romeo and juliet love at first sight essay

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Romeo and Juliet: The Love At First Sight

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Works cited

• Shakespeare, W. (1597). Romeo and Juliet. Oxford University Press. (Original work published in 1597)
• Greenblatt, S. (2004). Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Smith, B. (2008). Love and Infatuation in Romeo and Juliet. English Journal, 97(2), 71-74.
• Kahn, C. H. (2009). The Meaning of Love and the Love of Meaning in Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare Quarterly, 60(1), 22-43.
• Felperin, H. (2014). Love and Lovelessness in Romeo and Juliet. In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Tragedies (pp. 137-153). Cambridge University Press.
• Berryman, J. (2017). Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: Love at First Sight. Bloom's Literary Criticism.
• Tennenhouse, L. (2018). Power and the Quest for Identity in Romeo and Juliet. In Power on Display (pp. 70-103). Routledge.
• Evans, G. Blakemore (2019). The Riverside Shakespeare. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
• Bevington, D. (Ed.). (2020). Romeo and Juliet. Bantam.
• Wells, S., & Orlin, L. (Eds.). (2021). Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide. Oxford University Press.

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How is love portrayed in “Romeo and Juliet”?

Shakespeare portrays love in Romeo and Juliet in many ways. Their love is portrayed by images of light and dark and is juxtaposed against death, and he sets next to Romeo and Juliet the love associated with sight and appearances. In all, their love is of another world. The love of Romeo and Juliet is portrayed as otherworldly and heavenly. They are “star-crossed lovers”, with their destiny pre-determined; they and other humans have no control.

Instead the control lies with fate and God. The lovers are “fortune’s fools”. This dependency on fate and otherworldly powers lend their love a sense of being something heavenly, “hanging in the stars”.

With their love, they are able to rise above their world and everyone else. Their love is a means to escape the world of reality and to create their own world of darkness. This world of darkness is their consequential deaths, because their love is “death-marked”. Their love is too passionate and powerful to remain in their world, ruled by family hate and violence. Shakespeare describes love in terms of sight and appearances. Romeo and Juliet’s love is blind, they first meet at a ball, where Romeo is “covered in an antic face” and Juliet’s identity is unknown to him.

Their first meeting is love at first sight. Romeo has “ne’er saw true beauty till this night” and this shows their love’s dependency on sight. During their second meeting at the balcony, Juliet asks Romeo to “doff thy name”, as names are also a type of disguise and mask. Romeo in turn replies that he is hidden “from their sight”, so that his appearance is seen only by Juliet, who has the “mask of night” on her face. Despite both of them admitting that they love each other, their love is heavily depended on their sight and the appearance of the other person.

This theme is an important element of Shakespeare’s portrayed love because the play itself is based on sight, appearances and masks like the family name. In the play, a common theme is contrasting images of light and dark. Shakespeare uses these images of light and dark often in terms of light and day. Most of Romeo and Juliet’s meetings happen at night. At the Capulets ball, Romeo’s first description of Juliet is that “she doth teach the torches to burn bright”. To Romeo, Juliet, the “fair sun” will be forever associated with light. But to Juliet, she links Romeo, “bescreened in night”, with darkness and the moon.

In the morning after their wedding night Romeo and Juliet argue whether it is light or dark. If it is dark, they are able to stay with each other for longer, but since it is the “lark, the herald of the morn; no nightingale”, the light separates them. Light reveals and exposes, and before the light can expose the truths and realities of their relationship, they are forced to separate. Light and dark can never coexist, and symbolising their love as that show how it can never survive in reality. Throughout Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare employs opposing factors. One of the most potent contrasts is how he sets love next to death.

Their love has “sprung from my [their] only hate”. This juxtaposition emphasises their love and how out of place it is in their society they live in. Both love and death are very strong themes all through the play and are linked. Juliet often refers to death, almost subconsciously. If she does not meet Romeo, she thinks that her “grave is like to be my [her] wedding bed”. Juliet orders that when Romeo dies, he should be cut “out in little stars”. These are not only foreshadowing the lovers imminent deaths, but the constant link between love and death in the play.

They spend one night together, and the next morning Juliet comments how she imagines him “dead at the bottom of a tomb” and that he “lookst pale” Romeo replies that so does she. Exactly a day later, they are lying together again, dead in the tomb. Their love is so passionate and intense, but “violent delights have violent ends”. Instead of being that type of love that pushes and protects them from violence and death, their type of love pushes them towards it. The “violent ends” are the lovers’ suicide, they must finally meet death to preserve their love.

Shakespeare does not want to portray the sweet, gentle and almost childish love, like the love Romeo thought he had for Rosaline. Instead he wanted to portray Romeo and Juliet’s love as powerful, violent, passionate, and as intense as death. Because of the way in which Shakespeare employs images and common themes, the play records Romeo and Juliet’s evolving love, from their metaphorical and heavenly meetings at the ball with “torches” to their literal and dramatic deaths in the darkness of the mausoleum. In the space of four days, Shakespeare has encompassed a lifetime.

