The obvious function of the Prologue as introduction to the Verona of Romeo and Juliet can obscure its deeper, more important function. The Prologue does not merely set the scene of Romeo and Juliet; it tells the audience exactly what is going to happen in the play. The Prologue refers to an ill-fated couple with its use of the word star-crossed, which means, literally, against the stars. Stars were thought to control people’s destinies. But the Prologue itself creates this sense of fate by providing the audience with the knowledge that Romeo and Juliet will die even before the play has begun. The audience therefore watches the play with the expectation that it must fulfill the terms set in the Prologue. The structure of the play itself is the fate from which Romeo and Juliet cannot escape.
Conflict interests the audience because they can find it exciting and it shows what it would be like in real life and people like getting into other peoples business. Sampson and Gregory enter Act 1 Scene 1 wearing swords and bucklers. This shows that they are prepared for a fight at any time. They are joking and bragging to each other. When Sampson and Gregory walk past the Montague’s Sampson deliberately provokes Abram by biting his thumb at him. Sampson here is deliberately trying to cause conflict, trying to start a fight and in Shakespearian times biting your thumb at someone was an insult. In this scene it starts off with verbal conflict between the two family’s servants and then escalates to physical conflict as they fight.
Benvolio then gets involved and tries to stop the fighting by telling them that they don’t know what there getting themselves into. Then he has a conversation with Juliet’s cousin Tybalt and Tybalt’s reaction to Benvolio trying to stop the fight is that he expresses how much he loves fighting especially the Montague’s and that he is being a coward if he doesn’t fight. Tybalt represents conflict in the play and the audience knows that when they see him on the stage they know that there is going to be conflict.
It had escalated to the two head of the families Montague and Capulet who both have a great desire to get involved with the conflict because of the past and it symbolizes there great hate for each other.
The Prince of Verona and the citizens break up the fight and the Prince angrily addresses the Montague’s and Capulet’s saying that the city is fed up with there fighting ad that if it happens again they would be killed. He says that fighting three times disturbed the quiet of our streets.
The Prince’s words makes it more interesting to the audience because they now know there has been a long feud between the two families and they know that if they fight again which is likely someone will be killed as a consequence therefore the audience are expecting more conflict to happen.
Shakespeare intends the audience to feel that they are now glued to the play and are anxious to find out whether someone is going to break the Prince’s words.
In Act 3 Scene 5 there is domestic and violent conflict. This is different from Act 1 Scene 1 because in that scene it’s between two families wanting to kill each other and in this scene it is within a family, a father being extremely angry with his daughter. The next part of the scene is in sharp contrast to this quiet, anxious farewell between the two lovers. Both Caplets are vehement as they chastise their daughter when she refuses to marry Paris. They are perplexed and furious over her disobedience. Capulet, whose temper has been shown before, explodes into a violent rage and berates his daughter for her ingratitude. He calls her "young baggage" and "a disobedient wretch" and threatens to disinherit her if she does not obey his commands. The irony is that in her own mind she has already been exiled from her family when Romeo left Verona. Lady Capulet also shows unexpected cruelty. She makes no attempt to sympathize with her daughter or to understand her feelings. Her wicked nature is seen in her plan to poison Romeo and in her preference to see "Juliet married to her grave" rather than to endure Juliet's disobedience to herself and her husband. Capulet enters the scene in quite a cheerful mood but this instantly changes when he hears Juliet’s verdict on Paris. In Shakespearian times daughters were expected to do what there fathers wanted. Juliet is not giving a chance to speak back to her father “speak not reply not, do not answer me”. The audience in Shakespearean times would have taken Capulet’s side because this was unheard of and the wrong thing to do. For a modern audience they would take Juliet’s side and feel sympathy for her.
I think that conflict is very important in Romeo and Juliet because without it the audience wouldn’t be as much involved and may find it boring and not interesting. Love and hatred both equally are just as important in the play as each other and this helps express the different types of conflict. Conflict in this play still appeals to a modern audience because they might want to find out what it would have been like back then and how people were expected to behave but it would not have been as intense as the conflict we see on our screens. Conflict makes good drama and it is still used today.
