Light/Dark and Day/Night
Romeo and Juliet is
filled with imagery of light and dark. But while light is traditionally
connected with "good" and dark with "evil," in Romeo and Juliet the relationship is more complex. Romeo and Juliet
constantly see each other as forms of light. In the balcony scene, Romeo
describes Juliet as the sun, while Juliet describes Romeo as stars. But the
relationship between light and dark is complicated by the lover's need for the
privacy of darkness in order to be together. As Romeo says when the sun dawns
on the morning when he is to be banished from Verona, "More light and
light, more dark and dark our woes!" So while Romeo and Juliet see each
other as light, in order for their light to shine brightly it needs the
contrast of darkness, of night, to make it powerful
Love as Religious Worship
"Call me but love and I'll be new baptized" (2.2.4). That's what our smooth-talking Romeo says to Juliet as a way to suggest that Juliet's love has the potential to make him "reborn." Jeez. It seems like every time we turn around Romeo compares his love for Juliet to a religious experience. When the pair first meets, Romeo calls Juliet a "saint" and implies that he'd really like to "worship" her body (1.5.2). Not only that, but Romeo's "hand" would be "blessed" if it touched the divine Juliet's (1.5.1). Eventually, Juliet picks up on this "religion of love" conceit (a conceit is just an elaborate metaphor) and declares that Romeo is "the god of [her] idolatry" (2.2.12). (We're guessing this is why director Baz Luhrmann fills his 1996 film version of Romeo + Juliet with religions icons, namely crosses. He also makes Romeo's love baptism literal by dunking Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio in a swimming pool.So, what's up with all this over-the-top talk about religion and love? Have these two kids gone off the deep end? Well, the first thing to note is that Romeo and Juliet didn't invent the idea that love is a holy experience – it's been around forever and was especially popular in medieval (roughly 400s – early 1500s) courtly love poetry. (Note, Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet in the late sixteenth century.)
We should also point out that, as cheesy or cliché as it may seem to us, all of this erotic talk about "worshipping" does a pretty good job of capturing the intensity of the young lovers' passion for one another. Let's face it. Sometimes head-over-heels love does seem to be rapturous, earth-shattering, and even holy. (Ever heard the song "Just Like Heaven" by The Cure?) At the same time, however, Shakespeare also seems to hint at the potential dangers of such an extreme relationship.
Poison
In his first
appearance, in Act 2, scene 2, Friar Lawrence remarks that every plant, herb,
and stone has its own special properties, and that nothing exists in nature
that cannot be put to both good and bad uses. Thus, poison is not intrinsically
evil, but is instead a natural substance made lethal by human hands. Friar
Lawrence’s words prove true over the course of the play. The sleeping potion he
gives Juliet is concocted to cause the appearance of death, not death itself,
but through circumstances beyond the Friar’s control, the potion does bring
about a fatal result: Romeo’s suicide. As this example shows, human beings tend
to cause death even without intending to. Similarly, Romeo suggests that
society is to blame for the apothecary’s criminal selling of poison, because
while there are laws prohiting the Apothecary from selling poison, there are no
laws that would help the apothecary make money. Poison symbolizes human
society’s tendency to poison good things and make them fatal, just as the
pointless Capulet-Montague feud turns Romeo and Juliet’s love to poison. After
all, unlike many of the other tragedies, this play does not have an evil
villain, but rather people whose good qualities are turned to poison by the
world in which they live.
Sex and Death
You've probably noticed that sex and death seem to go hand in hand in this play. In the very first scene, Sampson crudely puns on the term "maidenhead" (virginity) when he equates sword fighting against men with raping women: "When I have fought with the men I will be civil with the maids – I will cut off their heads […] the heads of maids or their maidenheads" (1.1.7). Even Juliet links sex and death – she puns on the word "die" (Shakespearean slang for orgasm) when, day-dreaming about her impending wedding night with Romeo, she imagines Romeo being transformed into a bunch of "little stars" lighting up the night sky: "Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die / Take him and cut him out in little stars, / And he will make the face of heaven so fine" (3.2.1).The most obvious example of the sex/death connection in the play is when Capulet sees his daughter's lifeless body and says that "death" has "lain with" (slept with) Juliet: "See, there she lies, / Flower as she was, deflowered by him. Death is my son-in-law, death is my heir" (4.4.9). (By the way, Capulet has no idea at this point that Juliet is married to Romeo – he still thinks she was all set to marry Paris and is still a virgin.)
Shakespeare scholar Marjorie Garber offers one of the most interesting insights when she notes that even the way that Romeo and Juliet each literally die carries symbolic sexual meaning. Romeo drinks his poison from a goblet, a traditional symbol of female sexuality. (This same symbolism is used in the Da Vinci Code, where the Grail, a big V-shaped goblet, symbolizes, well, a woman's vagina.) Juliet, in contrast, stabs herself with Romeo's dagger – a traditional symbol of male sexuality. What's this all about, you ask? Symbolically, Romeo and Juliet combine physical death and sexual climax. It's all pretty ironic, really. Typically, sex acts between men and women are supposed to result in the creation of life (making babies, that is). Yet, in the play, that's just not the case.
Prince Escalus and Veronese Citizens
As the sole representative of the government to
appear in Romeo and Juliet, Prince Escalus symbolizes the law. The citizens
of Verona symbolize civil society. These forces seek to contain the feud
between the Montagues and Capulets, but over the course of the play it becomes
clear that they also try to contain any grand passions,
including the love between Romeo and Juliet.
Oxymoron and Paradox
When Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, he seems to have been going through his "I heart oxymora" phase because the play is chock full of them. An "oxymoron," by the way, is the combination of two terms ordinarily seen as opposites. For example, at the end of the famous balcony scene, when Romeo is leaving, Juliet says "parting is such sweet sorrow" (2.2.27). "Sweet sorrow" is an oxymoron.Think that's impressive? Get a load of Juliet's use of 6 oxymora when she finds out that lover boy (that would be Romeo) has killed her cousin, Tybalt:
O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!
Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feather'd raven! wolvish-ravening lamb!
Despised substance of divinest show!
Just opposite to what thou justly seem'st,
A damned saint, an honourable villain!
O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell,
When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend
In moral paradise of such sweet flesh?
Was ever book containing such vile matter
So fairly bound? O that deceit should dwell
In such a gorgeous palace! (3.2.8)
Clearly, Juliet is experiencing some mixed emotions – she wonders how the love of her life, the guy she thought was so wonderful, could be a killer. Juliet's use of oxymoron here gives expression to her turmoil.
There are also some great examples of paradox in this passage. A "paradox" is a statement that contradicts itself and nonetheless seems true. Example: Juliet asks "Was ever a book containing such vile matter so fairly bound?"
We know what you're wondering – how the heck do you tell the difference between an "oxymoron" and a "paradox"? Well, a paradox is different from an oxymoron because it contains contradictory words that are separated by one or more intervening words.
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