An Exploration of the ways Shakespeare dramatises the teenage experience in Romeo and Juliet

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English HWK

An Exploration of the ways Shakespeare dramatises the teenage experience in Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeare’s portrayal of teenage experience in Romeo and Juliet is one of the most well known and often imitated in existence, and this is because of how well he captures some of it’s aspects – the idea of first love, isolation and rebellion – but with enough melodrama and exaggeration to make it the basis for entertainment on stage. Despite being written nearly half a millennia ago, Shakespeare’s play is still studied in schools today because so much of the subject matter is still relevant – the star crossed lovers are as much at home in modern Miami in Baz Luhrman’s film adaptation as they are in feudal Verona – and while the details may have changed, Romeo and Juliet would lead us to conclude that teenage experience in particular has many of the same elements now as it did in Shakespearean times.

        Romeo and Juliet are a pair of love-struck teenagers trapped between their desire to be together and the long and bloody feud between their families. However the play begins as Romeo is pining for another girl he professes to be in love with, Rosaline.

She represents the petrarchan ideal; an unattainable woman Romeo idolises and rarefies, who his love for is unrequited – a direct contrast with the immediate mutual amorousness he and Juliet share. Here, Shakespeare chooses to depict teenage love as melodramatic, superficial and fickle. Romeo seems to almost obsess over Rosaline, though only upon her good looks and the fact that she has decided to ‘remain chaste’ despite his advances upon her.  In scene one of Act one, Romeo bombards Benvolio with a torrent of oxymorons – “O brawling love, O loving hate!” – to describe the depression and emotional turmoil his love for Rosaline is causing inside him, a girl whom he barely knows but says is “…rich in beauty”. Romeo describes being in love as being a weight upon him, in act one scene one love is a “heavy lightness” and a “feather of lead”, and then in scene four before entering the Capulet’s masked ball he says he has “a soul of lead”. In spite of this, later when he sneaks into the Capulet’s garden to see Juliet, he describes himself as having “love’s light wings” further contrasting his love for Juliet against his previous feelings for Rosaline, showing this is a different, higher form of love.

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In a moment of male camaraderie, Mercutio jokes with Romeo, implying the heavy weight he feels is that which lovers feel on each other during intercourse, and suggests he “borrow cupid’s wings”.  After he meets Juliet the language he uses changes, and becomes far less coarse and less fraught with innuendo – later, they talk in sonnet and rhyme each other’s lines in order to show there is a deeper connection between them.

As they share their first kiss, both Romeo and Juliet’s speech becomes rich with religious imagery “For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, and palm ...

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