“Oh she doth teach the torches to burn bright!”
This adds to the beauty of this particular part of the scene. The phrase reveals how Romeo is feeling and the angelic brightness of Juliet compared to the dark atmosphere of the rest of the room in Romeo’s eyes. It means that in contrast to everyone else Juliet is brighter and more beautiful. Romeo’s love for Juliet is expressed by using incredible light holy and white imagery:
“…snowy dove….
Make blessed my rude hand…”
This gives the audience a sense of purity and preciousness; there is a pure and endearing feeling throughout the little section. We get the impression that Romeo is stunned by Juliet’s purity and beauty:
“Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight!
For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.”
He cannot come to terms with her magnificence and states that it is love at first sight and that he has never seen true beauty until that moment; this shows his emotional and romantic attitude to life. It also shows us that he could be quite a fickle person with an impulsive personality; he has quickly forgotten about ‘his love’ Rosaline whom he was extremely depressed and downtrodden about in just the last scene. He has risked everything to fall in love with Juliet and so this might tell us that his love is for real.
This is a change in pace from Capulet’s speech to Romeo’s statement of love for Juliet. This adds to the dramatic effect and splendour of the scene because Romeo’s speech is so influential in the striking change of mood. The heavy change is caused by the large contrast in language between Capulet and Romeo. Capulet is very direct and straight forward; he does not use rhyme or any sort of imagery in his speech:
“You are welcome, gentlemen! come musicians, play.”
This is jolly but does now conjure any interesting in our heads or use imagery. When the audience is confronted by Romeo’s beautiful similes and metaphors the contrast between that and Capulet’s speech is huge and impressive. Romeo’s speech is very poetic and extremely romantic and emotionally involved therefore creating a dramatic feel to the contrast which takes place.
The language and expression of character that Romeo uses adds immensely to the dramatic effect of his section where he describes Juliet wonderfully:
“Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear.
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!”
He describes her as too precious, too pure which draws the audience in and endears them to Romeo; they are introduced to his more romantic and emotional side of his character and given more information about his complicated personality.
The character of Tybalt is introduced by Shakespeare with the device of a sudden confrontation between him and Capulet, his uncle. This comes very quickly and is a huge contrast between Romeo’s confession of love immediately before. Creating a large amount of dramatic effect within the scene this shocks the audience and shows them the two extremes of character from the emotional Romeo to the violent and aggressive Tybalt:
“Fetch me my rapier boy.”
Tybalt’s anger is created by the presence of Romeo, a Montague, at a Capulet party. The fact that Tybalt can recognise Romeo as a Montague without seeing his face links into the strong theme of identity in the play and also shows the height his hatred has grown towards his fellow feuding family. His speech expresses his immense hatred for the Montague family and shows him as an extremely hot-headed, vicious character:
“To strike him dead, I hold it not a sin”
This quote shows Tybalt saying that to kill Romeo, a Montague, he would feel no remorse or hold it as a sin, despite his religious beliefs. It is in this way that Tybalt is made as such a violent character in his language and expression. He calls Romeo a “villain” and tries to tell Capulet that he should be aggressively removed from the masked ball to which Capulet tells Tybalt that Romeo is not causing any trouble and therefore should not be removed forcefully:
“I’ll not endure him”
Again, this shows his deep hatred for the Montague family and adds an immense amount of dramatic effect and excitement of the scene.
Tybalt’s style of expressing himself is very similar to Romeo’s in terms of rhyming couplets and imagery. But, to add dramatic effect, is passionate words are focused on hate and murder in contrast to Romeo’s love and beauty:
“A villain that is hither come in spite,
To scorn at our solemnity this night.”
This great contrast provokes a huge amount of dramatic effect because to see this pure hatred and violence on stage would be thrilling and engaging with the audience. The contrast between Tybalt and Romeo conveys drama and therefore makes the section a large part of the overall quantity of dramatic effect.
The meeting of Romeo and Juliet provokes an incredible amount of religious and physical imagery between the two lovers and emotional and romantic language. Firstly, Romeo and Juliet speak in sonnet form (“if I profane…” to “…I take”). There is specialty in Shakespeare’s sonnets due to the change he made to them from the original Italian form used by famous writers such as Francesco Petrarca in the fourteenth century. Shakespeare became the most famous practitioner of the new English form of sonnet but did not originally make the alterations. He used their form as a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g which is used classically in Romeo and Juliet’s expression of love to one another. Sonnets were used by Shakespeare to express love from one person to another as love poetry, showing that Romeo and Juliet’s exchange of love is real and not just spontaneous. They fit perfectly into the situation Romeo and Juliet are both in and although the audience might not be able to recognise the sonnet form within a long play such as Romeo and Juliet they hold with them an attractive quality due to the rhyme and decasyllabic lines. They are linked perfectly and mixed with Shakespeare’s incredible words are wonderful for Romeo and Juliet. A sonnet is also used in the prologue at the very beginning of the play to engage the audience in its rhyme and rhythm.
As I have said, the meeting of Romeo and Juliet conjures a great deal of religious and physical imagery from both “star-cross’d lovers” talking of each other and their situation together on the masked evening. There is a strong emphasis from both Romeo and Juliet on the body and physical actions which separates them from everyone else in the play:
“Too smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.”
