One of the most powerful aspects of Romeo and Juliet is the language. The characters curse, vow oaths, banishes each other, and generally plays with the language through overuse of action verbs. In addition, the play is saturated with the use of oxymoron’s, puns, paradoxes, and double entendres. Even the use of names is called into question, with Juliet asking what is in the name Romeo that denies her the right to love him.
Romeo does indeed; experience a love of such purity and such passion that kills him when he believes the object of his love. The power of Romeo’s love however, often obscures a clear vision of Romeo’s character which is far more complex. The relationship of love is not so simple he pines for Rosaline at the beginning of the play. Romeo is a great reader of love poetry and the portrayal of his love for Rosaline suggests he is trying to recreate the feelings that he has read about. After first kissing Juliet, she tells him “you kiss by the’ book,” meaning that he kissed according to the rules, and implying that while proficient, his kissing lacks originality (I.v.107). In reference to Rosaline, it seems, Romeo loves by the book. But Rosaline slips from Romeo’s mind at first sight of Juliet. The love with Romeo and Juliet is far deeper, more authentic and unique that the clichéd puppy love Romeo felt for Rosaline. His love matures over the course of the play, from the shallow desire to be in love, to a profound and intense passion. One must describe Romeo’s development at least in part to Juliet; her level- headed observations, such as the one about Romeo’s kissing, seem just thing to snap Romeo from his superficial idea of love, and to inspire him to begin to speak some of the most beautiful and intense love poetry ever written. Romeo’s deep capacity for love is merely a part of his larger capacity for intense feeling of all kinds. Put another way, it is possible to describe Romeo as lacking the capacity for moderation.
Love compels him to sneak into the garden of his enemy's daughter, risking death simply to catch a glimpse of her; anger compels him to kill his wife's cousin in a reckless duel to avenge the death of his friend; despair compels him to suicide upon hearing of Juliet's death. Such extreme behaviour dominates Romeo's character throughout the play, and contributes to the ultimate tragedy that befalls the lovers. Had Romeo restrained himself from killing , or waited even one day before killing himself after hearing the news of Juliet's death, matters might have ended happily. Of course, though, had Romeo not such depths of feeling, the love he shared with Juliet would ever have existed in the first place.
Among his friends, especially while bantering with , Romeo shows glimpses of his social persona. He is intelligent, quick-witted, fond of verbal jousting (particularly about sex), loyal, and unafraid of danger.
Romeo and Juliet abound in imagery: vivid words and phrases that help create the atmosphere of the play as they conjure up emotionally charged pictures in the imagination. E.g. the prologue describes the lovers as ‘star-crosses’ and their love as ‘death-marked’ As both a poet and a playwright, Shakespeare seems to have thought in images and the whole play richly demonstrates his unflagging and varied use of verbal illustration.
The play focuses on romantic love, specifically the intense passion that springs up at first sight between and . In Romeo and Juliet, love is a violent, ecstatic, overpowering force that supersedes all other values, loyalties, and emotions. In the course of the play, the young lovers are driven to defy their entire social world: families ("Deny thy father and refuse thy name," Juliet asks, "Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, / And I'll no longer be a Capulet"); friends (Romeo abandons and after the feast in order to go to Juliet's garden); and ruler (Romeo returns to Verona for Juliet's sake after being exiled by the on pain of death in II.i.76–78). Love is the overriding theme of the play, but a reader should always remember that Shakespeare is uninterested in portraying a prettied-up, dainty version of the emotion; the kind that bad poets write about, and whose bad poetry Romeo reads while pining for Rosaline. Love in Romeo and Juliet is a brutal, powerful emotion that captures individuals and catapults them against their world, and, at times, against themselves.
The powerful nature of love can be seen in the way it is described, or, more accurately, the way descriptions of it so consistently fail to capture its entirety. At times love is described in the terms of religion, as in the fourteen lines when Romeo and Juliet first meet. At others it is describes as a sort of magic:
‘Alike bewitched by the charm of looks" (II.Prologue.6). Juliet, perhaps, most perfectly describes her love for Romeo by refusing to describe it: "But my true love is grown to such excess / I cannot sum up some of half my wealth" (III.i.33–34). Love, in other words, resists any single metaphor because it is too powerful to be so easily contained or understood.
Romeo and Juliet does not make a specific moral statement about the relationships between love and society, religion, and family; rather, it portrays the chaos and passion of being in love, combining images of love, violence, death, religion, and family in an impressionistic rush leading to the play's tragic conclusion.
This opening speech by the Chorus serves as an introduction to Romeo and Juliet. We are provided with information about where the play takes place, and given some background information about its principal characters. However, 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 full fill the terms set in the Prologue. The structure of the play itself is the fate from which Romeo and Juliet cannot escape.