romeo and juliet

• romeo: eponymous character (name is in title), archetypal Petrarchan lover (falls in love but is rejected), unrequited love, impulsive, fickle, headstrong, passionate, acts on emotions
• romeo characteristics - love, fateful, religious, masculine
• R love explores types of love and the effect of love
• • R Fateful unable to avoid fate but shows assertion of the individual self
• • R Religious used religious language/ references which reflects religious society, link between love and religion
• • R Masculine doesn’t conform to expectations unlike other characters to show constraints of gender expectations
• • R+J relationship- Julietlove develops quickly, very passionate, very strong love
• • Rosaline makes Romeo and unrequited love, shows the difference between love and lust
• • Romeo Lord Montague shows love and respect, furthers the tension between families but resolves  the conflict
• • Romeo/ Mercutio best friends, foil for romeo (Romeo is an emotional romantic but Mercutio is very cynical), strong bond- Romeo kills Tybalt as revenge for Mecutio’s murder
• R-

  • ‘Shuts up his window, locks fair daylight out. And makes himself an artificial night’implies isolation is self inflicted, night and day show contrasting emotions
• R-

  • ‘O loving hate’ oxymoron shows love is full of contradictions and doesn’t make sense, speech is 13 lines so imperfect sonnet showing Romeo's experience with love is flawed
• R-

  • ‘But Soft, what light through yonder window breaks?/ It is the east and Juliet is the sun./ Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon’ -Juliet is described metaphorically as the ‘fair sun’ showing Romeo’s obsession, could allude to Juliet being the centre of Romeo’s world
• R-

  • ‘With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls,/ For stony limits cannot hold love out’ contrast between abstract noun ‘love’ and concrete noun ‘walls’, use of alliteration of sounds ‘love’, ‘lights’, ‘walls’ emphasise ‘love’ which is repeated
• R-

  • Friar Lawrence: ‘Thy tears are womanish, thy wild acts denote/ The unreasonable fury of a beast’ ‘womaish’ shows gender expectations/ patriarchal society, ‘unreasonable fury of a beast’ is a metaphor for Romeo’s irrational nature, loss of self- analogy to beast, dehumanising
• R-

  • ‘For I ne’ver saw true beauty to this night’ - shows Romeo is fickle
• R-

  • ‘It is my lady. O it is my love’ - possessive pronoun shows patriarchal society, repetition emphasises it
• R-

  • ‘Heaven is here’ Juliet is heaven, connotations to purity and peace
• R-

  • ‘But Romeo may not’ - referring to himself in 3rd person, foreshadows death or shows he is ashamed of himself or that he has lost his identity 
• j - Headstrong, passionate, decisive, young, doesn’t conform to norms, maturity contrats age, anomaly as she rejects societies pressure
• j characterisitcs love, fate, isolation, opposition
• • j- Love foil to Rosaline who portrays abstract, perfect love, physically shows love for Romeo, early feminist- Romeo’s equal not subservient
• • j- Fate has very little freedom, strong woman who tries to defy gender boundaries
• • j- Isolation rarely alone unlike Romeo, shows her lack of freedom and privacy
• • j- Opposition character filled with conflicting themes- love and hate, life and death, complex character
• j/lord capulet- initially protective and tells Paris he can’t marry her, suggesting he is progressive but becomes demanding, showing they have a complicated relationship
• • j/nurse maternal figure, strong bond, supportive, tool for fate
• j/lady capulet- no relationship, only talk when ordered by lord capulet, opposites
• • j/friar tool for fate, ironic
• • My child is yet a stranger in the world’- period between adulthood and childhood, emphasises how young she is 
• j -

  • ‘My grave is like to be my wedding bed’foreshadowing Romeo causing her death
• j-

  • ‘Can heaven be so envious?’ - rhetorical question shows conflict between fate and individuals, physical matter has no effect on love but spiritual things do 
• j-

  • ‘Beautiful tyrant’ ‘Fiend angelical’oxymorons her internal conflict
• j-

  • ‘It is an honour I dream not of’ -does not conform to gender expectations/shows age
• j-

  • ‘Was ever a book containing such vile matter so fairly bound’ - extended metaphor describing Romeo as a book