This shows two examples of physical imagery in the line by Romeo to Juliet during the exchange in sonnet form. There are many examples where the body is used to link between the two characters. It is refined yet their love is spontaneous and not yet earned that quality. Their way of binding to each other is by speaking beautiful words and phrases showing devotion to one another from the moment they converse. This will affect the audience and at this point will relate to them; some of the audience will definitely know what it is like to fall in love and share their life with someone and so will be heavily affected by the story of Romeo and Juliet especially in this scene.
Romeo and Juliet also use religious imagery to express their love for one another during the sonnet. This device catches the audience’s attention because of closeness of the two lovers when they say all these things. They tease each other by using the technique of religious language talking of “saints” and “pilgrims”:
“My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand”
Here Romeo talks of his lips as “two blushing pilgrims”; a pilgrim is the word used to describe a person who visits a holy place to worship. Therefore, Romeo is the pilgrim who is devoted to Juliet: he is using a metaphor to show his devotion and love for her that we may not notice but an Elizabethan audience would.
Romeo proceeds to woo Juliet and Juliet tease Romeo creating a strong bond between them in the space of a sonnet:
“Give me my sin again…
…You kiss by the book”
The religious language and imagery emphasises the wonder and stresses spiritual purity. They are singled out from the rest of the crowd at the party as dignified and pure, therefore having a huge effect on the audience’s mood and what they think of their love for one another; they will relate to the two characters and be able to understand the feelings they are experiencing together tangled up in their devotion and love for one another.
Juliet, one of the “star-cross’d lovers”, is obviously one of the two most important characters in Shakespeare’s romantic masterpiece. 1:5 helps us, the audience, to discover a lot about her character and how it changed dramatically in this scene because of the meeting with Romeo. At the beginning of the play she, for example, states she has never thought of marriage before and that it is not something she is certain about showing her innocence and lack of experience in life and yet in my selected scene she gives her heart away easily to Romeo and is in effect showing disloyalty to her parents and their expectation of her:
“Then have my lips the sin that they have took.”
She becomes more of her own person and takes on a new independence after taking complete responsibility for her actions with Romeo, a stranger to her at the time.
Towards the end of the scene she shows her first sign of complete independence and extreme feelings when she learns of Romeo’s name when she talks about death and seems to have a sense of foreboding about their fate together; it is as if she knows that something could go wrong between them but is this because of their feuding families or an actual ominous sense that they will not go on together forever?
The climax at the end of the scene where the two lovers, Romeo and Juliet, discover the truth about their two families is one of the most exciting and dramatic parts of the play. They have previously fallen intensely in love without knowing one another and both try to discover each others’ identities:
“Go ask his name: if he be married.
My grave is like to be my wedding bed.”
This is Juliet’s attempt at finding out about Romeo and more significantly her first remark focused on death. There is a clue to a sense of foreboding about their future together where their horrific death occurs. The reference to death creates dramatic irony where the audience know the fate of the two lovers. Juliet’s reaction is extremely dramatic and emotional as she says that if Romeo belongs to someone else then her life is not worth living and she will die; this is an extreme reaction which is not expected from her innocent character. Her attitude change towards her life starts to come to light as she falls for Romeo. Also, the theme of love and hate, life and death is conveyed from this quote.
Romeo’s reaction is just as extreme as Juliet’s when finding out about her family heritage:
“Is she a Capulet?
O dear account! my life is my foe’s debt!”
In this he says that he is torn: he loves Juliet, but he cannot love a Capulet. He states that such is his situation that his life is in his enemy’s hands and belongs to them. Again the theme of love and hate is echoed by this quote to make is increasingly dramatically effective for the audience.
At the very final section of the scene Juliet speaks one of the most famous lines from the play in reaction to learnt Romeo’s surname:
“My only love sprung from my only hate!”
In this she shows the split decision between Romeo, her only love, and hating the Montagues, her only hate. She shows despair and a sense of foreboding again about her own death; this shows that she has to choose between her first love and the strong belief of her family.
In conclusion I believe that 1:5 of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is extremely dramatically effective with all of the different occurrences in the scene. Firstly I think that one of the most influential techniques used in the scene is the change of pace between the sections. For example the way Shakespeare changes the mood between Romeo’s slow statements of love for Juliet to Tybalt’s quick anger-stricken statement of hatred towards the Montagues. This provokes excitement throughout the audience because of the quick alternatives between extreme emotions and characters.
The language conveys many emotions within many of the characters. We see the bright, religious imagery of Romeo and Juliet and the aggressive language of Tybalt; this contrast conveys incredible excitement for the audience and gets them heavily involved in the plot. The way the characters, in particular Romeo and Tybalt, speak in rhyming couplets thrills the audience and creates a feeling it is more important; the linguistic technique used by the Shakespeare heightens the drama in the scene.
Everything involved in the scene, the actual things that occur make it one of the most charming and beautiful sections of the play. Romeo and Juliet’s meeting, the most important event in the play, is extremely dramatically effective together with all the language and imagery. It can relate to the modern day; falling in love can happen to everyone and involves their emotions in the play to experience what the characters are feeling.
The beautiful yet tragic love story is brought to life in this single scene. Any audience can appreciate the romance and hatred of the classic section of the play. The universal themes of love and hate live on in the present day and will bring this play to many more generations in the future.
