What type of audience was romeo and juliet written for

I think if these two houses were joined in marriage, and the violent excesses of their hatred were to be put by, all Italy would have reason to envy the men of Verona. This speech attributes to Roselo a positive appreciation of the possibilities of their intrusion unlike Romeo's negativism —a termination of the feud, which is attributed to Friar Laurence alone by Shakespeare.

Lope's audience is encouraged from the start to be aware of a happy option for the resolution of the plot, even though Roselo does ominously savor the risks: "Dangers in the tasting stimulate the appetite" Lope's ball scene itself is akin to Shakespeare's though there is certainly no direct relationship between the scripts.

Romeo is recognized by Teobaldo, now the brother of Julia's father, Antonio, whom he unexpectedly urges to take a positive view of Roselo's rash abandonment of his disguise, which Teobaldo sees as "a simple and noble directness. He is young, and being young, he's without the enmity that is the nature of his breed" He warns Antonio not to "cry havoc and revive the feud again" just because Roselo has come to flirt with "some pretty lovebirds" Unfortunately, as with Romeo, passion reverses Roselo's positive state of mind.

On seeing Julia he describes her as "my death" and exclaims "Let me gaze upon that celestial angel, and let whatever ill they have in mind befall me. For it is necessary to forfeit life on earth for a man to enter heaven" The fatal potentiality of this attitude is clearly marked. At this point Lope creates a scene worthy of Shakespeare at his most ingenious; two Monteses, Roselo and his friend Anselmo, approach two Castelvin girl cousins: Julia and her cousin Dorotea daughter of Teobaldo , who are both attracted to the two Monteses, even while Dorotea's brother is trying to court Julia.

Roselo excuses himself for his tactless intrusion by accusing Julia:. Yet, lady, you must pardon me; you are yourself to blame, and to absolve your fault you cannot then blame me. It was your rare beauty, from you, my boldness was born.

That beauty beckoned me with a light divine and pure, and like a moth I came to circle near the fire. Your blazing heaven burns me, and to die beside you is sweeter to me, more precious than to live in the lonely cold. The ominous imagery is worthy of Shakespeare's Romeo, but Julia cleverly handles the tricky situation resulting from the rival Otavio's resentful presence, by what has become a notorious stage example of female duplicity: while seeming to address gracious remarks to Otavio she ensures by secretly holding Roselo's hand that he understands that her flirtation is really directed at him.

Vaughan Jacob who played Roselo for Heather Davies admitted he found this scene incredibly difficult: "Roselo has to convince Julia of his sincere love and not be seen by the person she is talking to, Otavio. Otavio observes: "I have the curious sense that I hear my answers echoed" If Roselo initiates the dialogue, it is the psychological ingenuity of Julia that sustains it, and even allows the lovers openly to plan a rendezvous.

Thus Julia begins to emerge as the dominant and effective figure in the relationship like the Rosalind of As You Like It in a way Shakespeare's Juliet does not, with consequently divergent outcomes. Julia tells her maid: "I've made myself the gallant, I wooed so boldly" However, the tragic complication is that both of Julia's lovers now believe they have a commitment.

As the situation develops Lope diversifies the sentimental tone as does Shakespeare in his early scenes by introducing two comic supporting characters analogous to Shakespeare's Mercutio and the Nurse: Roselo's corrupt and cowardly servant Marin, and Julia's cynical maid, Celia, her youthful confidant. Both tease their superiors: Celia says of Julia's passion for Roselo: "Forget him. Your kinsmen would sooner give you in marriage to a Moor than him" ; but then confesses she has fallen for Marin and will connive at the secret affair.

Similarly, Marin counsels Roselo that "The best time to treat an illness is in the early stages" but professes willingness to help in Julia's seduction: "You know me for a rash, bold man; I shall meet death at your side. I'm afraid you may have the effect on me you wish to have" She echoes Juliet almost word for word when she finally admonishes Roselo: "Don't swear; a man who swears is not to be believed" The redeeming feature of this relatively brief scene is that one of the key factors sealing the love affair is the possibility that it might end the family feud, a recurring positive motif in the early scenes shared by both lovers.

It is with the argument against causing further strife that Roselo forces "the honest curate Aurelio" to marry the lovers, not the cleric's own motive to achieve a resolution. This goal enhances our respect for Roselo. With its use of octosyllabic lines Lope's play is consistently brisker than Shakespeare's pentameter blank verse, and it has only two intervals making three not five acts.

Its second act begins abruptly with report of a quarrel between the families' women in the local church over the moving of kneeling cushions. The discourtesy to his family infuriates Teobaldo, paradoxically, since it was he who had previously counseled pacifism to his brother over Roselo's intrusion at the party.

