When Romeo is talking to Benvolio, Romeo tells him about his unpleasant life and how his love is affecting him. Shakespeare has used oxymoron’s to show Romeo’s position in life, to show that he is negative to everything. Romeo says “O brawling love, O loving hate “he uses the opposite of love to show Benvolio and the audience how negative his love is by saying ‘hate’.
Romeo uses many oxymorons’s to show his emotions, such as ‘sick health’, ‘sleep still walking’. This implies how depressing his life is. Romeo is hasty to fall in and out of love. He does this not think about what can go wrong.
Romeo and Juliet did not take time to know each other and form a deep and intimate relationship. They rushed into their relationship and they were also very young to experience. Even people much older then people in Elizabethan times did not know the proper meaning of love. It may have been true love that was mutually felt between them both. Where as when Romeo is in love with Rosaline, he has very vague definitions of love. Romeo defines love as “love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs”. This conveys the idea that love is like a big black cloud, which is difficult to escape from.
Shakespeare stresses that the love Rome’s tangled in is very difficult to get out of. Romeo is finding it extremely hard to forget Rosaline.
On the same day, Romeo gatecrashes the Capulet’s party with a few friends. That night he sees love at first sight. He falls deeply in love with Juliet because of her appearance. Juliet also falls in love at first sight. Even she falls in love with Romeo’s appearance. Romeo says “for I ne’er saw true beauty till this night”. This illustrates that Juliet’s beauty is true beauty. It also emphasises that Rosaline was not defined to him as true beauty. Therefore there was obviously something different he saw in Rosaline. May be it was her character or status, we do not really know as Shakespeare has not mentioned it in act 1 of the play. As I have already said that Romeo is deeply in love with Juliet’s beauty, but if we think about their love deeply we can see that Romeo and Juliet in all probabilities were not really in love. They were infatuated with each other. They were in love with the idea they were in love. They could not have fallen so deeply in love with just having one conversation.
When Romeo and Juliet have there first meeting Romeo describes Juliet as a ‘holy shrine’. There is nothing purer then a holy shrine, which implies that Juliet’s beauty, is pure. She is totally pure. We can already see that Romeo is using romantic, flowery and ornate language. From the play, we can see that Romeo’s love for Juliet is balanced. They love each other as much as one loves the other. Shakespeare uses rhyming couplets and sonnets to highlight this. The rhyming couplets he uses are hand to hand, this kiss, much touch, prayer despair etc. Shakespeare only uses sonnets in the prologue as well as when Romeo and Juliet are in love.
Although Romeo and Rosaline had an invisible relationship, Romeo and Juliet’s relationship was dramatic. Both relationships affected Romeo’s actions in someway or another. Rosaline had made Romeo unhappy in his life, as she did not return the love, which Romeo had for her. Juliet was so beautiful that Romeo fell in love at first sight (not knowing who she was or knowing where she came from). We can also see that Juliet had turned Romeo’s ‘negative love’ into ‘positive love’.
After concluding all the points, I personally think that Romeo’s love for Rosaline for is more sincere than his love for Juliet. This is because when Romeo falls in love with Juliet, it is love at first sight and Romeo only falls in love with her because of her appearance. But when Romeo was in love with Rosaline, he did not fall in love with her beauty but who she actually was. At the time when he was in love with Rosaline and was not returned that love, Romeo had been affected by it in his own life. This was because time for him was going slow and ‘sad hours seemed long’. Since it was the reason that it was ‘true love’.
