ROMEO AND JULIET

CONTEXT:
● To an Elizabethan audience, in the 16th century
● At a time where courtly love was popular - Widely popular in Europe throughout the
Middle Ages, courtly love was characterised by a series of stylised rituals between a
knight and a married lady of high rank. These idealised customs were based on the
traditional codes of conduct associated with knighthood, such as duty, honour,
courtesy and bravery. The lady was put on a pedestal and was worshipped, and
this lady was normally unattainable, leading to forbidden love.
● Violence was an insistent reality for the Elizabethans
● 1590s London was driven by violence, fuelled by class conflicts and the anxiety
caused by crippling high grain prices
● They were familiar with upper-class gang feuds, leading to the Tudor monarchs
having to issue proclamations against fighting in public and in the 1590s, Elizabeth
attempted to limit elite violence to the destructive private confrontation of the duel.
● Italian fencing manuals were popular among young men, and Italian fencing
instructors thrived in London in the 1580s and 90s.
● There was a crisis in masculine honour among aristocracy and Jill Levenson calls
Romeo and Juliet a ‘panoramic view of violence in Elizabethan England’.

THEMES: Fate, Adults and young people, Parents and children, Honour, Conflict, Love
MOTIFS: light and dark, nighttime, poison (symbolic of feud)

ACT 1 PROLOGUE

‘Two households, both alike in dignity’

‘Ancient grudge break to new mutiny’
‘Civil blood makes civil hands unclean’
‘Star-cross'd lovers’
‘Death-mark'd love’

ACT 1 SCENE 1

Sampson - ‘My naked weapon is out’

‘I will bite my thumb at them; which is a disgrace to them, if they bear it.’
Abraham - ‘Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?’
Tybalt - ‘What, drawn, and talk of peace! I hate the word, as I hate hell, all Montagues, and
thee…’
Prince - ‘You men, you beasts, that quench the fire of your pernicious rage with purple
fountains issuing from your veins,on pain of torture, from those bloody hands…’
Romeo - ‘O brawling love! O loving hate! O any thing, of nothing first create! O heavy
lightness! serious vanity...Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health…This love feel
I, that feel no love in this.’
Romeo - ‘Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs; being purged, a fire sparkling in
lovers' eyes’
ACT 1 SCENE 2

Capulet - ‘She is the hopeful lady of my earth’

Paris - ‘Younger than her are happy mothers made’
Capulet - ‘An she agree, within her scope of choice lies my consent and fair according
voice.’
Benvolio - ‘Compare her face with some that I shall show, and I will make thee think thy
swan a crow.’

ACT 1 SCENE 3

Nurse - ‘What, lamb! what, ladybird!’

Juliet - ‘Madam, I am here’
L Capulet - ‘Nurse, give leave awhile, we must talk in secret:--nurse, come back again’
Nurse - ‘Thou wast the prettiest babe that e'er I nursed: an I might live to see thee married
once, I have my wish.’
L Capulet - ‘I was your mother much upon these years’
Nurse - ‘He’s a man of wax.’
L Capulet - ‘Verona's summer hath not such a flower.’
Nurse - ‘No less! nay, bigger; women grow by men.’
Nurse - ‘Go, girl, seek happy nights to happy days.’

ACT 1 SCENE 4

Romeo - ‘Is love a tender thing? it is too rough, too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like
thorn.’
Mercutio - ‘If love be rough with you, be rough with love’
Mercutio - ‘That dreamers often lie.’
Mercutio - ‘Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love’
Mercutio - ‘I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle brain’
Romeo - ‘Some consequence yet hanging in the stars…by some vile forfeit of untimely
death.’

ACT 1 SCENE 5

Romeo - ‘O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!’

‘I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.’
‘So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows.’
Tybalt - ‘Now, by the stock and honour of my kin, to strike him dead, I hold it not a sin.’
Tybalt - ‘ This intrusion shall now seeming sweet convert to bitter gall.’
Romeo - ‘If I profane with my unworthiest hand, this holy shrine’
Romeo - ‘dear Saint’
Juliet - ‘For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, and palm to palm is holy
palmers' kiss.’
Romeo - ‘O dear account! my life is my foe's debt.’
Juliet - ‘My grave is like to be my wedding bed.’
Juliet - ‘My only love sprung from my only hate!’