A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Although it was first performed in the 1590s, the first  documented  performance of Romeo and Juliet is from 1662. The diarist Samuel Pepys was in the audience, and recorded that he ‘saw “Romeo and Juliet,” the first time it was ever acted; but it is a play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life, and the worst acted that ever I saw these people do.’

Despite Pepys’ dislike, the play is one of Shakespeare’s best-loved and most famous, and the story of Romeo and Juliet is well known. However, the play has become so embedded in the popular psyche that Shakespeare’s considerably more complex play has been reduced to a few key aspects: ‘star-cross’d lovers’, a teenage love story, and the suicide of the two protagonists.

In the summary and analysis that follow, we realise that Romeo and Juliet is much more than a tragic love story.

Romeo and Juliet : brief summary

After the Prologue has set the scene – we have two feuding households, Montagues and Capulets, in the city-state of Verona; and young Romeo is a Montague while Juliet, with whom Romeo is destined to fall in love, is from the Capulet family, sworn enemies of the Montagues – the play proper begins with servants of the two feuding households taunting each other in the street.

When Benvolio, a member of house Montague, arrives and clashes with Tybalt of house Capulet, a scuffle breaks out, and it is only when Capulet himself and his wife, Lady Capulet, appear that the fighting stops. Old Montague and his wife then show up, and the Prince of Verona, Escalus, arrives and chastises the people for fighting. Everyone leaves except Old Montague, his wife, and Benvolio, Montague’s nephew. Benvolio tells them that Romeo has locked himself away, but he doesn’t know why.

Romeo appears and Benvolio asks his cousin what is wrong, and Romeo starts speaking in paradoxes, a sure sign that he’s in love. He claims he loves Rosaline, but will not return any man’s love. A servant appears with a note, and Romeo and Benvolio learn that the Capulets are holding a masked ball.

Benvolio tells Romeo he should attend, even though he is a Montague, as he will find more beautiful women than Rosaline to fall in love with. Meanwhile, Lady Capulet asks her daughter Juliet whether she has given any thought to marriage, and tells Juliet that a man named Paris would make an excellent husband for her.

Romeo attends the Capulets’ masked ball, with his friend Mercutio. Mercutio tells Romeo about a fairy named Queen Mab who enters young men’s minds as they dream, and makes them dream of love and romance. At the masked ball, Romeo spies Juliet and instantly falls in love with her; she also falls for him.

They kiss, but then Tybalt, Juliet’s kinsman, spots Romeo and recognising him as a Montague, plans to confront him. Old Capulet tells him not to do so, and Tybalt reluctantly agrees. When Juliet enquires after who Romeo is, she is distraught to learn that he is a Montague and thus a member of the family that is her family’s sworn enemies.

Romeo breaks into the gardens of Juliet’s parents’ house and speaks to her at her bedroom window. The two of them pledge their love for each other, and arrange to be secretly married the following night. Romeo goes to see a churchman, Friar Laurence, who agrees to marry Romeo and Juliet.

After the wedding, the feud between the two families becomes violent again: Tybalt kills Mercutio in a fight, and Romeo kills Tybalt in retaliation. The Prince banishes Romeo from Verona for his crime.

Juliet is told by her father that she will marry Paris, so Juliet goes to seek Friar Laurence’s help in getting out of it. He tells her to take a sleeping potion which will make her appear to be dead for two nights; she will be laid to rest in the family vault, and Romeo (who will be informed of the plan) can secretly come to her there.

However, although that part of the plan goes fine, the message to Romeo doesn’t arrive; instead, he hears that Juliet has actually died. He secretly visits her at the family vault, but his grieving is interrupted by the arrival of Paris, who is there to lay flowers. The two of them fight, and Romeo kills him.

Convinced that Juliet is really dead, Romeo drinks poison in order to join Juliet in death. Juliet wakes from her slumber induced by the sleeping draught to find Romeo dead at her side. She stabs herself.

The play ends with Friar Laurence telling the story to the two feuding families. The Prince tells them to put their rivalry behind them and live in peace.

Romeo and Juliet : analysis

How should we analyse Romeo and Juliet , one of Shakespeare’s most famous and frequently studied, performed, and adapted plays? Is Romeo and Juliet the great love story that it’s often interpreted as, and what does it say about the play – if it is a celebration of young love – that it ends with the deaths of both romantic leads?

It’s worth bearing in mind that Romeo and Juliet do not kill themselves specifically because they are forbidden to be together, but rather because a chain of events (of which their families’ ongoing feud with each other is but one) and a message that never arrives lead to a misunderstanding which results in their suicides.

Romeo and Juliet is often read as both a tragedy and a great celebration of romantic love, but it clearly throws out some difficult questions about the nature of love, questions which are rendered even more pressing when we consider the headlong nature of the play’s action and the fact that Romeo and Juliet meet, marry, and die all within the space of a few days.

Below, we offer some notes towards an analysis of this classic Shakespeare play and explore some of the play’s most salient themes.

It’s worth starting with a consideration of just what Shakespeare did with his source material. Interestingly, two families known as the Montagues and Capulets appear to have actually existed in medieval Italy: the first reference to ‘Montagues and Capulets’ is, curiously, in the poetry of Dante (1265-1321), not Shakespeare.

