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What does Juliet mean when she tells Romeo that he "kiss[es]" by the book" (1.5.110.2)? Why does Lady Capulet compare Paris's face to a book of love poetry when she instructs Juliet to "read over the volume of [his] face" at the Capulet ball (1.3.82)? What are the implications of such a comparison?
Individuals vs. Society. New! Understand every line of Romeo and Juliet. Read our modern English translation. LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Romeo and Juliet, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. When Romeo and Juliet fall in love, their individual desire for each other—which flies in the face of ...
Romeo and Juliet is one of seven plays Shakespeare set in Renaissance Italy, a setting he used to present a freer society than Elizabethan England. In fact, Shakespeare set only one play (The Merry Wives of Windsor) in contemporary England. While England was a single kingdom with a hereditary monarch, Italy was a patchwork of city-states, each ...
Romeo and Juliet are the heroes of the story despite their age and inexperience. Romeo and Juliet is also culturally relevant due to its popularity. Most people are aware of the story even if they ...
- The Forcefulness of Love
- Love as A Cause of Violence
- The Individual Versus Society
- The Inevitability of Fate
- Love
- Sex
- Violence
- Youth
- Fate
Romeo and Juliet is the most famous love story in the English literary tradition. Love is naturally the play’s dominant and most important theme. The play focuses on romantic love, specifically the intense passion that springs up at first sight between Romeo and Juliet. In Romeo and Juliet,love is a violent, ecstatic, overpowering force that supers...
The themes of death and violence permeate Romeo and Juliet, and they are always connected to passion, whether that passion is love or hate. The connection between hate, violence, and death seems obvious. But the connection between love and violence requires further investigation. Love, in Romeo and Juliet,is a grand passion, and as such, it is blin...
Much of Romeo and Julietinvolves the lovers’ struggles against public and social institutions that either explicitly or implicitly oppose the existence of their love. Such structures range from the concrete to the abstract: families and the placement of familial power in the father; law and the desire for public order; religion; and the social impo...
In its first address to the audience, the Chorus states that Romeo and Juliet are “star-crossed”—that is to say that fate (a power often vested in the movements of the stars) controls them (Prologue.6). This sense of fate permeates the play, and not just for the audience. The characters also are quite aware of it: Romeo and Juliet constantly see om...
Given that Romeo and Julietrepresents one of the world’s most famous and enduring love stories, it seems obvious that the play should spotlight the theme of love. However, the play tends to focus more on the barriers that obstruct love than it does on love itself. Obviously, the Capulet and Montague families represent the lovers’ largest obstacle. ...
The themes of love and sex are closely linked in Romeo and Juliet, though the precise nature of their relationship remains in dispute throughout. For instance, in Act I Romeo talks about his frustrated love for Rosaline in poetic terms, as if love were primarily an abstraction. Yet he also implies that things didn’t work out with Rosaline because s...
Due to the ongoing feud between the Capulets and the Montagues, violence permeates the world of Romeoand Juliet.Shakespeare demonstrates how intrinsic violence is to the play’s environment in the first scene. Sampson and Gregory open the play by making jokes about perpetrating violent acts against members of the Montague family. And when Lord Monta...
Romeo and Juliet are both very young, and Shakespeare uses the two lovers to spotlight the theme of youth in several ways. Romeo, for instance, is closely linked to the young men with whom he roves the streets of Verona. These young men are short-tempered and quick to violence, and their rivalries with opposing groups of young men indicate a phenom...
The theme of ill-fated love frames the story of Romeo and Juliet from the beginning. During the Prologue, before the play officially commences, the Chorus makes several allusions to fate, including the famous reference to Romeo and Juliet as a “pair of star-crossed lovers.” Shakespeare coined the term “star-crossed,” which means “not favored by the...
Mar 2, 2021 · The logic of Juliet’s almost instant disobedience in looking at, and liking, Romeo (rather than Paris) can be understood as the ironic fulfillment of the fears in traditional patriarchal culture about the uncontrollability of female desire, the alleged tendency of the female gaze to wander.
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Mercutio. Romeo ’s best friend and kinsman to Prince Escalus. Mercutio is one of the play’s most dynamic and complex characters. Wild, frenetic, easygoing, and fun-loving, Mercutio’s manic energy, rambling stories, and razor-sharp wit masks… read analysis of Mercutio. "My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have ...
