Reading notes on Romeo
and Juliet
- 1.1
- rhymes; sonnet of
prologue
- rap
talk; hip hop--bravado violence and sexual abuse
- puns and rhymes
- gang war
- draw thy tool...my
naked weapon is out; challenging each other
- begin
with a fight
- old
montague and wife--comedy; give me sword; energies of youth
- inflammatory
explosion--Luhrman
- Prince
as order and authority
- transition
to Romeo; language switch at 111 from violence to tenderness; adolescent
melancholy
- the
lover boy --banter with Benvolio and then barrage of oxymora 170--lines
start rhyming; praise of Rosaline; Petrarchan fashion
- lovesickness
- 1.2
- Old Cap. and Paris--Juliet's
age at 14
- Illiterate
Peter interlude
- party invitation;
Romeo swears loyalty to Rosaline
- Benvolio
insists on comparisons
- 1.3
- Juliet called by lady
cap; Nurse's speech about earthquake and weaning and falling backward and
wound and time passing
- realtion
of nurse of Juliet
- mother wants her to
marry; join the adults
- love
as obedience or independence; 99--loving the one forbidden by parents
- 1.4
- Masquers enter; Romeo
doesnt want to dance; Mercutio: prick love for pricking--Romeo wants to
be old--25
- Queen
Mab--poetry, dreams, talk and nothing--Mercurial; manic; Protean--the mind
the unconscious, language and feeling aand masquing
- Romeo's dreamy premonition
- 1.5
- the servingmen--upstanirs
downstairs; setting stage for party
- Capulet's
nostalgia--cf. Nurse; passage of time NB
- Romeo's sudden fall
40 and Tybalt's violent noticing--love and hate juxtaposed; oxymoron
- Cap.
battles Tybalt--staging of two things at once 80 while the dance goes on--three
things
- the holy sonnet: love
and divinity; a dance of language--formal pattern
- interruption--nurse
and mother calls--coarse and refined
- both find love/hate;
love/death oxymoron
- 2.0
- old desire; young
affection
- 2.1
- Mercutio
mocking the language of love; conjuring by Rosaline
- raising up and down;
mistress' circle
- Contrast
to "soft what light throughyohnder window breaks?..."
- Seeing
her unobserved--audience actor
- language
and imagination; metaphor to reality through speech...entranced with her
speech
- Her
speech itself a cry of woe, and then a tirade against language
- love is nameless,
yet she loves his name
- either he or she should
renounce their name=marriage
- Montague is not body...what's
in a name...doff thy name
- Exchange name for
her...all figurative dance of language and meaning
- He
pops out; audience turns to actor; comments on taking metaphor literally--cant
identify himself by name--comedy
- moving
directly into danger and tragedy--death
- his
bravado and linguistic sense of protection
- love
is worth death
- She
reverses herself....fain would I dwell on form 130
- I will take thy word
- worried about falseness
of words again--well taken, given Romeo's previous infatuation and the fact
that love cools or is prorogued
- problem of saying
I love you--what does it mean or does it make meaning
- then she reverses
again...coyness, easiness
- play of signifiers:
not impute this y ielding to light love
- He
tries to swear she stops him--by what shall he swear; looking for the signified=God
of my idolatry
- all
this talk is also cover for the actions of touch and tease
- She
keeps interrupting
- Her
caution--I have no joy of this contract tonight--too sudden/Too like the
lightening which doeth cease to be /Ere one can say it lightens--ineffable
feelings; lost when put into words
- give and take; infinite
bounty; satisfaction and desire grows with withdrawal
- she leaves and returns--good
night, good night
- typical lovers good
night
- her pledge to him;
her vows--also her distrust
- schoolboy metaphor
- leaves and comes back
again
- forgot why called
you back
- losing what's in mind;
spacing out; he'll stay
- wanton bird image--wants
to be her bird; parting and sweet sorrow; kill thee with much cherishing
- 2.2
- Friar Lawrence collecting
natural herbs--he loves youth and desire; reflecting on paradox of virtue
and vice; poison and medicine--Juliet's flower imagery
- R's
father figure--religion and love[medieval romance]
- Difference between
Rosaline and Juliet--J. shares it
- Wisely
and slow; they stumble that run fast 94
- 2.3
- Mercutio and romeo
bantering endlessly and sexually; meeting and mocking Nurse
- cords
sailing vessel imagery [comic interludes create tension; not lighthearted]
- 2.4
- youth vs. age; Juliet
waiting; slow vs. fast--17/18
- nurse
teasing her with good news; essence of impatience
- Nurse teases her asking
for massage; her earthiness; reveals the news
- 2.5
- Romeo defies time
and death--his desire so strong; haste, urgency, impatience
- These
violent delights have violent ends/and in their triumh die like fire and
powder/which as they kiss consume
- Love moderately
- Juliet:
my love's excess
- 3.1
- now these hot days
is the mad blood stirring
- Mercutio's
aggression--tension of wanting to fight--moodiness and volatilility--accuses
Benvolio of being quarrelsome
- Tybalt and Mercutio
as hotheads--Benvolio tghe peacemaker
- Romeo
wants to love Tybalt; Mercutio sees it as vile submission; he and Benvolio
try to stop the fight
- Tybalt gets Mercutio
under R's arm
- Mercutio's
