Romeo and juliet:points Flashcards
dreams as a motif
Shakespeare links Romeo’s feelings of love to a dream-like state, reinforcing the sense of transience and magic of the play.
Romeo: O blessed, blessed night! I am afeard.
Being in night, all this is but a dream,
Shakespeare utilises the motif of dreams to create a sense of tragic inevitability; Juliet’s vision of Romeo dead foreshadows the tragic consequences of their love.
Juliet: O God, I have an ill-divining soul!
Methinks I see thee, now thou art below,
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb:
Either my eyesight fails, or thou look’st pale.
Shakespeare employs Romeo’s soliloquy at the start of Act 5, before he finds out about Juliet’s ‘death’ to create pathos for the character.
Romeo: I dreamt my lady came and found me dead
And breathed such life with kisses in my lips,
fate
Structurally, Shakespeare’s use of the chorus creates a sense of tragic inevitability about the events of the play, using prolepsis to reinforce the idea that the lovers are not only fated to die, they are already dead.
Shakespeare uses the motif of stars in order to reinforce the sense of cosmic irony; the lovers are fated to die, and the audience is never allowed to forget this, imbuing the whole play with a powerful dramatic irony.
Shakespeare makes use of dreams and visions of death to create a sense of how Romeo and Juliet’s love is fated to be fatal. (Romeo, at the end of the scene suggests he is ‘fortune’s fool’ but in fact it is the male obsession with the honour code that has caused Mercutio’s death and his banishment. He says ‘Juliet, they beauty hath made me effeminate, and in my temper soften valour’s steel’
Likewise, Capulet’s need for Juliet to be ‘ruled in all things by me, nay more’ means that his pure paternal love is corrupted by his obsession with his need to be obeyed as the family patriarch; it is arguably his movement away from giving Juliet a ‘scope of choice’ which means she is forced to execute her desperate plan, which results in her death. )
friendship
Shakespeare presents the friendship between Romeo and Friar Lawrence and The Nurse and Juliet, as comment on the breakdown of parent-child relationships in the text.
Shakespeare explores how Romantic love is presented as a threat to homosocial friendships in the text, through Benvolio and Mercutio’s response to Romeo’s love for Rosaline.
Shakespeare presents male friendships as governed by ideas of male honour.
c Montaigne( renaissance philosopher) posits friendship as possibly the highest human good, a spiritual endeavor. “Friendship,” he says, “is enjoyed…proportionally as it is desired; and only grows up, is nourished and improved by enjoyment, as being itself spiritual, and the soul growing still more refined by practice.”
lord capulet
In Act 1 Scene 2 Shakespeare presents Lord Capulet as a protective father to Juliet, who would have been recognisably progressive to an Elizabethan audience.
However, at this point in the play Capulet is presented as a loving father in the way that he describes Juliet.
love romeo(satire)
Shakespeare presents how romantic love comes across as a childish fantasy through Romeo’s obsession with Rosaline, in order to satirise the conventions of courtly love, which had been revived in the Elizabethan period amongst members of the aristocracy
OR
Shakespeare introduces the theme of love in a comedic way, through Romeo’s courtly unrequited love for Rosaline, as Shakespeare mocks this artificial convention of love. Romeo’s desperate assertion ‘O brawling love, o loving hate’
Whilst it is evident that courtly love is being satirised through Romeo’s obsession with Rosaline at the start of the play, it is more ambiguous as to if Shakespeare is inviting his audience to understand R’s relationship with Juliet as a departure from this childish fantasy or an extension of it.
Shakespeare also explores how romantic love is perceived as a threat to the homosocial bonds of the male characters, which may have resonated with an Early Modern audience who celebrated male friendship with essays such as ‘On Friendship’ by Montaigne written on the subject.
mercutio
Mercutio was not an original character in the Arthur Brooke. It seems that Shakespeare has written him into the play, both to create a sense of comic, physical and sexual energy but also a foil to Romeo, as Mercutio believes that ‘dreamers often lie’.
The peripeteia of the play is based on an issue of male honour. Mercutio is both instigator and victim of the fight, which leads to Romeo killing Tybalt and the events leading to the lovers’ deaths. Structurally, when Mercutio dies, the comedy of the play dies, as up until this point, the play has fulfilled many of the generic conventions of tragedy, such as young lovers defying their parents’ wishes, and a series of bawdy jokes.
love
Shakespeare celebrates Romantic love, through his use of the sonnet form in the dialogue between Romeo and Juliet in their first meeting.
However, through the unseen character of Rosaline, Shakespeare arguably presents Romeo as an insincere, foolish young lover, satirising young love and presenting it as leading to the shared hamartia of Romeo and Juliet.
Finally, Shakespeare presents secondary characters such as Mercutio or the nurse as character foils to Romeo, as a way of offering an alternative, more physical view of love. Romeo’s meeting with Juliet is framed by their depictions of worldly love, and their love and language stands out as more elevated because of this.
