Romeo & Juliet

Many people consider a tragedy to be a play or story, which includes an element of death and disaster, the play Romeo and Juliet fits into this category. With their fate already mapped out, Shakespeare ends the secret love affair of Romeo and Juliet with their deaths. The tragedy has a didactic purpose; Shakespeare wants the audience to learn how to avoid making the same mistakes as the characters.

Shakespeare cleverly begins the play with a prologue, which sets the scene for the rest of the play. The prologue tells us about an “ancient grudge” between two families and how only the deaths of “star-crossed lovers”, one from each enemy, could end the feud. This brief revelation of the plot of the play allows the audience to concentrate on how and what led to the two lovers deaths instead of a surprise ending with death. The fact that the prologue is written as a sonnet emphasises the theme of love. A sonnet typically uses very elaborate and poetic language and this can be seen in the prologue, such as “their death-marked love”. However this also creates a theme of violence and death, which carries on throughout the rest of the play by mentioning “civil blood makes civil hands unclean” and “their parents rage”, it sets the scene for the rest of the play.

The opening scene of the play is in complete contrast to the prologue. We go from a sonnet describing love in very elaborate and poetic language to the coarse and sexual language of two servants. This extreme contrast grabs the attention and interest of the audience straight away. The scene begins with two servants of the Capulet’s basically “egging each other on” to fight the enemy. Sampson, the seemingly more hot headed of the two, brags about being “in choler” and that he will “draw” his sword in order to defend the Capulet’s. Gregory, on the other hand, is much more sensible and in response to Sampson’s claimed bravery states that “to move is to stir, and to be valiant is to stand: therefore if thou art move thou runn’st away”. There is also a lot of sexual language used, particularly by Sampson, he declares hat he “will be civil with the maids: I will cut off their heads”. At the time the play was written, an Elizabethan audience would have found this coarse, sexual language and the puns hilarious.

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The arrival of two of the Montague’s servants puts Sampson and Gregory’s boasting of their superiority to the test. Once again, Shakespeare injects humour into the scene by the servants biting their thumbs to one another and sarcastically repeating “Sir”. The heated argument soon turns into a fight and brings about a lot of action onto the stage. In comparison to the prologue, the stage would now be filled with commotion; Shakespeare purposely uses this busy visual effect to increase the interest of the audience.

The entrance of Benvolio into the play is very different to that of Tybalt. The ...

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