Romeo & Juliet - The Complete Play with Annotations, Audio and Knowledge Organisers

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Audiences are introduced to Romeo as a character who understands the connections between love and hate

Comment on the contrasting imagery in the poem. What purpose does it serve in highlighting the intensity of love? Known to the Elizabethans as ague, Malaria was a common malady spread by the mosquitoes in the marshy Thames. The swampy theatre district of Southwark was always at risk. King James I had it; so too did Shakespeareï¿&fraq12;s friend, Michael Drayton. Read on... According to Romeo, Juliet seems to hang upon the cheek of night, like a jewelled earring hanging against the cheek of an Ethiopian lady. Juliet is dominant, not submissive : she proposes to Romeo, insisting he take the marriage seriously Juliet tells audiences she would rather die than be forced to marry Paris, presenting the strength of her emotions to marry on her own terms

Karnataka 2nd PUC English Textbook Answers Springs Chapter 1 Romeo and Juliet

The Prologue dooms the “star-cross’d lovers”, asking audiences to watch events unfold and question the role of fate in the tragedy As a prologue to the play, the Chorus enters. In a fourteen-line sonnet, the Chorus describes two noble households (called “houses”) in the city of Verona. The houses hold an “ancient grudge” (Prologue.2) against each other that remains a source of violent and bloody conflict. The Chorus states that from these two houses, two “star-crossed” (Prologue.6) lovers will appear. These lovers will mend the quarrel between their families by dying. The story of these two lovers, and of the terrible strife between their families, will be the topic of this play.

Shakespeare situates this maturation directly after Juliet’s wedding night, linking the idea of development from childhood to adulthood with sexual experience. Indeed, Juliet feels so strong that she defies her father, but in that action she learns the limit of her power. Strong as she might be, Juliet is still a woman in a male-dominated world. One might think that Juliet should just take her father up on his offer to disown her and go to live with Romeo in Mantua. That is not an option. Juliet, as a woman, cannot leave society; and her father has the right to make her do as he wishes. Though defeated by her father, Juliet does not revert to being a little girl. She recognizes the limits of her power and, if another way cannot be found, determines to use it: for a woman in Verona who cannot control the direction of her life, suicide, the brute ability to live or not live that life, can represent the only means of asserting authority over the self.As the play was written for Queen Elizabeth I , Shakespeare could be mirroring her own challenges within forbidden relationships The friar’s dialogue refers to nature as opposing forces present in all things: good and evil, light and dark, love and hate, religion and magic, old and young