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How dose Shakespeare make this extract from Act 1 Scene 5 a dramatic and significant moment in the play Romeo and Juliet

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Introduction

How dose Shakespeare make this extract from Act 1 Scene 5 a dramatic and significant moment in the play Romeo and Juliet? Romeo and Juliet is an Elizabethan tragedy set in the Italian city of Verona, written by Shakespeare around 1591 and is one of the most famous plays of the time. In Act 1 Scene 5, the Lord Capulet is throwing a party in order for his daughter, Juliet, to fall in love with a man named Paris. Romeo is in love with a girl called Rosaline and has discovered that she has been invited to Lord Capulet's party and also discovers that his cousin, Mercutio, has also been invited. This scene is one of the most important in the play, it is when Romeo and Juliet first meet and we see love in the midst between them. Shakespeare makes this scene dramatic and significant by using many different techniques, for example, developing themes already seen in earlier scenes as we already know that there is tension between the two houses, the use of metaphor, sonnet, religion and the belief of the times. Throughout the act Shakespeare Writes in heroic couplets which is a poem constructed from a sequence of rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter "O, She doth teach the torches to burn bright! ...read more.

Middle

Tybalt is shown to be choleric, Mercutio is Sanguine and Romeo is shown to be Melancholic at times. Shakespeare spent most of his career working for Lord Chamberlain's Men playing company. The company was founded in 1594 and had an all male acting cast. The all male cast may sound humorous to us but the Elizabethans did not let women act in plays, so they would have been accustomed to this. This may have affected the staging of the play however, because Romeo and Juliet is a romantic story it may have been harder for the audience to take it as seriously and as they should if they had two men acting it out compared to a man and a woman. In Elizabethan times society was very different compared to that of today. The rolls of women had changed drastically over the years. They were raised to believe that they were inferior to men. The two main religions in Elizabethan England were Roman Catholics or Protestants, but in Italy, were this play is set, the religion followed would have been Roman Catholicism. The beliefs of these religions were so strong that they could have led to executions. ...read more.

Conclusion

Shakespeare uses sonnet form to show how perfectly in tune Romeo and Juliet are for each other. Shakespeare uses many other literary techniques such as oxymorons. The majority of Romeo and Juliet is about opposites clashing, so oxymorons would be appropriate in this play. An example of this is; "What, goodman boy!" on saying this Lord Capulet is saying that Tybalt is being childish over Romeo coming to the party and they he should just enjoy the night. "To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss" the words rough and tender make this phrase an antithesis with is another style adopted by Shakespeare in the play In conclusion I think that Shakespeare made the plot of this scene very dramatic and significant by using a variation of language techniques. Shakespeare would have wanted this scene to be eye catching because the entire play revolves around this scene. He created anxiety by using many religious images. Tension was created with the help from previous scenes; we already knew that the two houses had a dislike with each other, we also know that Juliet is going to find out that Romeo is a Montague, this also creates tension in the audience as they do not know what will happen when Juliet finds out. ?? ?? ?? ?? Kiran Atwall 5B 28/09/08 ...read more.

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