A major theme in the play Romeo and Juliet is the contrast between the two worlds: real and unreal. In order for true love between the star-crossed lovers to survive, it must exist in both. Romeo lives in the unreal world for the majority of the...

The epistle of Saint John unequivocally states, “Love comes from God” (1 John 4:7). This statement not only explains the source of love but it also provides a means to understand both love and God. If love is from God, then an understanding of...

In the 1997 film, Romeo + Juliet, Baz Luhrmann has attempted to take the original play by William Shakespeare, and create an appropriation of it for today. He takes what we value about the text: the themes, evocative language and poetry, the...

In his play Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare puts his minor characters to good use. Romeo’s friend Mercutio and Juliet’s nurse are both characters that are not considered the main focus of the play, but nevertheless play a crucial role in the lives...

"You're television incarnate, Diana: indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt...

Romeo and Juliet is rife with the powerful contrasting passions of Love and Hate. Since this work is a drama, Shakespeare has chosen to convey these emotions through characters’ language. This essay will examine how dialogue is used to demonstrate...

In Act 4 Scene 1 of Romeo and Juliet, Friar Lawrence, Paris, and Juliet converse about the upcoming marriage of Juliet and Paris. In the scene, Juliet’s new identity of an independent woman is forged through her vigor in dealing with Paris and the...

In Romeo and Juliet, many ironic situations foreshadowing their doomed result. In the passage where Tybalt and Capulet debate at the masquerade feast, there are many lines that directly foreshadow two important components of the play: Romeo’s...

Throughout Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare makes heavy use of religious imagery, especially when concerned with the young couple. This imagery serves two purposes in the play. It underlines the purity of Romeo and Juliet’s love by associating it...

In Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet are doomed from the start, and the audience is aware of this from the prologue. “From forth the fatal loins of these two foes a pair of star-crossed lovers take their...

Novelist Napoleon Hill once wrote, “Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in another.” His opinion compels people to reconsider and reflect on the consequences and effects...

Most modern children grow up listening to their mothers tell fairytales and other fictional stories, but what did they do before the time of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White? In earlier centuries, it was not uncommon for care of small children to be...

The theatrical device of performing a play within another play has been employed for centuries, most notably in European theatre and literature (Fisher and Greiden xi). The play within a play “describes a strategy for constructing play texts that...

Shakespeare uses a great number of linguistic and structural devices throughout his play ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in order to portray the characters and their relationships with one another. In this essay I will explore and analyse the effects and...

Dutch humanist and scholar Erasmus defines free will as “a power of the human will by which man may be able to direct himself towards or turn away from what leads to eternal salvation” (Erasmus 6). Many literary works of the Renaissance debate the...

Many film adaptations of William Shakespeare’s classic tragedy of “star-crossed lovers” have been made, both in the original setting and more modern ones (Shakespeare Prologue. 6). Two movies that exemplify this are Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and...

Nature is an important feature of poetic realism, an offshoot of German realism in the late 19th century. Gottfried Keller, the author of the novel Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (Romeo and Juliet in the Village), is a Swiss writer who belongs to...

The Bible states “God saw light was good, and he separated the light from darkness.” Though light and dark are separated in Romeo in Juliet, they have entirely different connotations. The presence of light turns the characters belligerent, while...

In dark and dire situations, humor is often needed to lighten the atmosphere in order to ensure sanity. This proves to be very true in William Shakespeare’s tragic play, Romeo and Juliet. As the plot of the play continues to develop, tragic and...

As French writer Luc de Clapiers said, “The art of pleasing is the art of deception.” William Shakespeare, an artist of words, employed deceit and trickery in his stories to make them complex and engrossing. Deceit is a subject not often spoken...

Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, the 1996 cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, is imbued with religious imagery. The feuding families display such images on everything from their cars, to their clothes, to their guns. In addition, a statue of...

The social construct of gender has been challenged more than ever in the recent century, but long before this age of partial freedom, Shakespeare was placing ideas of rebellion from it into the minds of his consumers. The rigid ideas of the time...

Ludicrous car chases, intense hot pink hair and a world where Prince songs are sung as hymns; is this what Shakespeare wanted when he wrote Romeo and Juliet over 400 years ago? Baz Luhrmann’s film adaption of Shakespeare’s masterpiece, is a...

Feminist literary criticism has become an integral part of the way in which we study literature in the 21st century. By analyzing the way in which the female condition is represented in works of literature, we can establish how women were...