Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare

In the late 1990s, French composer Gerard Presgurvic rewrote Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into a musical with modern influences, while largely remaining faithful to the original plot. This musical play was hugely successful and was translated...

Separating qualities common to one 'set' or 'type' of Shakespeare's plays which are not common to the plays as a whole is a difficult task: it would no doubt be possible to find evidence of any feature uniting 'the Tragedies' within any of...

The concept of fate functions as a central theme in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In the opening prologue of the play, the Chorus informs the audience that Romeo and Juliet are "Star ñ cross'd Lovers" (Prologue l.6). In other words, the Chorus...

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet explains love through the use of three different kinds of love: unrequited love between Romeo and Rosaline, true love between Romeo and Juliet, and cynical love from Mercutio and the Nurse. The use of common, era...

From the bawdy Mercutio to the gentle Juliet, the characters in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet are colorful, but purposeful. Even the most obscure characters reflect Shakespeare's calculations in the development of key themes throughout the play....

A major theme in the play Romeo and Juliet is the contrast between the two worlds: real and unreal. In order for true love between the star-crossed lovers to survive, it must exist in both. Romeo lives in the unreal world for the majority of the...

The epistle of Saint John unequivocally states, “Love comes from God” (1 John 4:7). This statement not only explains the source of love but it also provides a means to understand both love and God. If love is from God, then an understanding of...

In the 1997 film, Romeo + Juliet, Baz Luhrmann has attempted to take the original play by William Shakespeare, and create an appropriation of it for today. He takes what we value about the text: the themes, evocative language and poetry, the...

In his play Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare puts his minor characters to good use. Romeo’s friend Mercutio and Juliet’s nurse are both characters that are not considered the main focus of the play, but nevertheless play a crucial role in the lives...

"You're television incarnate, Diana: indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt...

Romeo and Juliet is rife with the powerful contrasting passions of Love and Hate. Since this work is a drama, Shakespeare has chosen to convey these emotions through characters’ language. This essay will examine how dialogue is used to demonstrate...

In Act 4 Scene 1 of Romeo and Juliet, Friar Lawrence, Paris, and Juliet converse about the upcoming marriage of Juliet and Paris. In the scene, Juliet’s new identity of an independent woman is forged through her vigor in dealing with Paris and the...

In Romeo and Juliet, many ironic situations foreshadowing their doomed result. In the passage where Tybalt and Capulet debate at the masquerade feast, there are many lines that directly foreshadow two important components of the play: Romeo’s...

Throughout Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare makes heavy use of religious imagery, especially when concerned with the young couple. This imagery serves two purposes in the play. It underlines the purity of Romeo and Juliet’s love by associating it...

In Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet are doomed from the start, and the audience is aware of this from the prologue. “From forth the fatal loins of these two foes a pair of star-crossed lovers take their...

Novelist Napoleon Hill once wrote, “Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in another.” His opinion compels people to reconsider and reflect on the consequences and effects...

Most modern children grow up listening to their mothers tell fairytales and other fictional stories, but what did they do before the time of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White? In earlier centuries, it was not uncommon for care of small children to be...

The theatrical device of performing a play within another play has been employed for centuries, most notably in European theatre and literature (Fisher and Greiden xi). The play within a play “describes a strategy for constructing play texts that...

Shakespeare uses a great number of linguistic and structural devices throughout his play ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in order to portray the characters and their relationships with one another. In this essay I will explore and analyse the effects and...

Dutch humanist and scholar Erasmus defines free will as “a power of the human will by which man may be able to direct himself towards or turn away from what leads to eternal salvation” (Erasmus 6). Many literary works of the Renaissance debate the...

Many film adaptations of William Shakespeare’s classic tragedy of “star-crossed lovers” have been made, both in the original setting and more modern ones (Shakespeare Prologue. 6). Two movies that exemplify this are Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and...

Nature is an important feature of poetic realism, an offshoot of German realism in the late 19th century. Gottfried Keller, the author of the novel Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (Romeo and Juliet in the Village), is a Swiss writer who belongs to...

The Bible states “God saw light was good, and he separated the light from darkness.” Though light and dark are separated in Romeo in Juliet, they have entirely different connotations. The presence of light turns the characters belligerent, while...

In dark and dire situations, humor is often needed to lighten the atmosphere in order to ensure sanity. This proves to be very true in William Shakespeare’s tragic play, Romeo and Juliet. As the plot of the play continues to develop, tragic and...