ACT 2 PROLOGUE - ‘Now old desire doth in his death-bed lie, and young affection gapes
to be his heir’
ACT 2 SCENE 1

Mercutio - ‘Romeo! humours! madman! passion! lover!’

Benvolio - ‘Blind is his love and best befits the dark.’

ACT 2 SCENE 2

Romeo - ‘Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon…’
‘Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, having some business, do entreat her eyes’
‘The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars’
‘Bright angel…As is a winged messenger of heaven…’

Juliet - ‘O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?’

‘What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to
a man.’

Romeo - ‘With love's light wings did I o'er-perch these walls; for stony limits cannot hold love
out’
‘My life were better ended by their hate, than death prorogued, wanting of thy love.’

Juliet - ‘I have no joy of this contract to-night: It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;Too
like the lightning…’
‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep; the more I give to thee, the more I
have, for both are infinite…’

Romeo - ‘How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night, like softest music to attending
ears!’

Juliet - ‘O, for a falconer's voice, to lure this tassel-gentle back again!’

ACT 2 SCENE 3

Romeo - ‘Good morrow father’

F Lawrence - ‘That's my good son’
F Lawrence - ‘For this alliance may so happy prove, to turn your households' rancour to pure
love.’
F Lawrence - ‘Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.’

ACT 2 SCENE 4

Mercutio about Tybalt - ‘He fights as you sing prick-song’

ACT 2 SCENE 5
Juliet - ‘Love's heralds should be thoughts, which ten times faster glide than the sun's
beams’

ACT 2 SCENE 6

Romeo as they marry - ‘Then love-devouring death do what he dare’

F Lawrence - ‘These violent delights have violent ends’
Juliet - ‘But my true love is grown to such excess I cannot sum up sum of half my wealth.’

ACT 3 SCENE 1

Mercutio - ‘By my heel, I care not.’

Tybalt - ‘No better term than this,--thou art a villain.’
Romeo - ‘But love thee better than thou canst devise, till thou shalt know the reason of my
love’
Benvolio - ‘Either withdraw unto some private place, and reason coldly of your grievances, or
else depart’
Mercutio - ‘O calm, dishonourable, vile submission!’
‘A plague o' both your houses!’
‘Ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man.’
Romeo - ‘And fire-eyed fury be my conduct now!’
‘O, I am fortune's fool!’
Benvolio - ‘This is the truth, or let Benvolio die.’
Prince - ‘My blood for your rude brawls doth lie a-bleeding; but I'll amerce you with so strong
a fine’

ACT 3 SCENE 2

Juliet - ‘love-performing night’

‘Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars’
‘To an impatient child that hath new robes and may not wear them.’
‘My dear-loved cousin, and my dearer lord?’
‘A damned saint, an honourable villain!’
‘That 'banished,' that one word 'banished,' hath slain ten thousand Tybalts.’
‘There is no end, no limit, measure, bound, in that word's death; no words can that woe
sound.’
‘And death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead!’

ACT 3 SCENE 3

F Lawrence - ‘A gentler judgment vanish'd from his lips, not body's death, but body's
banishment.’
Romeo - ‘There is no world without Verona walls, but purgatory, torture, hell itself.
Hence-banished is banish'd from the world’
F Lawrence - ‘And turn'd that black word death to banishment: This is dear mercy, and thou
seest it not.’
Romeo - ‘But Romeo may not; he is banished: Flies may do this, but I from this must fly’
F Lawrence - ‘O, then I see that madmen have no ears.’
Romeo - ‘And fall upon the ground, as I do now, taking the measure of an unmade grave.’
Nurse - ‘Stand up, stand up; stand, and you be a man: For Juliet's sake, for her sake, rise
and stand.’
F Lawrence - ‘Thy tears are womanish; thy wild acts denote the unreasonable fury of a
beast: Unseemly woman in a seeming man!’

ACT 3 SCENE 4

Capulet - ‘I think she will be ruled in all respects by me; nay, more, I doubt it not.’

