Review for Test on Romeo and Juliet

Review for Test on Romeo and Juliet

What is one of the themes of Romeo and Juliet? • The destruction of innocence • The dangers of haste

What information about the play is given in the prologue to Act I? • The play is about two star-crossed lovers • They are the children of two feuding families • The feud ends when the children die • The setting is Verona • The play will last for two hours

What is one of the external conflicts in the play? • The feud between the two families • The fights between Tybalt and Mercutio, Romeo and Tybalt • Juliet’s argument with her father when she refuses to marry Paris

How is light imagery used in the play? • There are frequent references to the sun, moon, and stars • The lovers can only meet at night, so day is their enemy • “It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” • “More light and light, more dark and dark our woes.”

Explain at least one reference to fate in the play. • “Oh, I am fortune’s fool.” • “…star-crossed lovers” • “…some consequence left hanging in the stars…”

What is the plot structure of a Shakespearean tragedy? • Act I-exposition • Act II-rising action • Act III-crisis or turning point • Act IV-falling action • Act V-climax (the death of one or more of the main characters) and resolution

Internal Conflicts in the Play • Juliet’s decision to take the Friar’s potion • The Friar’s decision to marry Romeo and Juliet • Romeo’s decision to fight Tybalt

Setting of the play • The play takes place in Verona, Italy, in the fourteenth century

Poetic Forms in Romeo and Juliet • Blank verse is poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Most of Romeo and Juliet is written in blank verse. • An iamb is a pair of syllables, the first unstressed and the second stressed. • Iambic pentameter is a line of poetry that consists of five iambs. • Couplets are two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme

Poetic forms continued… • Lines of poetry are either end-stopped lines or run-on lines. • End-stopped lines have some punctuation at the end which requires a pause. • In a run-on line, the meaning is always completed in the line or lines which follow. • A sonnet is a fourteen line poem with the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg. A sonnet ends with a couplet. There are three sonnets in Romeo and Juliet

More terms… • A conceit is an ingenious, elaborate, and extended comparison. Shakespeare is famous for his skillfully wrought conceits. An extended metaphor is a comparison developed over several lines of a poem. • A soliloquy is an unusually long speech in which a character who is onstage alone expresses his or her thoughts aloud. The soliloquy is a very old dramatic convention in which the audience is supposedly overhearing the private thoughts of the actor.

And still more terms… • The thought we suppose a character is thinking while saying the lines is the subtext, and subtext controlsthe way an actor reads a line.

Foreshadowing • When Juliet looks down at Romeo from her balcony and tells him he looks as if he were in a grave • When Lady Capulet says that she wishes Juliet were married to her grave

Comic Relief • Scenes of comic relief are used to lighten the mood before or after heavy dramatic scenes: when the nurse gives Juliet the news about the marriage plans, when the musicians hired for the wedding are joking around after Juliet is found dead

Dramatic Irony • Dramatic irony is when the audience or the reader knows something that the characters don’t know. The most obvious example of this in Romeo and Juliet is when we know that Juliet isn’t really dead. (The first time, anyway!)

Shakespeare and the English language • Shakespeare added over 1500 new words to the English language. For instance, words like advertising, manager, luggage, and zany have their first recorded use in his writing.

Puns • Shakespearean audiences loved puns and wordplay. • Examples: • When Mercutio says, “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” • When Romeo says “You have dancing soles, but I have a soul of lead.”

Review for Test on Romeo and Juliet