FATE

• "Star-cross'd lovers" } prologue
• "I defy you stars" - Romeo } Act 5 Scene 1
• "Fortune's fool" - Romeo } Act 3 Scene 1
• FATE>

  • God and Stars decided your destiny - no control over that.
  • By killing themselves - they destroy that in a way.
• "fatal loins"

  "death marked love"

  "star crossed lovers" (prologue)

  1) These quotes from the prologue all creates a sense of a stain of doom on Romeo and Juliet's love even before they had met.

  2) The fact that we hear about this in the prologue, even before we meet Romeo and Juliet highlights the lack of control they have over their fate, as it was there before in the 'ancient grudge'.
• "ere we may think her ripe to be a bride" (Capulet)

  1) The fact that we meet Juliet through male conversation before herself, emphasises her place as a wealthy teenage girl in a patriarchal society - she has her life mapped out for her by her father.

  2) 'ripe' has connotations of fruit - she has no control over her fate.

  3) 'ripe' also would mean she is in her prime and if left too long would go off like fruit. This reflects the fate of unmarried women in Elizabethan patriarchal society - married off young.
• "younger than she are happy mother's made" (Capulet)

  1) 'made' creates the sense that her future is being created for her - she is a vessel in which her father can fill all of his ambitions.

  2) 'mother' suggests how her father views her fate or 'end goal' - as a 'happy' submissive mother with duty, not a passionate lover.
• "she is the hopeful lady of my Earth" (Capulet)

  1) the possessive pronoun 'my' reveals how Capulet views himself as a governor of Earth - that Juliet is to play the part as his 'hopeful lady'.

  2) 'hopeful' suggests Capulet has many ambitions for his daughter - but he is not talking to her about it, but to someone else suggests she has a lack of control in her fate.
• "my child is yet a stranger in the world" (Capulet)
• "my grave is like to be my wedding bed" (Juliet)
• "two of the fairest stars in all the heaven" (Romeo)
• "the earth that's nature's mother is her tomb: what is her burying grave, that is her womb" (Juliet)
• "Take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine" (Romeo)
• "heaven is here where Juliet lives" (HINT: before Juliet dies) (Romeo)
• "night's candles are burnt out" ... "meteor" (Romeo)
• "methinks I see thee now, thou art so low, as one dead in the bottom of a tomb" (Juliet)
• "Wife, we scarce though u blest that God had lent us but this only child" (Capulet)
• "bid me go into a new made grave" (Juliet)
• "with purple fountains issuing from your veins, on pain of torture, from those bloody hands, throw your mistempered weapons to the ground" (Escalus)

  
  

  "O happy dagger this is thy sheath, there rust and let me die" (Juliet)
• "These violent delights have violent ends and in their triumph die, like fire and powder, Which, as they kiss consume" (Friar Lawrence)


  1) emphasises the fate of their love and death closely linked.