Romeo and Juliet

In Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet are the two young lover’s victims of fate and really that star-crossed?   I beg to differ, in a humanistic perception people have the capabilities to do whatever they wish with their lives and be whoever they want to be, thus they were not victims of chance but of their own free will. The play is based upon coincidences but if the youngsters had thought through their actions and weren’t basing their every move on sheer passion the play could have had a less tragic ending. The two lovers take their lives not because ‘fate’ does not let them be together, but rather because they were too immature and obsessed with the idea of love and tragedy.
The plays story is based heavily upon coincidences which can be argued are a product of fate but had Romeo and Juliet been more mature they could have handled them better. The series of coincidences that led up to their death could have been easily avoided in the first place. If Romeo was hanging out with Benvolio he would have never met Juliet, if the Apothecary that Romeo visited wasn’t poor he wouldn’t have sold him the poison, if the Friar arrived at the tomb the same time that Romeo did he wouldn’t kill himself. The entire play is really just based upon bad timing, miscommunications, and coincidences that could have been easily avoided.
If our lives were completely controlled by fate, life would not be worth living; the choices we make in our day to day lives would be void. I believe Romeo and Juliet dug their own graves in the sense that they were too quick to fall in love and didn’t think their actions through. Romeo is a realistic example of the average teenage boy, in the beginning of the play he speaks in sonnets rather than free verse displaying his overly romantic personality. Towards the beginning of the play he is hasty to fall out of love with Rosaline and back into love with Juliet at first sight, Juliet is just as violently in love because the day after they first meet...