Download ROMEO AND JULIET Structure and plot The action is

ROMEO AND JULIET
Structure and plot
The action is extremely condensed and rapid; there is no subplot to shift attention
away from the two lovers.The events of the play start on Sunday morning and
end at dawn on Thursday. However, noone notices or cares about it; what strikes
us is that one morning Romeo is hopelessly in love with Rosaline and on the
evening of the same day he falls in love with Juliet; the two lovers marry the day
after they meet; they are dead just two days after their first and only night
together. By concentrating the action in this way, Shakespeare communicates
both the intensity of the lovers' passion and the inevitably of their end. This end,
anyway, which leads to the end of the feud between the Capulet and Montague
families, dramatically reminds us of the volatile state of that society. We are made
aware that there is a civic order which exists and requires obedience above
individual passions, whether they are the passions of hate and love.
The steps that move the plot to its tragic conclusion are in part caused by the
impetuous actions of the characters (e.g. Romeo is stung by his friend's death
into fighting Tybalt) but, as the play develops, coincidences become increasingly
predominant as a means to develop the story (Romeo kills himself only minutes
before Juliet wakes). The lovers often invoke Fate as the cause of their tragedy,
and it is difficult not to see such events as examples of extraordinary bad luck.
In the structure of the play, nine scenes take place by night, fifteen by day. The
play ends at dawn, but a dawn that does not want to break. On a verbal level, the
contrast between day/night and light/darkness builds up into a complex of
imagery which runs throught the play. The love of Romeo and Juliet is often
associated with light,but it is compelled to be clandestine and takes place at
night. This contrast underlines its beauty and nobility, but it also emphasises that
it cannot take place in the 'light of the day', in the conventional social context.
The theme of love
Romeo's initial idea of love is Petrarchan, conventional: the object of his love
(Rosaline) is distant and untouchable. An extraordinary contrast for him is Juliet,
a girl who positively wants to be kissed, who herself proposes marriage, who
looks forward to her first wedding night, who is ready to defy her family for love,
who will commit suicide rather than accept a love without Romeo in a convent.
In this play Shakespeare uses more rhyme than in later plays. The initial lovesick Romeo tends to speak in rhyme, while as he matures he speaks in blank
verse(unrhyming iambic pantameters), which becomes associated with his
passionate love for Juliet.
Sources
This story originated in the folklore and inspired several Italian and French
'novelle' in the 15th and 16th centuries.It then became extremely popular in
England. The first written version is Salernitano's 'Cinquanta Novelle' (1476).In
his version of 1530, Luigi Da Porto sets the story in Verona at the time of
Bartolomeo della Scala. This version seems the origin of the belief, unfounded,
that the story is historically factual. Shakespeare's main source is the translation
of the French version of the story (by Pierre Boaistuau) into English verse by
Arthur Brooke with the title 'The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet'. In the
Preface to his poem Brooke mentions having seen a version of this story on
stage, but unfortunately no records of this play exists, and we have no idea if
Shakespeare knew it or followed it.