Notes - Romeo and Juliet PART 1 (Description, Morality, setting, writing, structure and background) PDF

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Summary

Gives descriptive notes of the plot, background, setting, moral, structure and writing style. It explains how the moral values of the time intertwine with the tragedy....

Description

Notes for Romeo and Juliet (Part 1) Description of the plot 

Romeo attends a party in an attempt to get over a girl with whom he is utterly fascinated, but he meets another girl, Juliet, and becomes obsessed with her as well.

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Their families despise each other, yet despite or perhaps because of this, they fall madly in love and marry the next day, sparking an immediate family feud.

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Several people are killed, including Juliet's cousin, whom Romeo murders.

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As a result, Romeo must flee.

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To avoid another marriage, Juliet drinks a sleeping potion.

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Romeo returns after hearing the dreadful news and, finding her sleeping corpse and believing she is dead, kills himself.

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She then awakens, finds Romeo, and kills herself.

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This event brought the feuding families to an end.

Background 

This story is based on Arthur Brooke's 1562 3000 line narrative poem The Tragical Historye of Romeus and Juliet, which was also based on a history of tragic romances stretching back at least to Ovid's Metamorphosis.

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Shakespeare added narrative complexities.

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The story of Romeo and Juliet served as a warning tale for Brooke.

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He refers to them as "a couple of unlucky lovers, thrilling themselves to unhonest desire, disregarding the authority and advise of parents and friends.. attempting all perilous adventures for the attainment of their desired lust.. abusing the noble name of legitimate marriage."

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Shakespeare offers a much more compassionate portrait of Romeo and Juliet and encourages us to empathize with them o They have feelings for each other, but they are polite about it. The physical gap between them in their most passionate scene demonstrates this.

o They use sacred metaphors were recommended for courtship. 

Shakespeare’s Juliet is only 13 which gather empathy from the audience when the tragic events unfold.

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Shakespeare was also influenced by Petrarch's love poems, which the character Mercutio mentions, and Petrarch's work is much more approving of intense adoration than Brooke's is

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Example of this – He believed in love at first sight because all of his poems were written to a woman he never met or only saw once.

Setting 

The play is set in Verona, Italy, which was also the setting of the source material, as well as the fact that Shakespeare's plays were mostly set outside of England.

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The play was inspired by arguments concerning morals and values, such as individuals' responsibility to themselves against their families and the greater societal order. It was much safer to put the scene in distant Italy..

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Romeo and Juliet is a political drama as well – o

The Montagues and Capulets repeatedly disregard the prince of Verona's proclamations.

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Romeo's largest roadblock to marrying Juliet is the Prince's exile and threat of execution if he returns to the city.

Moral 

The central topic in this novel was whether an individual should be loyal to their own feelings or to their family, faith, or prince. These were crucial questions in Elizabethan England. Shakespeare, according to critic Northrup Frye, either set his plays in the distant past or in a faraway land whenever he wished to write about the troubles of squabbling lords.

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The romance that takes place is very catholic, and much of the tragedy is aided by a slick Catholic friar in Protestant England.

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The image of Italians as passionate and impetuous dates back well before Shakespeare, which helps to understand Romeo and Juliet's actions.

The structure 

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy

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Aristotle initially described the form of tragedies in the 5th century BCE, and Shakespeare's plays follow it

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Tragedy comes when a generally decent character or noble character makes a mistake and is dragged low.

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Despite the fact that the tragedy that decent people face when they act wrongly isn't typically reflected in the real world, it remains a potent theme in our fiction and in how we perceive the world around us.

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It's why we're so interested when we witness once-famous people fall from grace.

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The complexity Shakespeare adds to the Aristotelian structure is what makes Shakespearean tragedy so fascinating..

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By Elizabethan standards, Romeo and Juliet both make mistakes, but their errors are born of love, and it is because of their deaths as a result of their errors that peace and harmony return to Verona's streets.

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It might be read as an Aristotelian tragedy, but it can also be understood as a tragic sacrifice story or as a story about love being worth the price of death.

Writing 

Romeo and Juliet has both poetry and prose; it is easy to identify based on the line length.

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The lines of poetry are shorter and usually conform to the same metric structures, called iambic pentameter. An iamb is a poetic foot consisting of a stressed and unstressed syllable. (putting an emphasis on a syllable). Pentameter means that there are five feet in a line.

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Example: Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene. From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

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Iambic pentameter is a technique for reflecting and intensifying the natural rhythms of human speech in English

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It's especially important to pay attention to when Shakespeare toys with the meter, as in the famous line Romeo, Romeo! "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" says the narrator

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That sentence should be written in iambic pentameter, but something keeps mucking it up - notably, Romeo's name, which is the issue.

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There would be no problem in the line or in the play if he wasn't named Romeo Montague.

Stage 

The play is difficult to understand since English has changed much since the 16th century, and it was created for the stage

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The Elizabethan playhouse was substantially different from today's theaters.

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A portion of the audience with a good income sat on tiered seats in the galleries with an excellent view of the stage, as did Shakespeare's company in enormous theaters like the Globe, which were partially open to the air and partly covered by the thatched roof.

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The theaters were dirty and not quiet places

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There was nothing to focus attention on the stage except the play itself, so people drank, ate, and jeered at the actors if they thought the performances were bad.

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There was nothing to focus attention on the stage except the play itself so people drank and ate and jeered at the actors of they thought the performances were bad.

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While Romeo and Juliet is a fantastic piece of poetry, it also caters to popular interests at the time

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Nobles did attend the theater, but it was not regarded as a sophisticated activity. It was not a show for the affluent. Shakespeare was a master of balancing high and low culture. He had a knack for amusing and entertaining us while simultaneously struggling with major issues like honor, fate, obligation, and human imperfection...