Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare., Sintesi del corso di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare. e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! ROMEO AND JULIET BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Shakespeare’s play about the doomed romance of two teenagers from feuding families is the most famous love story ever written. His tragic drama was written in 1590 and first performed around 1596. PLOT The play which is set in Verona is a story about a long feud between the Montague and Capulet families. This feud causes tragic results for the main characters in the play, Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet fall in love at a party. But they come from families which hate each other. They are sure they will not be allowed to marry. Nevertheless, helped by Friar Laurence, they marry in secret instead. Unfortunately, before their wedding night Romeo kills Juliet's cousin in a duel, and in the morning he is forced to leave her. If he ever returns to the city, he will be put to death. Juliet's parents told her she must marry Paris. Her parents do not know she is already married. She refuses in the beginning, but later agrees because she plans to fake her death and escape to be with Romeo forever; again with the help of Friar Laurence. Frair Laurence designs the plan. He gives Juliet a sleeping potion. She appears to be dead and was put in a tomb. However, Romeo does not know about the plan, visits her grave, thinks she is dead, and kills himself. When Juliet finally wakes up, she discovers that Romeo is dead and then kills herself. THE CHARACTERS ROMEO The son of Montague and Lady Montague. A young man of about sixteen, Romeo is handsome, intelligent, and sensitive. Though impulsive and immature, his idealism and passion make him an extremely likable character. He lives in the middle of a violent feud between his family and the Capulets, but he is not at all interested in violence. His only interest is love. At the beginning of the play he is madly in love with a woman named Rosaline, but the instant he lays eyes on Juliet, he falls in love with her and forgets Rosaline. Thus, Shakespeare gives us every reason to question how real Romeo’s new love is, but Romeo goes to extremes to prove the seriousness of his feelings. He secretly marries Juliet, the daughter of his father’s worst enemy; he happily takes abuse from Tybalt; and he would rather die than live without his beloved. Romeo is also an affectionate and devoted friend to his relative Benvolio, Mercutio, and Friar Lawrence. Yet Romeo’s deep capacity for love is merely a part of his larger capacity for intense feeling of all kinds. Put another way, it is possible to describe Romeo as lacking the capacity for moderation. JULIET Juliet is of an age that stands on the border between immaturity and maturity. At the play’s beginning however she seems merely an obedient and naïve child. When Lady Capulet mentions Paris’s interest in marrying Juliet, Juliet dutifully responds that she will try to see if she can love him, a response that seems childish in its obedience and in its immature conception of love. Juliet gives glimpses of her determination and strength in her earliest scenes, and offers a preview of the woman she will become during the four-day span of Romeo and Juliet. Juliet’s first meeting with Romeo propels her full-force toward adulthood. Though profoundly in love with him, Juliet is able to see and criticize Romeo’s rash decisions and his tendency to romanticize things. After Romeo kills Tybalt and is banished, she makes a logical decision that her loyalty and love for Romeo must be her guiding priorities. Essentially, Juliet cuts herself loose from her nurse, her parents and her social position in Verona, in order to try to reunite with Romeo. Juliet’s development from a wide-eyed girl into a loyal and capable woman is one of Shakespeare’s triumphs of characterization. It also marks one of his most confident and rounded treatments of a female character. FRIAR LAWRENCE Friar Lawrence occupies a strange position in Romeo and Juliet. He is a kindhearted cleric who helps Romeo and Juliet throughout the play. He performs their marriage and gives generally good advice, especially in regard to the need for moderation. He is the sole figure of religion in the play. But Friar Lawrence is also the most scheming and political of characters in the play: he marries Romeo and Juliet as part of a plan to end the civil strife in Verona; he spirits Romeo into Juliet’s room and then out of Verona; he devises the plan to reunite Romeo and Juliet through the deceptive ruse of a sleeping potion that seems to arise from almost mystic knowledge. This mystical knowledge seems out of place for a Catholic friar. In addition, though Friar Lawrence’s plans all seem well conceived and well intentioned, they serve as the main mechanisms through which the fated tragedy of the play occurs. MERCUTIO Mercutio’s “Queen Mab” speech introduces us to an important aspect of his character. He is a cynical realist who finds dreams and fantasies ridiculous. Throughout the play Mercutio makes fun of Romeo’s fantasy of perfect romantic love, which invites the audience to question the seriousness and maturity of Romeo’s feelings for Juliet. Mercutio makes fun of Romeo for using language drawn from the love poetry that was popular in Shakespeare’s day. He draws attention to the fact that Romeo’s romantic language is clichéd. Mercutio believes that love is grounded in sexual desire. When Romeo makes the romantic gesture of breaking into the Capulets’ garden to see Juliet, Mercutio calls after him that his real motive is not romantic but sexual. With his clever mind, Mercutio is one of the most memorable characters in all of Shakespeare’s works. Mercutio loves wordplays, especially sexual double entendres, and hates people who are affected or obsessed with the latest fashions. He finds Romeo’s ideas about love tiresome, and tries to convince Romeo to view love as a simple matter of sexual appetite. Though he constantly jokes, sometimes in fun, sometimes with bitterness, Mercutio is not a mere prankster. With his wild words, Mercutio punctures the romantic sentiments and blind self-love that exist within the play. The critic Stephen insists that Romeo has confused his love for Juliet with mere