Romeo and Juliet an Analysis

Romeo and Juliet

An Analysis of the Use of Language in Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is a play full of characters that are built and developed through the use of language. This paper will analyze the language of the principal character Romeo and show how Shakespeare uses language to turn Romeo from depression to love and finally to despair.

Romeo begins the play by speaking in cliches and of insipid paradoxes: "O brawling love! O. loving hate…" (1.1.164). His language is pathetic, unoriginal, uninspired, and hackneyed. His imagination is bored with that which is around it -- but, then, all that is around it is shallowness: a ridiculous feud fueled by bored young men attempting to prove their masculinity (like Sampson and Gregory) and parents interested only in themselves.

Romeo's complaints, however, also stem from his unrequited love -- not for Juliet -- but for a girl named Rosaline, who has sworn to live chaste (and thus has no time for young Romeo). Romeo considers her extreme ("She is too fair, too wise, wisely too fair") (1.1.212) -- but this is obviously an example of the pot calling the kettle black, considering Romeo's tendency to swing from wild extreme to wild extreme himself. (He moves from depression to ecstasy to despair within the space of 5 acts).

His language and character changes considerably, however, when he meets Juliet. In fact, the first thing he shows is a kind of loss of language upon seeing her: he cries out rather primitively, "O!" (1.5.41) as though in the breakdown of his speech patterns a new language, character and purpose were being erected. Juliet inspires this transformation in Romeo, as he himself articulates: "She doth teach the torches to burn bright!" (1.5.41). The alliteration ("t" sound) and consonance ("ch" sound) is very like the flicking of a lighter or match: his very speech sounds like a fire is being started -- and a kind of animal growl is introduced in the "rr" sound in "burn bright." In one breath, Romeo reveals awareness, inspiration, and attraction.

As Romeo's imagination is sparked by her beauty, it is also given an education. Indeed, when the two speak for the first time, they compose a perfect sonnet (fourteen lines of rhyming iambic pentameter) illustrating that their love is ordered, measured, and beautiful. She encourages Romeo to drop his tired cliches -- and she also inspires him to a higher and better structure and behavior. In the sonnet that they form, the two of them liken their courtship to a holy pilgrimage. Romeo, however, is the one to introduce the theme -- and he does so by comparing Juliet to a shrine and himself to an unworthy sinner who yet dares to approach it: "If I profane with my unworthiest hand / This holy shrine, the gentle sine is this; / My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand / to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss" (1.5.93-96). Juliet kindly forgives him and even encourages him. Romeo is emboldened but is tempered by Juliet's modesty.

Through Juliet, Romeo rises out of his depression to become himself, as he is "by art as well as by nature" (2.4.45) as Mercutio states: Romeo again is happy, witty, and sociable. He has been given a purpose and a definitive direction, thanks to Juliet. His language is no longer floundering in the depths of melancholy and self-pity. Now it is alive: he has found someone who will happily reciprocate his desire; she "doth grace for grace and love for love allow; / the other did not so," (2.1.90-92) as he tells the Friar.

The test to see how well the young lover can maintain his new state comes soon enough -- hours after the wedding in fact, at a meeting with the fiery Tybalt (Juliet's cousin). Although Romeo enters the scene by suing for peace, his resolve to love does not hold up under the strain of witnessing his friend Mercutio's death at the hands of Tybalt. To Tybalt, he cries: "I do protest I never injur'd thee, / but love thee better than thou canst devise." His language is insistent, but Mercutio's death is more than he can bear: he takes it personally and is blinded by the abuse he feels that he has suffered. His language changes from insistence to accusation. First, he feels his pains: "This gentleman… / My very friend, hath got his mortal hurt / in my behalf; my reputation stain'd / With Tybalt's slander" (3.1.73-76). Then, he turns to blame -- and the first person he blames is the very same person he has vowed to love earlier that same day: Juliet. "O sweet Juliet! / Thy beauty hath made me effeminate, / and in my temper soften'd valour's steel!" (3.1.77-79). When Tybalt returns, Romeo has stoked his own rage and says, "Fire-ey'd fury be my conduct now!" (3.1.90). One can hear him fanning the flames of his wrath with the alliterative "ff" sound. When Romeo kills Tybalt, his rage is quenched -- but now his character crumbles. Having abandoned the love that made him swell and grow so quickly, he has cut off the life that gave him life. He is wounded and unable to accept the fact that he has wounded himself, crying out instead that he is "Fortune's fool" (3.1.103). Later, he will literally wound (mortally) himself, following a grotesque descent into the horror of his own soul, which has been governed by nothing more than appetite. The language is briefly elevated once more at the sight of Juliet -- but believing that she is dead and that death destroys all, his words do not sustain but only make his loss that much more painful

That descent bottoms out at the Capulet tomb, where Juliet is buried. Here, Romeo looks upon the grave and reckons that all men and women are nothing more than food for its mouth: "Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death, / Gorg'd with the dearest morsel of the earth, / Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open, and, in despite, I'll cram thee with more food!" (5.3.48-51). His sense of living for any saintly purpose has escaped him. He reflects the kind of nihilism that plagues Macbeth after he runs his murderous course. "Maw," "gorg'd," and "morsel" all complement the idea upon which Romeo has fixated: namely, that life is governed by appetites and that those appetites spring from and return to Death. Indeed, he calls the grave a "womb of death" -- and a hideous inversion takes place: rather than life coming out of the womb, Romeo promises to stuff the womb with more death. The language illustrates the despair to which he has succumbed. When Paris arrives to stop what he believes is about to be the abuse of Juliet's corpse, Romeo unleashes his fury upon the unsuspecting innocent.