Day 14: Your Favorite Fight Scene

[a_t_rain]

I think everybody else has got the battle of Shrewsbury covered, so I'll put in a word for Romeo and Juliet 3.1.



This is the pivotal scene of the play; everything else swings on it (and Romeo gets this, in a heartbreaking flash of intuition: "This day's black fate on more days doth depend; / This but begins the woe others must end"). And all those thematic strands about fate and fortune flow together, propelled by Mercutio's dying curse.

And it's the scene where Romeo has to choose what kind of man he's going to be (because R&J is really a play about masculinity). The choice to walk away from the fight with Tybalt is BIG, given how things work in Verona; he tries so hard to buck everything his society is telling him about manhood and honor, and he almost makes it. Sadly, he can't stick to that choice in the heat of the moment, for very understandable reasons, and he ends up falling back on those same received ideas about what it means to be a man: "O sweet Juliet, / Thy beauty hath made me effeminate / And in my temper softened valor's steel."

Oh yeah, and there are a couple of good sword fights in there. (While I'm iffy about a lot of aspects of the Globe production I saw last summer, I do like the contrast between the two fights -- Mercutio vs. Tybalt is very mannered, a couple of bored guys amusing themselves by showing off with rapier and dagger, while Romeo vs. Tybalt is raw and dirty and completely below the belt.)



Day #1: Your favorite play
Day #2: Your favorite character
Day #3: Your favorite hero
Day #4: Your favorite heroine
Day #5: Your favorite villain
Day #6: Your favorite villainess
Day #7: Your favorite clown
Day #8: Your favorite comedy
Day #9: Your favorite tragedy
Day #10: Your favorite history
Day #11: Your least favorite play
Day #12: Your favorite scene
Day #13: Your favorite romantic scene
Day #14: Your favorite fight scene
Day #15: The first play you read
Day #16: Your first play you saw
Day #17: Your favorite speech
Day #18: Your favorite dialogue
Day #19: Your favorite movie version of a play
Day #20: Your favorite movie adaptation of a play
Day #21: An overrated play
Day #22: An underrated play
Day #23: A role you've never played but would love to play
Day #24: An actor or actress you would love to see in a particular role
Day #25: Sooner or later, everyone has to choose: Hal or Falstaff?
Day #26: Your favorite couple
Day #27: Your favorite couplet
Day #28: Your favorite joke
Day #29: Your favorite sonnet
Day #30: Your favorite single line