But this has more to do with the consistency of public perception than anything inherent to the text itself. Shakespeare has many characters in comedies that wax as depressingly poetic as those found here, and the end itself can be seen as funny in the right macabre light. When people devote themselves to foolishness, the result is comedy, and this sums up Romeo and Juliet.
Works Cited
Dobson, Michael. "Shakespeare on the Page and on the Stage." The Cambridge
Companion to Shakespeare. New York: Cambridge University Press 2001.
Evans, G. Blakemore and M. Tobin, eds. The Riverside Shakespeare. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. In the Riverside Shakespeare.
Works Cited
Dobson, Michael. "Shakespeare on the Page and on the Stage." The Cambridge
Companion to Shakespeare. New York: Cambridge University Press 2001.
Evans, G. Blakemore and M. Tobin, eds. The Riverside Shakespeare. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. In the Riverside Shakespeare.
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