In the opening scenes of the play Romeo is very anti-social “private in his chamber”. This is said about Romeo when Lady Montague asks why Romeo wasn’t fighting in the street fight. It is then said by Benvolio that he has seen Romeo wondering lonely abroad up by the woods sighing and feeling sorry for himself. Romeo does this because he feel so depressed about not getting any signals back from Roseline that she loves him to. After Romeo has been for his early morning walk before the sun has come up, he quickly disappears into his chamber and closes the shutters. “Locks fair daylight out”. He does this because he doesn’t want to talk to anybody about his illness and he just wants to think alone about Roseline.
In the opening scene when Romeo is in love with Roseline he talks about love to be a bad thing that is ruining his life “Love is a smoke”. We can tell from this that the love that Romeo feels for Roseline is not true love because if he was properly in love, love wouldn’t destroying his life it would be making his life better. When Romeo talks about love to be a smoke, he is saying this because as you can’t see through smoke, Romeo can’t see a way through his admiration and love for Roseline.
In the opening scene when Romeo is in love with Roseline all the language he uses about love is very negative, artificial and doesn’t make complete sense. “Love is smoke”. To do this Shakespeare uses oxymorons, this is because they don’t make complete sense and they contradict themselves, and mean the opposite. His speech is very slow and pathetic; noting rhymes or makes complete sense. None of his language seems to have anything to do with love and never rhymes with love, as it should if he was truly in love. His language is very poetic and has a lot of O’s in his speech which gives the impression that he feels sorry for himself.
The Elizabethans symbol for unrequited passion was a rose, and in this play Shakespeare uses this symbol to express Romeos love for Rosaline, because even though a rose looks and sounds nice if you get to close to if it will hurt you with its thorns and maybe even draw blood. This is similar to Romeos love for Rosaline because although the idea of love looks good to Romeo when he gets closer to being in love with Rosaline it hurts him and destroys his life. Romeo sees Rosaline as a rose, she looks good from a distance she looks perfect but as he gets closer to being in love with her it hurts him and his life. His love for Rosaline is unrequited love.
However when Romeo sees Juliet in the play all these things change about him, mood, what he does, language and what he says about love. He suddenly feels very romantic “you kiss by th’book” when Romeo sees Juliet all he wants to do is wait for her to stop dancing and then go over and touch her and hopefully kiss her. He is now very sociable “let lips do what hands do”. All Romeo wants to do is talk and touch Juliet and be very sociable towards her, he is suddenly very confident about speaking. In this scene Romeo is suddenly very happy and relaxed. He seems to have suddenly forgotten about his worries of love and how it was so depressing for him. “O trespass sweetly”. From this we can see the comparison of Romeo as a courtly lover and when he was truly in love with Juliet. We can see how his mood has changed and how he feels a lot more confident with himself.
When Romeo first sees Juliet he doesn’t want to go and walk lonely in the woods and feel sorry for himself, he wants to go over and speak to and touch Juliet “ Go to, go to,” this is the major difference in Romeo’s love for Juliet and for Rosaline. He is no longer anti-social and now everything he wants to do is very physical. We see a different side of Romeo in this scene; everything he does to Juliet is very physical and flirtatious. “Give me my sin again”. This is a huge change in his appearance since he first entered the stage. He is no longer viewed as a courtly lover, but as a man involved with true love.
The language he now uses to express himself changes dramatically; he no longer uses oxymorons. Instead of using these contradicting terms he immediately uses a sonnet, which is a fourteen line Shakespearean love poem. The poem is usually said between two lovers and it is can be as a conversation. In the sonnet that Shakespeare has in his play, Romeo and Juliet have just met. A typical Elizabethan audience would recognise this sonnet to mean that these two actors were in love. He does this by the words that he chooses to rhyme with. One example of this is, when Juliet chooses to rhyme with the word “kiss”. This tells the audience that these two actors are in love.
In the opening scene of the play when Romeo falls in love with Juliet, he doesn’t talk about his obsession with the idea of being in love like when he was in love with Rosaline, in this scene he actually talks about Juliet and of features on her body. The typical Elizabethan audience would immediately get the impression that the love her was feeling for Juiliet was true love unlike the love that Romeo felt for Rosaline.
