What is the significance of romeo and juliet

For instance, in Act I Romeo talks about his frustrated love for Rosaline in poetic terms, as if love were primarily an abstraction. Whereas Mercutio cynically conflates love and sex, Juliet takes a more earnest and pious position. Juliet, by contrast, implies that the concepts are distinct and that they exist in a hierarchical relationship, with love standing above sex.

This view accords with Catholic doctrine, which privileges the spiritual union of marriage, but also indicates that this union must be legally consummated through sexual intercourse.

The speech Juliet delivers in Act III, scene ii, nicely demonstrates her view of the proper relationship between love and sex:. Oh, I have bought the mansion of a love But not possessed it, and, though I am sold, Not yet enjoyed. Due to the ongoing feud between the Capulets and the Montagues, violence permeates the world of Romeo and Juliet. Sampson and Gregory open the play by making jokes about perpetrating violent acts against members of the Montague family.

Tempers among the young men of Verona are clearly short, as further demonstrated when Tybalt spots Romeo at the Capulet ball and spoils for a fight.

Though tragic, this turn of events also seems inevitable. Given how the feud between the two families continuously fans the flames of hatred and thereby maintains a low-burning rage, such flaring outbursts of violence appear inescapable. Violence in the play has a particularly significant relationship with sex. But it also comes up in more localized examples. These events frame Act III, which opens with the scene in which Romeo ultimately slays Tybalt, and closes with the scene after Romeo stays the night with Juliet, possibly consummating their marriage.

Even the language of sex in the play conjures violent imagery. Romeo and Juliet are both very young, and Shakespeare uses the two lovers to spotlight the theme of youth in several ways. Romeo, for instance, is closely linked to the young men with whom he roves the streets of Verona.

These young men are short-tempered and quick to violence, and their rivalries with opposing groups of young men indicate a phenomenon not unlike modern gang culture though we should remember that Romeo and his friends are also the privileged elite of the city.

In addition to this association with gangs of youthful men, Shakespeare also depicts Romeo as somewhat immature. They also mock Romeo for being so hung up on one woman. Although Juliet does not want to marry Paris, she certainly believes herself old enough for marriage.

In fact, she yearns for marriage and for sexual experience, and she often uses explicitly erotic language that indicates a maturity beyond her actual years. Yet in spite of this apparent maturity, Juliet also tacitly acknowledges her own youthfulness. Indeed, one of the saddest aspects of the play is that the lovers die so young, cutting their lives and their relationship so tragically short. The theme of ill-fated love frames the story of Romeo and Juliet from the beginning.

In the case of Romeo and Juliet, then, their fates are cosmically misaligned. Watching the characters struggle against an invisible and unbeatable force such as fate heightens the sense of tension throughout the play. Instead, it locks the audience into a sense of tense anticipation of inescapable tragedy. Ace your assignments with our guide to Romeo and Juliet! SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Do Romeo and Juliet have sex?

Is Juliet too young to get married? Who is Rosaline? A more cutting irony is that the Petrarchan lover and his sensual opponent Sampson or Gregory have more in common than is first apparent. The Petrarchan lover, in emphasizing the often paralyzing intensity of his passion, is less interested in praising the remote mistress who inspires such devotion than he is in displaying his own poetic virtuosity and his capacity for self-denial.

The lover is interested in affirming the uniqueness of his beloved only in theory. On closer look, she too becomes a generic object and he more interested in self-display. Even when Paris and old Capulet, discussing Juliet as prospective bride, vary the discourse to include a conception of woman as wife and mother, she remains an object of verbal and actual exchange.

In lyric poetry, the Petrarchan mistress remains a function of language alone, unheard, seen only as a collection of ideal parts, a center whose very absence promotes desire. Drama is a material medium, however. In drama, the mistress may come surrounded by relatives and an inconveniently insistent social milieu.

As was noted above, Shakespeare distinguishes sharply between the social circumstances of adolescent males and females. Unlike Romeo, whose deepest emotional ties are to his gang of friends, and unlike the more mobile daughters of Shakespearean comedy who often come in pairs, Juliet lives isolated and confined, emotionally as well as physically, by her status as daughter.

Juliet, in contrast, is invited to look only where her parents tell her:. Juliet herself asks Romeo the serious questions that Elizabethan society wanted only fathers to ask. She challenges social prescriptions, designed to contain erotic desire in marriage, by taking responsibility for her own marriage:. The irony in her pledge—an irony perhaps most obvious to a modern, sexually egalitarian audience—is that Romeo here is following Juliet on an uncharted narrative path to sexual fulfillment in unsanctioned marriage.

Come, civil night,. Why, is not this better now than groaning for love? Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo, now art thou what thou art, by art as well as by nature. For this driveling love is like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole.

Implicit here is a central tenet of traditional misogyny that excessive desire for a woman is effeminizing. Why, we might ask instead, should Mercutio have insisted on answering a challenge addressed only to Romeo? The audience experiences this incompatibility as a sudden movement from comedy to tragedy. Suddenly Friar Lawrence must abandon hopes of using the love of Capulet and Montague as a force for social reintegration.

There they can exercise a sanctioned, limited freedom in the romantic experimentation of courtship. He begins to speak in blank verse as well as rhyme, which allows his language to sound less artificial and more like everyday language. The fated destinies of Romeo and Juliet are foreshadowed throughout the play. Romeo's sense of foreboding as he makes his way to the Capulet feast anticipates his first meeting with Juliet:. Romeo's role first as a melancholy lover in the opening scenes of the play and then as a Juliet's secret love is significant.

Romeo belongs in a world defined by love rather than a world fractured by feud. Tybalt's death in Act III, Scene 1, brings about the clash between the private world of the lovers and the public world of the feud. Romeo is reluctant to fight Tybalt because they are now related through Romeo's marriage to Juliet. When Tybalt kills Mercutio , however, Romeo out of loyalty to his friend and anger at Tybalt's arrogance kills Tybalt, thus avenging his friend's death. In one ill-fated moment, he placed his love of Juliet over his concern for Mercutio, and Mercutio was killed.

Romeo then compounds the problem by placing his own feelings of anger over any concerns for Juliet by killing Tybalt. Romeo's immaturity is again manifest later when he learns of his banishment. He lies on the floor of the Friar's cell, wailing and crying over his fate. When the Nurse arrives, he clumsily attempts suicide.