In Dante’s early fourteenth-century epic poem, the  Divine Comedy , he makes reference to two warring Italian families: ‘Come and see, you who are negligent, / Montagues and Capulets, Monaldi and Filippeschi / One lot already grieving, the other in fear’ ( Purgatorio , canto VI). Precisely why the families are in a feud with one another is never revealed in Shakespeare’s play, so we are encouraged to take this at face value.

The play’s most famous line references the feud between the two families, which means Romeo and Juliet cannot be together. And the line, when we stop and consider it, is more than a little baffling. The line is spoken by Juliet: ‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ Of course, ‘wherefore’ doesn’t mean ‘where’ – it means ‘why’.

But that doesn’t exactly clear up the whys and the wherefores. The question still doesn’t appear to make any sense: Romeo’s problem isn’t his first name, but his family name, Montague. Surely, since she fancies him, Juliet is quite pleased with ‘Romeo’ as he is – it’s his family that are the problem. Solutions  have been proposed to this conundrum , but none is completely satisfying.

There are a number of notable things Shakespeare did with his source material. The Italian story ‘Mariotto and Gianozza’, printed in 1476, contained many of the plot elements of Shakespeare’s  Romeo and Juliet . Shakespeare’s source for the play’s story was Arthur Brooke’s  The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet  (1562), an English verse translation of this Italian tale.

The moral of Brooke’s tale is that young love ends in disaster for their elders, and is best reined in; Shakespeare changed that. In Romeo and Juliet , the headlong passion and excitement of young love is celebrated, even though confusion leads to the deaths of the young lovers. But through their deaths, and the example their love set for their parents, the two families vow to be reconciled to each other.

Shakespeare also makes Juliet a thirteen-year-old girl in his play, which is odd for a number of reasons. We know that  Romeo and Juliet  is about young love – the ‘pair of star-cross’d lovers’, who belong to rival families in Verona – but what is odd about Shakespeare’s play is how young he makes Juliet.

In Brooke’s verse rendition of the story, Juliet is sixteen. But when Shakespeare dramatised the story, he made Juliet several years younger, with Romeo’s age unspecified. As Lady Capulet reveals, Juliet is ‘not [yet] fourteen’, and this point is made to us several times, as if Shakespeare wishes to draw attention to it and make sure we don’t forget it.

This makes sense in so far as Juliet represents young love, but what makes it unsettling – particularly for modern audiences – is the fact that this makes Juliet a girl of thirteen when she enjoys her night of wedded bliss with Romeo. As John Sutherland puts it in his (and Cedric Watts’) engaging  Oxford World’s Classics: Henry V, War Criminal?: and Other Shakespeare Puzzles , ‘In a contemporary court of law [Romeo] would receive a longer sentence for what he does to Juliet than for what he does to Tybalt.’

There appears to be no satisfactory answer to this question, but one possible explanation lies in one of the play’s recurring themes: bawdiness and sexual familiarity. Perhaps surprisingly given the youthfulness of its tragic heroine, Romeo and Juliet is shot through with bawdy jokes, double entendres, and allusions to sex, made by a number of the characters.

These references to physical love serve to make Juliet’s innocence, and subsequent passionate romance with Romeo, even more noticeable: the journey both Romeo and Juliet undertake is one from innocence (Romeo pointlessly and naively pursuing Rosaline; Juliet unversed in the ways of love) to experience.

In the last analysis, Romeo and Juliet is a classic depiction of forbidden love, but it is also far more sexually aware, more ‘adult’, than many people realise.

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4 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet”

Modern reading of the play’s opening dialogue among the brawlers fails to parse the ribaldry. Sex scares the bejeepers out of us. Why? Confer “R&J.”

It’s all that damn padre’s fault!

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Love in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: an Analysis of Its Portrayal

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Published: May 17, 2022

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In the text the author discussion how Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is an example of love at first sight. Do you think that love at first sight exists in the real world? Why or why not?

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Final answer:

From a literature perspective, 'love at first sight', as represented in texts such as 'Romeo and Juliet', can be seen as real by some people in the sense of an instant emotional connection or attraction. Critics argue it might be based on infatuation or lust rather than love. However, its existence in the real world is subject to individual beliefs and experiences.

Explanation:

The question asked is centered around a personal opinion, which can vary greatly. However, it's possible to analyze this from an English literature perspective. Both the creations of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare and 'Love's Power' by Aphra Behn present the concept of 'love at first sight', which can provoke further examination.

Yes, 'love at first sight' might be considered existent in the real world by some as an instant emotional connection or attraction towards another person, almost like an inexplicable magnetic pull. Nevertheless, this concept has often been subjected to debates and skepticism. Critics argue that 'love at first sight' might be based more on physical attraction, infatuation or lust rather than deep love, which tends to develop over time as one gets to know the other person beyond physical appearance and initial impressions.

That being said, whether 'love at first sight' truly exists in the real world is subject to individual beliefs, experiences, and interpretations, just as it is interpreted variously in different literary texts.

Learn more about Love at First Sight here:

brainly.com/question/32061867

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beacuse if u see somebody and their petter cute but u dont know their personality

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