ACT 3 SCENE 5

Romeo - ‘More light and light; more dark and dark our woes!’
Juliet - ‘Methinks I see thee, now thou art below, as one dead in the bottom of a tomb: Either
my eyesight fails, or thou look'st pale.’
‘O fortune, fortune! all men call thee fickle’
Capulet - ‘Out, you green-sickness carrion! out, you baggage! You tallow-face!’
‘My fingers itch’
‘We have a curse in having her’
‘And you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets’
Juliet - ‘Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed in that dim monument where Tybalt lies.’
Nurse - ‘Romeo's a dishclout to him’
‘For it excels your first: or if it did not, your first is dead; or 'twere as good he were, as living
here and you no use of him.’
Juliet - ‘Ancient damnation! O most wicked fiend!’
‘If all else fail, myself have power to die.’

ACT 4 SCENE 1

F Lawrence - ‘[Aside] I would I knew not why it should be slow'd.’

Paris - ‘Happily met, my lady and my wife!’
‘Till then, adieu; and keep this holy kiss.’
Juliet - ‘O bid me leap…or bid me go into a new-made grave’
F Lawrence - ‘I'll send a friar with speed’

ACT 4 SCENE 2

Capulet - ‘Well, he may chance to do some good on her: A peevish self-will'd harlotry it is.’
Juliet - ‘Henceforward I am ever ruled by you.’

ACT 4 SCENE 3

Juliet - ‘I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins, that almost freezes up the heat of life’
‘The horrible conceit of death and night, together with the terror of the place,--as in a vault’
ACT 4 SCENE 5

Nurse - ‘Why, lamb! why, lady! fie, you slug-a-bed!’

Lady Capulet - ‘O me, O me! My child, my only life, revive, look up, or I will die with thee!’
Capulet - ‘Death lies on her like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of all the field.’
Capulet - ‘ There she lies, flower as she was, deflowered by him. Death is my son-in-law,
Death is my heir; my daughter he hath wedded: I will die, and leave him all; life, living, all is
Death's.’
Lady Capulet - ‘Accursed, unhappy, wretched, hateful day!’
Nurse - ‘Never was seen so black a day as this: O woful day, O woful day!’
Paris - ‘Most detestable death, by thee beguil'd, by cruel cruel thee quite overthrown! O love!
O life! not life, but love in death!’
Capulet - ‘O child! O child! my soul, and not my child! Dead art thou! Alack! my child is dead;
and with my child my joys are buried.’
Capulet - ‘Our instruments to melancholy bells, our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast, our
solemn hymns to sullen dirges change, our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse, and all
things change them to the contrary.’

ACT 5 SCENE 1

Romeo - ‘I dreamt my lady came and found me dead– Strange dream, that gives a dead
man leave to think!’
Bathalsar about Romeo - ‘Your looks are pale and wild, and do import some misadventure.’
Romeo - ‘Come, cordial and not poison, go with me to Juliet's grave; for there must I use
thee.’

ACT 5 SCENE 2

F Lawrence - ‘Poor living corse, closed in a dead man's tomb!’

ACT 5 SCENE 3

Paris - ‘Sweet flower, with flowers thy bridal bed I strew’

Romeo - ‘The time and my intents are savage-wild, more fierce and more inexorable far than
empty tigers or the roaring sea.’
Balthasar about Romeo - ‘His looks I fear, and his intents I doubt.’
Romeo - ‘Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death, gorged with the dearest morsel of the
earth, thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open, and, in despite, I'll cram thee with more food!’
Paris - ‘Stop thy unhallow'd toil, vile Montague! Can vengeance be pursued further than
death?’
Romeo - ‘A madman's mercy bade thee run away.’
Romeo - ‘... a lantern, slaughter'd youth, for here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes this vault
a feasting presence full of light.’
Romeo - ‘Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath’
‘Ah, dear Juliet, why art thou yet so fair? shall I believe that unsubstantial death is amorous,
and that the lean abhorred monster keeps thee here in dark to be his paramour?’
‘shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world-wearied flesh’
‘Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide! Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on the
dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark!’
Juliet - ‘O happy dagger!’
Capulet - ‘O wife, look how our daughter bleeds!’
Lady Capulet - ‘O me! this sight of death is as a bell, that warns my old age to a sepulchre.’
Montague - ‘Grief of my son's exile hath stopp'd her breath…To press before thy father to a
grave?’
Prince - ‘ Capulet! Montague! See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate, that heaven finds
means to kill your joys with love.’
Capulet - ‘O brother Montague, give me thy hand’
Prince - ‘The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head…for never was a story of more woe,
than this of Juliet and her Romeo.’