What literary devices are used to portray whether Romeo and Juliet is more about Love or Hate

University Degree Linguistics, Classics and related subjects

What literary devices are used to portray whether Romeo and Juliet is more about Love or Hate? With reference to the audiences response

Romeo and Juliet was written by Shakespeare at a relatively early juncture in his literary career, most probably in 1594 or 1595. The play was an experimental stage piece at the time of its composition, featuring several radical departures from long-standing conventions. These innovative aspects of the play, moreover, reinforce and embellish its principal themes. The latter include the antithesis between love and hate, fate and destiny and the handling of time (as both theme and as structural element). The primary theme is, arguably, the contrast between love and hate. Shakespeare utilizes many literary devices as a way of representing love and hate; whether that is dialogue, the correlative use of a light/dark polarity or action. Each technique not only represents the two emotions, it represents which emotion is the dominating theme.

The play begins, with a fourteen line sonnet, The Prologue. The obvious function of the Prologue - an introduction to the play - 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 creates a sense of fate, a key motif utilized by the bard throughout the play, by providing the audience with the knowledge that and will die even before the play has begun. The audience therefore watches the play with the expectation that it must fulfil the terms set in the Prologue. The structure of the play itself is the fate from which Romeo and Juliet cannot escape. This was a tool often used by Shakespeare to capture what would have been a far more unruly audience than that of which we are accustom too in the 21st century.

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One of the key literary devices utilized by Shakespeare is the light/dark polarity. Though many critics argue that these continual references to light are overkill, illustrative of Shakespeare at his most immature stage of writing, it is pivotal in the battle between love and hate. When Romeo initially sees Juliet, he compares her immediately to the brilliant light of the torches and tapers that illuminate Capulet's great hall: “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!" (I.V.46). Juliet is the light that frees him from the darkness of his perpetual melancholia. In the famous balcony scene Romeo associates Juliet with sunlight, "It is the east and Juliet is the sun!" (II.ii.3), daylight, "The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars/As daylight doth a lamp" (II.ii.20-1), and the light emanating from angels, "O speak again bright angel" (II.ii.26). In turn, Juliet compares their new-found love to lightening (II.ii.120), primarily to stress the speed at which their romance is moving, but also to suggest that, as the lightening is a glorious break in the blackness of the night sky, so too is their love a flash of wondrous luminance in an otherwise dark world. She also describes him as someone "Which ten times faster glides than the sun's beams/Driving back shadows over lowering hills"(II.v.4-5). However, despite all the aforementioned positive references to light in the play, it ultimately takes on a negative role, forcing the lovers to part at dawn ‘The sun rises, I must be gone and live, or stay and die (III.V.10-1). From this point on, darkness becomes the central motif. Romeo acknowledges this, exclaiming: "More light and light: more dark and dark our woes!" (III.v.36).The final indication that darkness has prevailed comes from The Prince: "A glooming peace this morning with it brings/The sun for sorrow will not show his head" (V.III.304-5). The light and dark imagery employed by Shakespeare, signifies that hatred is the overriding theme in Romeo and Juliet. The change from light imagery to dark imagery in Act III scene V. is pivotal in the conflict between love and hate. Darkness conquering light is representative of the hatred triumphing over love. The uncivil, Elizabethan audience would have been engrossed by the varying conflicts that are woven into every line of the play. The overuse of light and dark imagery would have offered a visual motif appreciated by all, due to its obviousness. The less sophisticated viewers would have been able to decipher its significance as well as the more educated members of the audience.

As well as using visual motifs, Shakespeare liked to convey the sense of opposed views and opinions via dialogue. Dialogue and speech permeate the play, and is often used to illustrate opposing views and feelings, such as love and hate.

In Act I, scene IV, He delivers a dazzling speech about the fairy Queen Mab, who rides through the night on her tiny wagon bringing dreams to sleepers. One of the most noteworthy aspects of Queen Mab’s ride is that the dreams she brings generally do not bring out the best sides of the dreamers, but instead serve to confirm them in whatever vices they are addicted to—for example, greed, violence, or lust. Another important aspect of Mercutio’s description of Queen Mab is that it is complete nonsense, albeit vivid and highly colourful. Nobody believes in a fairy pulled about by “a small grey-coated gnat” whipped with a cricket’s bone (I.iv.65). Finally, it is worth noting that the description of Mab and her carriage goes to extravagant lengths to emphasize how tiny and insubstantial she and her accoutrements are. Queen Mab and her carriage do not merely symbolize the dreams of sleepers; they also symbolize the power of waking fantasies, daydreams, and desires. Through the Queen Mab imagery, Mercutio suggests that all desires and fantasies are as nonsensical and fragile as Mab, and that they are basically corrupting. He uses his description of Mab as an analogy for his view on love. He believes that love too does not bring out people’s best sides, that love is mainly nonsense, insubstantial and over extravagant. The audience would have been able to identify with Mercutio for the Elizabethan society generally believed that a man too much in love lost his manliness.

To conclude, I feel that although the play’s primary theme is universally depicted as love, there is compelling evidence to suggest otherwise. Many devices used by Shakespeare present hatred as the over-riding theme, his employment of light/dark polarity, in which the darkness triumphs over the light, is in my opinion, Shakespeare hinting at hatred conquering love. After all, it was the family’s hatred that ultimately sealed the lovers doom. It was Romeo’s hatred of Tybalt that separated the lovers.

The sudden, fatal violence in the first scene of Act III, as well as the build-up to the fighting, serves as a reminder that, for all its emphasis on love, beauty, and romance, Romeo and Juliet still takes place in a masculine world in which notions of honour, pride, and hatred are prone to erupt in a fury of conflict. The viciousness and dangers of the play’s social environment is a dramatic tool that Shakespeare employs to make the lovers’ romance seem even more precious and fragile—their relationship is the audience’s only respite from the brutal world pressing against their love.

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