“Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean”
Shows the reader that members of the general public are going to cause harm or even kill (as suggested by the words ‘civil blood’). The prologue gives an insight to the play. From this prologue I have learnt that this play is about two families, who have had a feud between them that has been around for a long time.
The first scene shows evidence of Shakespeare making use of a pun (play on words) to engage the audience’s attention from the beginning. He portrays the verbal violence, which is actually playful, between two friends: Samson and Gregory:
‘Samson: “Gregory, on my word we’ll not carry coals.”
Gregory: “No, for then we should be colliers.”’
The word collier was once used to describe those people who sold coal. The word underlying meaning sometimes was aimed towards the dirtiness of the trade or the collier’s reputation for cheating. The pun plays on both figurative and literal meaning of carry coals.
At the end of the first scene the prince speaks in a blank verse. A blank verse is a verse written in lines of usually ten syllables, without rhyme. The purpose it fulfils in the scene is that it focuses on certain information to show emphasis. For example:
“With purple fountains issuing from your veins.”
In this particular example Shakespeare has used eleven syllables. This example also shows evidence of imagery. The word ‘purple’ refers to blood, as this is the poetic term for it. The word ‘purple fountains’ creates an image of a fountain with gushing water; in this case blood. This itself produces a violent thought. As it mentions the word ‘veins’ and the blood in your veins has a steady flow, yet having the thought of blood gushing through them like a fountain is creating a violent image. The reason the reader feels the word ‘fountain’ is violent is due to the fact of the line of thought that has been created. For example the previous line:
“That quench the fire of your pernicious rage”
This quote shows the word ‘fire’, which represents violence and is an example of the whole theme in the first scene-violence and dark. This would make the readers thought of mind violent and dark too.
In Romeo’s speech in scene one, Shakespeare uses oxymorons. Oxymorons are words that represent opposites such as, hot and cold. In this speech the oxymorons used are:
“Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,”
To further explain one of these: ‘cold fire’ is one oblivious contradiction, because everyone knows that fire is hot. This empathies a point and makes it stand out because you know that they are wrong together.
Shakespeare used a lot of figurative language, in order to bring forward the theme of violence in ‘Romeo and Juliet’. I enjoyed doing research for this essay, as it helped me understand how different styles of writing can be used to bring about different moods, which I think Shakespeare did well in. in this essay, my main focus was on the prologue and act one; here I discussed Shakespeare’s use of puns, blank verse, imagery and so on.
