Romeo and Juliet

PLOT:

Romeo and Juliet is a play about the conflict between the main
characters’ love, with its transformative power, and the darkness, hatred, and
selfishness represented by their families’ feud. The two teenaged lovers, Romeo
and Juliet, fall in love the first time they see each other, but their families’ feud
requires they remain enemies. Over the course of the play the lovers’ powerful
desires directly clash with their families’ equally powerful hatred of each other.
Initially, we may expect that the lovers will prove the unifying force that unites
the families. Were the play a comedy, the families would see the light of reason
and resolve their feud, Romeo and Juliet would have a public wedding, and
everyone would live happily ever after. But the Montague-Capulet feud is too
powerful for the lovers to overcome. The world of the play is an imperfect
place, where freedom from everything except pure love is an unrealistic goal.
Ultimately, the characters love does resolve the feud, but at the price of their
lives.

Romeo and Juliet begin the play trapped by their social roles. Romeo is a
young man who is expected to chase women, but he has chosen Rosaline, who
has sworn to remain a virgin. The way Romeo speaks about Rosaline suggests
he is playing a role rather than feeling true, overpowering emotion. He
expresses his frustration in clichés that make his cousin Benvolio laugh at him.
Romeo is also expected to be excited by the feud with the Capulets, but Romeo
finds the feud as miserable as his love: “O brawling love, O loving hate” (1.1.).
When we meet Juliet she is in her bedroom, physically trapped between her
Nurse and her mother. As a young woman her role is to obediently wait for her
parents to marry her to someone. When her mother announces that Paris will be
Juliet’s future husband, Juliet’s response is obedient, but unenthusiastic: “I’ll
look to like, if looking liking move.” (1.3). These early scenes reveal Romeo
and Juliet’s characters, and introduce the themes of love, sex, and marriage that
dominate the remainder of the play.

The incident which sets the plot in motion is Romeo’s decision to attend
the Capulets’ party. This decision is Romeo’s first attempt to free himself from
the role that confines him. Benvolio has advised him to get over Rosaline by
checking out other women. By going to the Capulets’ home, Romeo is also
temporarily ignoring his social role as a Montague who must feud with the
Capulets. Unfortunately, Tybalt sees Romeo’s presence as an “intrusion” and
swears revenge: “this intrusion shall, / Now seeming sweet, convert to bitt’rest
gall” (1.5.). Tybalt’s anger raises the stakes for Romeo’s presence at the party,
and foreshadows their eventual duel. In the very next line after Tybalt’s exit,
Romeo and Juliet meet. Now Romeo has equally high stakes for staying at the
party as for leaving. If he stays he risks Tybalt’s further wrath, but if he leaves,
he won’t get to spend more time with Juliet. He risks his life for love,
establishing the high stakes of the lovers’ relationship. When Romeo and Juliet
talk, they reinforce the extraordinariness of their new love by using the religious
language of “pilgrims,” “saints,” and “prayers,” suggesting their love will
escapes earthly limitations.

After the party, Romeo returns to find Juliet. Their love gives both lovers
a sense of freedom. Romeo feels like he is flying with “love’s light wings”
(2.2). Juliet feels that her love is “as boundless as the sea” (2.2). She believes
that love can liberate them both from their families: “be but sworn my love /
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet” (2.2.). In the next scene we meet Friar
Lawrence, who reminds us that however good something seems, it can never be
entirely untainted by evil: “Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied” (2.3). By
the end of the scene, however, even Friar Lawrence is swept up in the lovers’
excitement. He believes their love can end the Montague-Capulet feud, and he
agrees to marry them. The next few scenes are more like a Shakespearean
comedy than a tragedy. Mercutio and the Nurse make bawdy jokes. Romeo and
Juliet come up with a cunning plan to get married under their parents’ noses. It
seems as if the feud between their families really might end. At the end of Act
Two, the lovers marry.

