Love

Question 1

Love overview

Answer 1

Romeo and Juliet’ is not a love story. This is a story about two teenagers with Romeo and Juliet’ is not a love story. This is a story about two teenagers with little or no experience of the world, who manage to find each other, get married, have sex, commit murder, and then take their own lives, all in the space of 3 days and without anyone really noticing for most of the time. This isn’t love. This is death, pride, anger and despair, and the lovers are just a vehicle for all the bottled-up hatred, the feuding and rancour, in the world of the play to spill out.

Question 2

Love paragraph 1 (love as a weakener)

Answer 2

1. “Tut I have lost myself” • At the start of the play, Romeo is brought low by unrequited love.
   Though we might call it nothing more than boyish lust, his despair over Roseline makes him less than himself.
   2.”soften valour’s steel.” Romeo’s marriage to Juliet makes him effeminate and Shakespearean men who develop deep attachments to women often allow themselves to be altered by those new loyalties and ‘soft’
   emotions.
2. “O, brawling love, o loving hate, o anything of nothing first create!” Use of the anaphoras in “O” reflects how Romeo is sharing his pain rather than containing it juxtaposing the macho masculinity of the Edwardian era. Antithesis used to show how love is a weakener, negative imagery associated with love.

Question 3

Love paragraph 2 (love with violence)

Answer 3

1. “The heads of their maidens” Shakespeare pairs love with death, love with hate, love with pain. There is never a moment that death or violence are absent from the stage and this, paired with the joyous exuberance of love, produces constant tension. For example, the opening of the play is a violent scene in the street laced with threats of violence. This introduces tybalt.
2. “Death - marked love” duality of love and death.
3. “It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun and kill the envious moon, who is already sick and pale with grief”
   More death, sun and moon are more duality linking back to this idea of life and death. East and west. Sun and moon. Life and death.

Question 4

Love paragraph 3 (showing change)

Answer 4

1. “Like Fire and powder” reflects how Romeo and Juliet’s love was short lived, this quick fire emotion. How love can easily dictate actions.
2. “What is a name” she cuts through a number of patriarchal conventions, reflecting how love conquered reason and dictates human action
3. “Didst request it” rejects the tradition of the father dictating to whom she should be married to making her seem like a scold (girl who was rebellious)