sexual desire. Whereas Mercutio cynically conflates love and sex, Juliet takes a more pious position. In Mercutio’s view, there is no such thing as love, since love is ultimately reducible to sexual desire. Juliet, by contrast, implies that the concepts are distinct and that they exist in a hierarchical relationship, with love standing above sex. This view accords with Catholic doctrine, which privileges the spiritual union of marriage, but also indicates that this union must be legally consummated through sexual intercourse. VIOLENCE Due to the ongoing feud between the Capulets and the Montagues, violence permeates the world of Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare demonstrates how intrinsic violence is to the play’s environment in the first scene. Violence in the play has a particularly significant relationship with sex. Sex and violence are twinned in the events following Romeo and Juliet’s wedding. YOUTH 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. In addition to this association with gangs of youthful men, Shakespeare also depicts Romeo as somewhat immature. Romeo’s speech about Rosaline in the play’s first scene is full of clichéd phrases from love poetry, and Benvolio and Mercutio take turns poking fun at him for this. Whereas we never learn Romeo’s precise age, we know that Juliet is thirteen. Her age comes up early in the play, during conversations about whether or not she’s too young to get married. Although Juliet does not want to marry Paris, she certainly believes herself old enough for marriage. In fact, she yearns for marriage and for sexual experience, and she often uses explicitly erotic language that indicates a maturity beyond her actual years. Yet in spite of this apparent maturity, Juliet also tacitly acknowledges her own youthfulness. When she looks forward to her wedding night, for example, she compares herself to “an impatient child”, reminding the audience that in fact this is what she is. FATE 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 stars,” or “ill-fated.” Although the term may seem primarily metaphorical today, the science of astrology occupied a place of privilege in Renaissance society. Thus, the notion that one’s fate was written in the stars had a more immediate, literal meaning than it does today. Later in the Prologue the Chorus reiterates the idea of fate in referring to Romeo and Juliet’s love as “death-marked,” which once again indicates that, from the very beginning, their desire for one another carry a sign of inevitable death. Shakespeare’s use of the word “marked” here also suggests a physical inscription, alluding to the notion that their fate has been pre-written. Uniting the theme of fate with the play’s structure in this way introduces a sense of dramatic irony, such that the audience will have more insight into the unfolding events than the characters. Watching the characters struggle against an invisible force such as fate heightens the sense of tension throughout the play. It also amplifies the sense of tragedy at the play’s conclusion. In the end, then, mentioning Romeo and Juliet’s fate at the beginning of the play doesn’t spoil the ending. Instead, it locks the audience into a sense of tense anticipation of inescapable tragedy. SYMBOLS POISON In his first appearance, Friar Lawrence remarks that every plant, herb, and stone has its own special properties, and that nothing exists in nature that cannot be put to both good and bad uses. Thus, poison is not intrinsically evil, but is instead a natural substance made lethal by human hands. The sleeping potion he gives Juliet is concocted to cause the appearance of death, not death itself, but through circumstances beyond the Friar’s control, the potion does bring about a fatal result: Romeo’s suicide. As this example shows, human beings tend to cause death even without intending to. Poison symbolizes human society’s tendency to poison good things and make them fatal, just as the pointless Capulet-Montague feud turns Romeo and Juliet’s love to poison. MOTIFS LIGHT AND DARK IMAGERY One of the play’s most consistent visual motifs is the contrast between light and dark, often in terms of night/day imagery. This contrast is not given a particular metaphoric meaning; light is not always good, and dark is not always evil. On the contrary, light and dark are generally used to provide a sensory contrast. One of the more important instances of this motif is Romeo’s meditation on the sun and the moon during the balcony scene, in which Juliet, metaphorically described as the sun, is seen as transforming the night into day. A similar blurring of night and day occurs in the early morning hours after the lovers’ only night together. Romeo, forced to leave for exile in the morning, and Juliet, not wanting him to leave her room, both try to pretend that it is still night, and that the light is actually darkness. ). In Romeo and Juliet , brightness can never be entirely free of darkness, just as the heroes’ love can never be entirely free of their families’ hatred. STYLE Romeo and Juliet has the third-highest number of rhymed lines amongst Shakespeare’s plays. In the play, many of these rhymes appear in fourteen line rhyming poems called sonnets. Both the prologue and the lovers’ first meeting are written as sonnets. In Shakespeare's time, most sonnets were about idealized romantic love, so the sonnets in Romeo and Juliet emphasize that this is a play about romantic ideals. The style of the play both elevates the love between the two characters and modernizes a traditional form of poetry. 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. Because verse is more structured and rule-bound than prose, verse also suits a play about characters who are trapped by fate and social rules. The other reason Shakespeare uses verse in Romeo and Juliet is that he generally uses verse for the speech of high-status characters. Most of the characters in Romeo and Juliet are nobles, so they address each other in verse. Prose in Romeo and Juliet usually marks either comic speech or the speech of low-status characters. The Nurse, Peter and the Musicians usually speak in prose, because they are comic and low-status characters. Mercutio and Romeo mostly use verse, but they often use prose when they are exchanging jokes. Mercutio sometimes uses prose when he is being especially provocative.