Pointers Romeo Julie 1

Pointers Romeo Juliet

• Contrast in the play: The sweetest and the bitterest love and hatred, festive rejoicings
and dark forebodings, tender embraces and sepulchral horrors, the fullness of life and
self-annihilation, are here all brought close to each other; and yet these contrasts are
so blended into a unity of impression.
• This play of youth is as lovely and as feverish as love itself. Youth is bright and
beautiful, like the animals. Age is too tired to care for brightness, too cold to care for
beauty. The bright, beautiful creatures dash themselves to pieces against the bars of
age's forging, against law, custom, duty, and those inventions of cold blood which
youth thinks cold and age knows to be wise.
• Friar Laurence warns them against haste in the marriage (ii. 6):

These violent delights have violent ends,

And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,

Which as they kiss consume; the sweetest honey

Is loathsome in his own deliciousness,

And in the taste confounds the appetite.

Therefore love moderately, long love doth so;

Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

• The feud of the two households and the civil strife that it has caused are the first
things to which the attention of those who are to witness the play is called. Next they
are told that the children of these two foes become lovers--not foolish, rash,
imprudent lovers, not victims of disobedience to their parents, not in any way
responsible for what they afterwards suffer--but "star-cross'd lovers." The fault is not
in themselves, but in their stars--in their fate as the offspring of these hostile parents.
But their unfortunate and piteous overthrow is the means by which the fatal feud of
the two families is brought to an end. The "death-mark'd love" of the children--love as
pure as it was passionate, love true from first to last to the divine law of love--while
by an evil destiny it brings death to themselves, involves also the death of the hate
which was the primal cause of all the tragic consequences.
• It is how Romeo reacts on death:

"Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath,

Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty:
Thou are not conquer'd: beauty's ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death's pale flag is not advanced there"--
 Pointers Romeo Julie 2

Quotes from:

ROMEO AND JULIET

Is love a tender thing? it is too rough,

         Romeo, Act I, scene iv

If love be rough with you, be rough with love;

Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.

Mercutio, Act I, scene iv

But, soft! what light through yonder window 
breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!

Romeo, Act II, scene ii

O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?

Deny thy father and refuse thy name;

Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,

And I'll no longer be a Capulet.

Juliet, Act II, scene ii

What's in a name? That which we call a rose,

By any other word would smell as sweet.

Juliet, Act II, scene ii

Love goes toward love, as schoolboys from their 
books,

But love from love, toward school with heavy 
 Pointers Romeo Julie 3

looks.

Romeo, Act II, scene ii

Good­night, good­night! Parting is such sweet 
sorrow

That I shall say good­night till it be morrow.

Juliet, Act II, scene ii

For naught so vile that on the earth doth live

But to the earth some special good doth give;

Nor aught so good but, strain'd from that fair use,

Revolts from true birth, stumbling on the abuse:

Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;

And vice sometimes by action dignified.

Friar Lawrence, Act II, scene iii

Come, gentle night, — come, loving black brow'd 
night,

Give me my Romeo; and when he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of Heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night,

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

Juliet, Act III, scene ii

Where be these enemies? Capulet! Montague!

See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate,

That heaven finds means to kill your joys with 
 Pointers Romeo Julie 4

love!

And I, for winking at your discords too,

Have lost a brace of kinsmen: all are punish'd.

Prince, Act III, scene iii

For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

Prince, Act V, scene iii