Many people say that love and hate are the same thing, while others say that the two emotions are completely opposite. William Shakespeare explored the two emotions in his play Romeo and Juliet. In the play, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet are teenagers who grew up in families that have argued for longer than either family can remember. However, the two meet due to unforeseen circumstances and fall irrevocably in love with "love". They court and within twenty-four hours they get married. Things seem to be going well until Romeo is provoked into killing Juliet's cousin Tybalt and gets himself banished. Juliet is also promised to marry Paris, an eligible bachelor, while still mourning Romeo's exile. She decides to see one of the two people who know about the marriage between her and Romeo, Friar Laurence, to whom she tells him that if he cannot find a way out of the loneliness he will kill himself. The Friar gives her a sleeping potion for forty-two hours and appears to have died to help her. The plan is that Romeo should be there when she wakes up, but Romeo senses that she is dead and kills himself at her feet. Then she wakes up and kills herself too, putting an end to the whole brutal affair. The reader is then left wondering whether what they have just experienced is a tragedy of young love or a lesson in the power of hate, a question for which Shakespeare leaves an unfocused but definite answer. After a deeper look at the text, it becomes clearly evident that hate has much more power over the characters than their "love" could ever have. The characters in Romeo and Juliet are fully aware of the power of hatred and act on the knowledge. They recognize that hate and anger are much more powerful motivators than love and kindness. For example, when trying to motivate R... in the middle of the paper... they provide more information about themselves than about the subjects, and it is assumed that Shakespeare is no exception. At the time he wrote this, Shakespeare clearly felt hopeless at love, which is evident in the play's themes, the scenes that occur, and the motivations of his characters. His personal interpretation was that hate wins, but this is not always true in the real world. All people interpret the world differently, and although Shakespeare's view was negative, not everyone sees it that way. Some people argue that in real life love wins, demonstrating the importance that perspective can have, and the fact that perspective often has more effect than the events themselves, and that interpretation is up to the individual. Works Cited Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Literature by McDougal Littell. Ed. Allen, Janet, etc. al. Evanston, IL: McDougal Littell, 2008. 940-1049.