Essay on Romeo and Juliet

Submitted By abirnawi
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The love affair of Romeo and Juliet is at the centre of the play against a background of hate, which dominates the Prologue. In this, the ‘star-crossed lovers’ seem tiny and rapidly extinguised in the ‘fearful passage of their death-marked love’. This is young love of ‘children’ - as a coming of age story - and it is also doomed.

The dangerous nature of love is continued when we first hear of Romeo from Benvolio and his father. Romeo is seen to suffer as a typical Petrarchan lover and we would immediately link this to the ‘fearful’ mood of the Prologue. It’s a shock to discover he’s dying of love for Rosaline, which immediately establishes his theatrical vision of himself as the unrequited lover. The semantic field of morning, freshness and spring in ‘fresh morning’s dew’, ‘bud’ and ‘sweet leaves’ highlights his youthfulness and is contrasted with imagery of ‘night’, ‘black’ and ‘portentious’ ‘tears’ which is claustrophobic, suffocating, extinguishing light.

Romeo is isolated, shuts himself in his room ‘steals’ away and ‘makes himself an artificial night’ as if he’s dressing a stage set for a painful love affair. Shakespeare’s own children would have been about thirteen when he wrote Romeo and Juliet, so you could argue this is a pitch perfect rendition of a typical, moody teenager. There’s a theatrical element to it, like his bombastic, hyperbolic speeches that are thick with oxymorons: ‘feather of lead’, ‘brawling love’ ‘loving hate’ where language becomes as tangled as his thought processes. Romeo’s language is full of the semantic field of weight, as if love is a burden pressing him down, in phrases like ‘soul of lead’, ‘love’s heavy burden’. He dramatises the saying ‘love hurts’: saying that it’s ‘rough’ and ‘pricks’. Romeo seems to be in lust rather than love and it’s the unrequited element that’s driving him to distraction, that his lady won’t even ‘ope her lap to saint seducing gold’. This is typical of Carpe Diem love poerty like Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress and Edmund Waller's Go Lovely Rose where the poet urges his lady to sleep with him. Shakespeare seems to be gently mocking Romeo for making bad poetry, imitating the emotions and postures of Petrarch, as theatrical, not true love. Romeo’s big speech ends with the almost comical oxymoron ‘this love feel I that feel no love,’ which implies, this may be ‘no love’ after all. To crown this, Benvolio then laughs at him, making it hard to take him seriously. Romeo’s nature then is to love immoderately and we see this develop dangerously when he meets Juliet and his love is requited.

Initially Juliet is presented as being on the cusp of womanhood but too young to marry. Lady Capulet says ‘my daughter’s of a pretty age’, but Capulet resists. He says ‘my child is yet a stranger in the world’, emphasising her innocence and insists she’s not yet ‘ripe’. This links to the spring-like imagery used for Romeo by his father. Capulet associates his daughter with his ‘hopes’. Juliet is a good and obedient daughter who seems to think of no ‘will’
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