No sooner are the lovers happily married than the play shifts from
comedy to tragedy. Tybalt still seeks revenge for Romeo’s decision to attend the
Capulets’ ball. Romeo, believing himself freed from the feud by his secret
marriage to Juliet, refuses to fight Tybalt. But Romeo’s freedom is an illusion.
Tybalt provokes Mercutio and Mercutio challenges him. They fight, and
Mercutio dies. Now Romeo’s duty to his new in-laws, the Capulets, comes in
conflict with his duty to avenge his friend’s death. Romeo kills Tybalt.
Although he was provoked into the murder, and would have been killed had he
not killed first, he is no longer an innocent, blameless character. It now seems
unlikely that Romeo and Juliet will be able to live happily together. Romeo is
banished from Verona. Before he leaves, he and Juliet spend their first—and
last—night together. The scene is bittersweet and moving because they know
they will soon be parted, and the audience understands this may be the last
moment the lovers see each other alive. At dawn, both Romeo and Juliet try to
believe that morning hasn’t come, since the new day brings nothing but grief:
“More light and light, more dark and dark our woes” (3.5).

In the final scenes, Romeo and Juliet are more trapped than ever. Neither
character can go back to who they were before they met, but the possibility of
them being together is very slim. The situation feels impossible, and reality
intrudes on all sides. For Romeo, reality takes the form of his banishment to
Mantua. For Juliet, reality is her impending marriage Paris. The two lovers’
separate fates close in on them. In a desperate attempt to escape her marriage to
Paris, Juliet fakes her own death, using a sleeping potion given to her by Friar
Lawrence. Reality intrudes once more in an outbreak of plague in Mantua,
which prevents Romeo from getting the news that Juliet’s only asleep. Romeo
rushes to Juliet’s tomb, where he finds Paris. Romeo, surrendering to the
circumstances that have trapped him in his tragic role, kills Paris, then enters
Juliet’s tomb and kills himself moments before she wakes. When Juliet finds
Romeo dead, she stabs herself with his dagger. By killing themselves, the lovers
accept that they are trapped by their fate. At the same time, they escape from the
world that has kept them apart.

GENRE:

Romeo and Juliet is officially classified as a tragedy, but in some respects

the play deviates from the tragic genre. Unlike other Shakespearean tragedies
such as Macbeth, King Lear, and Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet is not
concerned with a noble character whose actions have widespread consequence.
Instead, the story describes the love between two ordinary teenagers. Another
important way Romeo and Juliet deviates from other Shakespearean tragedies is
that the main characters cannot be said to make a fatal error that leads to their
demise. Not only does Romeo and Juliet deviate in many ways from the tragic
genre, the first two acts of the play are structured much more like a comedy

Like all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Romeo and Juliet is written mostly in

blank verse. Shakespeare preferred to use verse when he was tackling serious
themes, like the themes in Romeo and Juliet of doomed love, feuding, suicide,
and death.

Setting:

It is genrally believed that the play is based on a rral Italian Love story
from the 3rd Century. The real families are the Capeletti and The Montecci
families.

Shakespeare wrote his verion in 1594 which was based on Arthur

Brooke”s poem of 1562.

This period was ”The Elizabethan Era-which was also known as ” The
Renaissance”. A time of signigicant change in the fields of religion, politics,
science, language and the arts. R&J was set during a very religious period.

-It was a ”chatolic” society with a strong belief in damnation for mortal
sin.

-Suicide and bigamy were both considered to be mortal sins.

-Shakespeare was writing following ”THE Refornation”. This was when

England became a protestant nation, having broken away from papal control by
Henry VIII.

-Society became more open and less oppressed.

-Many Shakespeare plays show conflict between parents and children.

-The father was the undisputed head of the household

-Women had no rights or authority in law and they could not own
property or money but could influence their husbands.

-It was not unusual to be married very young.

-In high society, children were often raised by a wet nurse and did not
have a strong bond with parents.

-Courttly love-is about behaviour at court in the royal household. It

should be: Polite, Restrained, Intellectual, Courteous.

-Romeo refers to Julliet as a ”saint” & a ”goddess” -she id neither.