Teobaldo compulsively orders his son Otavio to revenge the slight, which he does by violently provoking his reluctant rival Roselo to a fight in which Otavio is killed. The situation is less complex in Lope's play than in Shakespeare's script, which shows Tybalt's killing of the marginal figure of Mercutio first, thus provoking his own doom at the hands of Romeo; but the effect is equally tragic. However, while Julia is caught nominally between two loyalties, she never hesitates to defend her husband understandably, after many nights of covert marital bliss , by lying that she was present at the duel and saw Roselo's need for self-defence.

This testimony ensures a penalty limited to exile, more for Roselo's safety than as a punishment, since Teobaldo vows revenge for his son's death at any price: "I shall die if I cannot revenge this pain" 2. This he maintains despite his daughter Dorotea's rejection of such a penalty for her brother's death. Roselo's secret parting from Julia shares much of Romeo's extravagance: "if your cousin means more than your husband to you, then come. Don't keep both our factions suspended—take this dagger and pierce this breast" However, Lope refuses to allow the audience to take this rhetoric seriously, by parodying it immediately with the protestations of the cowardly Marin, who concedes that Celia is free to kill herself if she rejects him.

Celia responds in Falstaffian vein, saying she prefers him alive, well-knowing that such "Cowards are discreet" 2. At no point are we allowed to dwell on Roselo's suicidal protestations. In Lope's script the issue of Julia's threatened marriage to Paris begins more or less as in Shakespeare, but there is a drastic diminution in the tensions of the relation of Paris to Roselo, who meet in friendly fashion on the road to Ferrara, until Paris is notified by letter of her father's renewal of the abandoned commitment of Paris to marry Julia.

Despite this, Paris maintains his friendship for Roselo, but Roselo, in a reversal reminiscent of Romeo's repudiation of Rosaline, denounces Julia's supposed fickleness with a bitterness matching Shakespeare's Posthumus repudiating Imogen for her reported betrayal of him with Iachimo in Cymbeline. Roselo decides to take the revenge proposed to him by Marin of marrying a Ferrarese lady, Silvia.

This totally reverses the effect of the sympathy that we have for the tragic misapprehension of Romeo that Juliet has died.

Up to this point the lovers' intensity has been regularly undercut by Lope's use of the continued comic presence of Marin and Celia.

Both Julia and Juliet accept the need for evasion of the forced bigamy by risking death. However, while Juliet nervously trusts Friar Laurence when he says that the soporific drug he offers her should not prove fatal, Julia and the audience receive no such promise of the safety of her sedative from its creator Aurelio at least, not in the surviving text, which is somewhat damaged at this point.

This uncertainty adds greatly to the suspense at the start of the second act. We cannot be certain how this confusion will be resolved, bearing in mind that the plot has already accommodated the death of Otavio. Lope follows this intense scene of Julia's loss of consciousness with one devoted to Roselo's obtuse courtship of his new mistress, Silvia. This is an act of revenge as a result of his hearing about the plan of Julia's family to secure her marriage to Paris, which he takes as proof of her betrayal of him.

His volatility at this point diminishes his charm, and his behavior is further complicated by his refusal to blame Paris. His misunderstanding is only terminated by misleading news of Julia's supposed death, but his distress is immediately corrected by further information from Aurelio about his drug's merely temporary effect. Back in Verona, Antonio unexpectedly decides that, having lost his own daughter Julia, he will ensure his family's continuity by marrying his niece Dorotea.

This new complication is distanced by the scene of Julia's awakening in the tomb, which begins by closely resembling Juliet's earlier apprehensions, but concludes with the timely arrival of a repentant Roselo. He is accompanied by a grotesquely apprehensive Marin, whose fear of the surrounding corpses undercuts the romantic mood, and it is further diminished by the lovers' practical decision to run away to a country retreat.

Significantly, this crypt scene was the favorite of the actor playing Roselo in the Dell Theatre production: he found the situation "in which a determined Roselo and a reluctant Marin seek out a confused Julia is really funny. In rehearsal it was a bore: for some reason we could not get the right balance between tension and comedy, and I think we were trying too hard: as soon as the comedy is artificial it ceases to be funny.

When we came to perform it in the open air, however, it was one of the most consistently satisfying scenes to act, and the audience seemed to enjoy it. Shakespeare also uses fast paced action, through an opening brawl, a In conclusion, Shakespeare in Act I of his play Romeo and Juliet, fabricates an intensely thought and interest provoking opening to the entire performance. This is achieved through the use of certain features such as: intertwining plot lines, an unexpected opening brawl, surprising use of bawdy humour, and an ominous cliff-hanger conclusion.

These techniques leave the viewer at the end of Act 1 with a profound urge for more information and hence, deep engagement in the play. Created in , Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is about two star-crossed lovers from opposing families who hold an ancient grudge. The theme is about love and hate throughout the play. Shakespeare built up the tension to Scene 5 from the start of Act 1 intelligently by, for example, building up the feud between the families.

