I think the violence is exciting to watch because the violence is “romantic violence”. This is violence that a person is fighting for another person. There are two types of violence in the play: revenge violence and rivalry violence.
The rivalry violence is between the two rival families: The Capulet’s and The Montague's. An example of this is at the start of the play when Tybalt and Benvolio are using fighting talk (most fights in the Elizabethan times started by “fighting talk”) then a fight starts with guns being shot and people dieing.
Romeo influences the revenge violence. In Act 3 Scene 1, there is a fight scene between Benvolio and Mercutio against Tybalt and some of his friends. Tybalt wants the fight because the night before the Capulet intruded on what was meant to be a Montague family party. Romeo is trying to prevent another fight from happening because he believes that the two families should no longer be enemies because he has just married Juliet, but Tybalt and Mercutio are not taking the advice. Having just married Juliet, Romeo wants to make the peace with Tybalt because they are now family, but Tybalt calls him a villain but Romeo chooses to ignore his insult and walks in the opposite direction. But then the fight starts to commence between Tybalt and Mercutio and Tybalt ends up killing Mercutio and Romeo has broke his peace with Tybalt and decides to kill him in an act of revenge for killing his best friend Mercutio. Meanwhile after just getting married to Romeo, Juliet does not know anything about the fighting that is going on neither that her cousin, Tybalt has been killed by her husband Romeo this is known as dramatic irony, were the audience know what is happening but a person in the play does not.
In act 3 scene 2, we see Juliet using soliloquy; in a speech to herself, she explains how she longs to be with her Romeo and how she wants the night to come soon so that she will be able to see him e.g. “for day to pass and night to come”. She does this by using imagery; she does this by telling us what she will do when she sees her Romeo e.g. “Give me my Romeo. And I will die”. Juliet also uses a lot of commands to tell the audience what she wants, in one line particularly she uses the word come three times: “ Come night! Come, Romeo! Come thou day in night”. So, she is explaining how she wants day to finish and night to come and how she wants to be beside her Romeo. She uses comparisons in her speech to compare some of the most meaningful things to her e.g.: she describes the night as, black-brow’d and her love for Romeo as big as a mansion. Juliet uses the colour black a lot, she describes black as the night e.g. “come, civil night, thou sober – suited matron, all in black”. But in contrast she uses white to describe the wings of the night: “whiter than new snow on a raven’s back”.
Then in act 3 scene 5, she finds out that Romeo must be banished from Verona by the next morning. This means that this night was to be their last together, their speech and language tell us this because it is very effectionative: “therefore stay yet; thou need’st not to be gone”. Juliet in this scene changes her mind about night. As in two scenes before she longed for night to come and day to finish, but now she wants night to be delayed so that she can be with her Romeo and day not to come at all. She does this when the lark sung (signalling it was daytime). She says to Romeo: “it was the nightingale, and not the lark”. (When the nightingale sung it signalled that it was night).
As well as Romeo and Juliet the other “peacemakers” are Romeo’s good friend Friar Lawrence and Juliet's nurse. Together they act as cupid and bring the two together using their places in society. The friar helps the couple get married behind both families backs and gave Juliet the sleeping potion to ensure that she didn’t marry Paris. The nurse helped Juliet sneak in and out of her house to meet Romeo and played a major part in bringing the two together, often lying to Juliet's mother about her whereabouts.
In modern days people still exist, like the friar and the nurse, people that take personal risks to overcome hatred, such people as Martin Luther King who stood up for what he believed was right and found allies and his beliefs became reality.
A lot of things can be learnt from people like the nurse and the friar, they proved that they were so determined to stop the feud that they used their courage to bring the two rivals together to try and merge the families as one.
I feel that Romeo as a “tragic hero” is a false statement. Never comes into my mind. I think that Romeo is never seen as a tragic hero because he never does anything to suggest that he is a hero. The definition of tragedy is: the protagonist will make an error of judgement, the result of having to take a course of action at a crucial moment, perhaps choosing between divine law and human law. The only time Romeo shows this is when he kills Tybalt to avenge Mercutio’s death.
In the twenty first century, there is not the elements of tragedy of love in this day. Evidence of this is the increase of divorces and less and less people are getting married. So, this shows not many couples are as passionate for each other as Romeo and Juliet. In a situation where a loved one has died, in the twenty first century I do not think many people would then commit suicide because of a death of a loved one. This shows that the love for each other in this society is not as passionate as it was in the Elizabethan times.
Our emotions are played with during the play effectively by Shakespeare, he creates the emotion by shifting scenes from love to hatred, to love etc… This effectively gets the audience very tense and “on the edge of their chair”.
The whole play revolves round act 3 scene 1. The build up of Romeo and Juliet's love for each other builds up in the first two scenes: the first meeting is when the two have the conversation at Juliet's house. Than at scene three the “tables turn” and the decision to kill Tybalt affects the play. As soon as Romeo kills Tybalt, then his life becomes a tragedy and a downfall. Romeo being banished from Verona, Romeo thinks that Juliet is dead (but actually she has took sleeping potion to trick her family) then kills himself because he cannot face life without his beloved Juliet.
