Romeo and juliet

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Romeo and Juliet

Liceo Scientifico Ven. A. Luzzago

Anno scolastico 2010/2011

The play begins with a sonnet, spoken as prologue, where the private emotion of the two lovers are explored in isolation and in relation to their social context, ideas of love, destiny and death.

FIRST ACTThe first act opens in Verona street and covers a whole day, the first of five days in whose the play takes place. Is composed of a series of dialogues about the courtly love, linked to the melancholy, holy devotion and idealization of the object of desire. It ends with the scene of the masque and the meting of the two main characters: Romeo, the son of Lord Montague, the head of a family that is gripped in a bloody feud with the Capulets, and Juliet the daughter of Lord Capulets.

SECOND ACTIs concentrates on the development of the relationship between the two lovers. It ends with a ceremony: the secret wedding of the two characters, celebrated in the chapel by Friar Laurence.

THE PLOT

THIRD ACTThe central act; the longest one that can be divided in two parts: the public events, concentrated in the first scene , full of action an movement, and the private events .

FOURTH ACTThe preparatory act to the final tragedy. The deviation of information creates a division of the characters in two parts, each living a different story. Only Fiar Lawrence and Juliet share both.

FIFTH ACTComposed by three scenes.The first breaks the unity of place, moving from Verona to Matua, where Romeo has gone after the banishment from Verona for killing Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin. In the last scene Romeo finds Juliet’s sleeping body in the family tomb after she has drunk a potion and he believes that she is dead. He decides to kill himself, then Juliet wakes up from her sleep. Out of fear and love she insert a dagger into her heart with the famous line " Oh happy dagger”. The death of the couple ends the feud between their families

Romeo, the young heir of the Montagues, attends the great ball of the Capulets and falls in love with Juliet, the daughter of the house, at first sight. Romeo turns out to be the prototype of the platonic lover.

THE LIGHT Love is one of the most important

aspect in Romeo and Juliet. In The Masque whe he first sees Juliet, he compares her to the brilliant light of the tourches that illuminate Capulet’s great hall. Juliet is the light that frees him from the darkness of his perpetual melancholy .

THE MASQUE

In the Balcony Scene associates Juliet with the sunlight, the daylight and the light emanating from angels. In turn, Juliet compares their new found love to the lightning, mainly to reveal the speed at which their romance is moving, but also to suggest that, as the lightning is a break in the blackness sky, so their love is a flash in a dark world. In the second act the darkness becomes one of the central images. The final indication that darkness has triumphed over light comes from the last act when Romeo finds his love lying in the tomb.

ROMEO

Romeo is the synonymous of lover and in the play he loves in a pure and passionate way, but Romeo’s character is not just a lover he’s far more complex. We can see that Romeo’s love matures during the play, from the simple desire to and intense passion. Romeo lacks of capacity of moderation: love compels him to risk his life entering the garden just to see Juliet; desperation compels him to suicide when he hears about Juliet’s death. Besides he’s clever, loyal and unafraid of danger.

JULIET We meet Juliet as thirteen years old girls, obedient,

sheltered and not mature yet. We can understand from his indecision about who she really loves, how childish she is at the beginning of the play. She has no friend of her own so it’s not easy for her to talk about sex. During the play she turns into adult and shows great determination and strength. Even if she is deeply in love she doesn’t follow Romeo blindly. She becomes a loyal, capable and mature woman. When she wakes in the tomb and find Romeo dead, she demonstrates much more courage than him.

“…Shakespearian scholar, A.C. Bradley, went so far as to neglect the play entirely in his well-known collection of lectures on the great tragedies, Shakespearian Tragedies.”

Romeo and Juliet is characterised by elements both of comedy and tragedy:

It begins as a comedy (the instant attraction of the two lovers, the masked ball, the comic servants). It’s different from conventional comedies because in the end knowledge is not for everybody, but only for the characters who has suffered and, even then, not completely.

It is a tragedy because of the role of chances; the heroes of the play must fight against external forces that make their relationships difficult, but unlike the great tragic heroes they lack inner struggle.

COMEDY OR TRAGEDY?

THE LACK OF KNOWLEDGECREATES THE TRAGIC FINALE

The lack of knowledge, which necessarily derives from bad communication, is a main theme. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of not knowing and unawarness; it cannot be summed up as the tragedy of old hat or young love, since the tragic final destruction results from a pattern whcich incluedes elementspf chance and the more pervading one of misinformation.

This is the famous Balcony Scene, where the two lovers declare their love to each other. While Romeo praises Juliet’s beauty with images in the style of the courtly tradition, Juliet turns out to be an unconventional character.

CURIOSITIES Envious moon (line 4) the

goddess of virginity, Diana (the moon personified), is envious of the fair Juliet. Romeo implores Juliet not to be in Diana’s service; thus, not to remain virgin.

THE BALCONY SCENE

Sick and green (line 8) some scholars read this passage as pale and green (a common expression in the play) and claimed that it should be referred to the uniform worn by Henry VIII’s court jester –white and green. Thus, her vestal livery is the garb of a fool and therefore this interpretation would also explain the reference to fools in the line below.

The brightness of her cheek…it were not night (line 19-22) it is one of the most glorious comparison of Juliet as light. We find the imagery of Juliet’s eyes pouring forth brilliant cosmic beams of light that burst through the clouds and fool the birds into believing it is day.

IMPORTANCE OF NAMES AND LANGUAGE “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

Deny thy father and refuse thy name,Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,

And I’ll no longer be a Capulet”

Leaning out of the window, unaware that Romeo is below in the orchard, she asks why Romeo must be Romeo –Why he must be a Montague, the son of her family’s greatest enemy. She asks him to deny his family for her love. She adds, however, that if he will not, she will deny her family in order to be with him if he merely tells her that he loves her.

`Tis but thy name that is my enemy…belonging to a man (line 27-30) A major theme is the tension between social and family identity. Juliet believes the feud between the houses is the result of a superficial identity, based only on names, for this reason she thinks this name can be denied and that her love overrides her family’s hatred for the Montague name.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose…take all myself (line 31-37) She says that if Romeo were not called Romeo or Montague, he would still be the person she loves. Therefore she reflects upon the relationship between a name and what it stands for.

JULIET’S TENDENCY TO REALISM She shows a tendency to realism in her use of

language. Though she is set within the courtly love convention, she belongs to no idealisation: she is a real woman. She’s aware of loving Romeo and finds an obstacle in his name, therefore she reflects upon the symbolical order of language and links to realty in order to face and overcome it.

Both Romeo and Juliet struggle to maintain an imaginary world void of time in the face of the harsh realities that surround them. From the very beginning, the lovers are designated as star-cross’d referring to an astrologic belief associated with time. Stars were thought to control the fates of humanity, and as time passed, stars would move along their course in the sky, also charting the course of human lives below.

Romeo and Juliet fight time to make their love last forever. In the end, the only way they seem to defeat time is through a death that makes them immortal through art.

Time is also connected to the theme of light and dark. In Shakespeare's day, plays were often performed at noon in broad daylight. This forced the playwright to use words to create the illusion of day and night in his plays. Shakespeare uses references to the night and day, the stars, the moon, and the sun to create this illusion. All in all, no fewer than 103 references to time are found in the play, adding to the illusion of its passage.

THE TIME