This build up of tension is essential to the context of the story and without this the play would not be as dramatically effective. Shakespeare succeeds in meeting these expectations by including several parallels in his performance. Parallels are events that foreshadow a later, more tragic incident of the play and are used to add suspense even in act 1 to create a sense of foreboding and tragedy.

In a classic, tragic tradition, Shakespeare highlights the main characters by naming the play Romeo and Juliet. Therefore the audience are aware of who the main characters are, who will lose their lives, at the beginning of the play.

Before these two characters are introduced, the audience find themselves becoming impatient to meet them. In every young age people have fallen in love against their parent's wishes. Shakespeare has shown this when Romeo sneaks his way into Capulet party, his great enemy, once there he set his eyes upon on Juliet and says "Did my heart love till now?

Forswear it, sight! When Romeo sees that another fight has happened he is not surprised. His next few lines are full of oxymorons and juxtaposition which highlight the point being made, that the fightings is pointless, but also his feelings of confusion.

From lines he makes a short speech. To begin with, it is about the feuding but it gradually moves back to his so called love for Roseline. Through this single quotation we understand why Romeo is confused. We see that pleasure and pain are linked with love and hate. Also, aside from the oxymorons, there is another theme that Shakespeare makes, yet goes unnoticed by many. This is shown in the way people speak of him.

A good example of showing that Romeo has a peaceful nature would be after the first fight in the play. His words are punchy, quick and seem violent — alliteration is used to give off this atmosphere. It is almost as though she did not hear a word Benvolio said, as if she was in her own world worrying about her son.

Saw you him today? Right glad I am he was not at this fray. Shakespeare brings comedy in to the play with the servants speaking in colloquialisms, for example, the servants talk about sexual natures. Shakespeare uses characters that clash with each other to create drama and tension, for example, Benvolio the peacemaker clashes with Tybalt who says,.

Drawn, and talk of peace? Have at thee, coward! This makes the audience interested and their attention is caught on the play. Another dramatic device is when the Prince arrives in the middle of their fight, soon as the Prince arrives in the play, it all stops, and everyone goes quiet, this makes the audience detect a tense atmosphere between the two families.

The prince says,. By looking at the comment you can tell that the prince has a high authority and that people respect him. There is a lot of historical, cultural and social context in Romeo and Juliet, for example, the fight scene begins with an old Italian insult of someone biting their thumb at one another, this causing the big feud between the two families, the Capulets and the Montagues.

The people of that century respected and looked up to authority in Elizabethan times a prince that kept the order and there was a strict hierarchy of power and wealth which is shown in the play by the prince giving orders and stopping the feud between the two families. Benvolio has an invitation and is going to slip Romeo and Mercutio in.

Romeo is still miserable; even though he knows Rosaline will be at the party and he will have a chance to see her. He is always living his life on the edge and always looking for something new and exciting to do. He is constantly playing on words, using two or more meanings. Mercutio believes that you should chase after what you yearn for. Appear though in the likeness of a sigh. Mercutio wants to live his life on the spur of the moment. He is not interested in being dependent on anyone.

Romeo is very reluctant to go at first, as he is still lovelorn over Rosaline who rejected him. It is too rough, too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn. That birds would sing and think it were not night. Shakespeare creates a huge build-up of tension for the next scene and this enthrals the audience. In Act 1 Scene 5, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of tension by using a variety of techniques to create a sense of excitement, romance and the undercurrent of danger.

Shakespeare plays with the audience as there is strong love between Romeo and Juliet but the mood changes to one of conflict. The audience can sense the danger coming from this but the tension lowers when Lord Capulet calms Tybalt down. This scene does make the audience tense because of the changes in mood and their knowledge of tragic consequence at the end of the day. This scene is about the first meeting of Romeo and Juliet falling in love, unaware that their family have an ancient grudge against each other.

The mood changes dramatically in this scene. They boast to each other about their bravery and sex appeal. Their conversation is full of puns and sexual jokes. Sampson and Gregory then meet up with two Montague servants and a fight begins. Next we meet another Montague, Benvolio, who tries to stop the fight. From Benvolios's first words, "I do but keep the peace. Put up thy sword, Or manage it to part these men with me.

Throughout the play people seem to trust Benvolio: Lord and Lady Montague ask him to find out what the matter with Romeo is, and then Romeo confesses him sorrow about Rosaline who he is in love, and later on Prince Escalus asks him to explain two deaths. These three events show Benvoios's character as benevolent, composed and trustworthy. The fight is. Get Access. Parental Rebellion In Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet Words 3 Pages William Shakespeare wrote over thirty plays, one of which, known as Romeo and Juliet, has been labelled the most tragic love story of all time since the early s.