gallows humor; and curse--Mercurial shifts between humor and violence
- Romeo's enraged because
of conflicts; shame at having been friendly to Capulets; kills tybalt
- Capulet's
wife demands revenge for Tybalt; Romeo banished by Prince
- 3.2
- Juliet
waiting for Romeo--her excitement and impatience; desire; urgency
- theme: horses, night,
heavens, secrecies, rhetorical energy created by desire
- paradoxes: win by
surrendering; concentration of language here again
- modesty and desire;
innocence and ardency
- come, come, come--calling
her lover to enter her and exploding in orgasm and stars
- not yet occupied as
a house; not enjoyed as a house to live in
- impatient child
- Contrast
to our knowledge of what just happened; love and death
- Juliet disoriented
by words and sounds and names
- suicidal
- rejects romeo and
then rejects tybalt; recognizes the changes she's gone through in response
to nurse condemnation of Romeo--blistered be thy tongue
- time falling over
itself; remembers Romeo's banishement
- 3.3
- Romeo
sees banishement sorse than death; he has to pass his own impatience; no
distinciton between death and delay
- philosophy
vs. emotion
- stand
up be a man 85--nurse and friar are sympathetic parent figures; reinforcing
audience's sympathy
- Romeo
back to his name
- accused
of being womanish; Friar takes over plot
- 3.4
- contrast to machinations
of Capulet father, trying to marry Juliet to Paris--old figures say"well
we were born to die" 5
- marriage
on Thursday--old man's haste to deny the suffering and loss; get on with
it--very short scene compared to previous long one; we want to see R and
J together
- 3.5
- departure
after their night together--lark and nightingale music--two birds; now
wanting to slow down time
- their
feelings after first lovemaking--effort to stop time; time passing as
they do so
- terrible
departure--we know and they have premonition its their last time together
- mother's
misunderstanding--grief for Tybalt; our intimate participation--she puts
down Romeo; Juliet's need to disguise herself as later in scene with nurse
- this
is the fall; the loss of innocence
- equivocation;
as if she plots with mother to kill Rome
- father
freaks out at her disobedience; she has to face terrible violence and
impetuousity in age
- tragedy:
she prefers husband to father and is cast out by him--banished from the
garden--cast out
- pathetic
search for comfort--some comfort--irony: Romeo's a dishclout
- ancient
damnation; 0 wicked fiend--cast out by nurse as well
- 4.1
- according to Paris,
father thinks he's doing it for her benefit
- she
disses Paris--she and Laurence conspire excluding Paris
- threatens her own
suicide
- death
engulfing all of them in desperation--the poison drug
- her total commitment
to Romeo
- Friar
tells a romantic story of sleeping beauty awakened; he's caught up in the
fairy tale, instead of sending her directly to Mantua; all in love with
death
- 4.2
- Capulet throwing another
party
- Juliet
gone from excess honesty to dissimulation with father; even enjoying the
deception--he is so happy--irony
- 4.3
- More dissimulation
from Juliet--with mom and nurse; also mock religion; the friar himself as
machiavellian and slightly satanic
- Her
soliloquy--mad fantasy--paranoia and gothic visions of the horror of the
grave, before she takes the potion
- 4.4
- mother and father
cheerfully concerned again with the party; their ignorance, thinking they
know best
- trying
to wke Juliet; sex jokes
- ritualistic keening
about the death of youth--a false death draws as much emotion as a real
one; like the false love of Rosaline--displaying the love for Juliet despite
previous aggression
- Friar
gives religious [false] comfort
- Party over; dirges
sung--tragic atmosphere
- Musicians
and servants goof around; couldnt care less--irony
- 5.1
- Romeo's dream--like
one of Queen Mab's--a premonition--happy and sad; irony
- Balthasar
brings misinformation
- Apothecary
to get poisons--the opposite of Friars gathering herbs in 2.2
- Romeo losing innocence;
dealing with criminals; shop is demonic parody of green fields
- death images; exploitation
of poverty; breaking law
- 5.2
- Friar John prevented
by plague quarantine from delivering Laurances letter
- Hasty
pace of last two short scenes; L. plans to rescue Juliet early
- 5.3
- Paris bringing flowers;
nighttime, graveyard and tomb--another garden--death and love; he's mourning
- wrenching
iron of Romeo and crowbar of Laurance
- Romeo violently threatening
Balthasar
- prying
open the jaws of death--tragic atmosphere
- Paris' misprision;
fights and killed by R.
- Romeo's
compassion
- His painfully ironic
and wordplay ending--Tybalt also there; double irony of thinking Juliet
looks alive
- drinks
poison to his love...with a kiss I die
- timing
and dramatic structure--Juliet's actually awake;
- Friar Lawrence entering--discovers
"lamentable chance."
- he knows and
we know she's awake
- J. awakens--tragedy
upon tragedy
- Friar cant deal with
the situation and runs away
- kissing lips to get
poison; still warm
- interruption again--like
in garden--the watch; order
- dagger in sheath "die"
- order
restored--catching the accessories; prince comes back
- death
of ms. montague announced
- everything
explained; end with a "glooming peace"