Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
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Notes on Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. This set of Tower Notes is 73 pages long and is sold as a fully illustrated PDF file with footnotes.
To purchase, click on the link above and enter your payment details. You may purchase using Paypal or your credit/debit card. You do not have to provide your postal address if paying by Paypal, but an email address is required as a link will be sent automatically to your email account by return. Click on the link to download the PDF file. Please note that the link will expire after 48 hours. If you have any problems with your purchase, please do not hesitate to contact the webmaster at info@towernotes.co.uk
A free sample, text only, including material from the beginning and the middle of the play is provided below.
INTRODUCTION:CORRUPTIBILITY AND TRANSCENDENCE: IMAGERY IN SHAKESPEARE’S ROMEO AND JULIET.
From its opening scene, Romeo and Juliet is a play of conflict and opposition, both in physical and conceptual terms: something highlighted by Romeo’s words as he contemplates the debris left by the fight that initially disturbs the streets of Verona: ‘Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love’ (I.i.173). As well as being ‘much to do with hate’ and ‘love’, the play also has ‘much to do’ with another set of binary opposites: death, fate and corruptibility set against incorruptibility – the transfiguring and transcending of an imperfect world. This second, wholly positive, message is related more by the imagery of the play than by its action or the import of its characters’ lines, but it is nevertheless essential to the final impact of the drama as Liebestod, and it further explains why most theatre-goers find the play much more life-affirming and positive than might initially appear from a bald plot-summary of the various disasters that befall the two lead characters. More, perhaps, than any other Shakespeare play, the most profound intentions of Romeo and Juliet are ‘carried’ and communicated by its imagery.
Perhaps a better word than ‘corruptibility’ in this context – at least one more resonant with the poetry of Shakespeare’s time – would be ‘mutability’. As Edmund Spenser wrote in a stanza intended for The Fairie Queene of his imagined allegorical figure of Mutabilitie:
To purchase, click on the link above and enter your payment details. You may purchase using Paypal or your credit/debit card. You do not have to provide your postal address if paying by Paypal, but an email address is required as a link will be sent automatically to your email account by return. Click on the link to download the PDF file. Please note that the link will expire after 48 hours. If you have any problems with your purchase, please do not hesitate to contact the webmaster at info@towernotes.co.uk
A free sample, text only, including material from the beginning and the middle of the play is provided below.
INTRODUCTION:CORRUPTIBILITY AND TRANSCENDENCE: IMAGERY IN SHAKESPEARE’S ROMEO AND JULIET.
From its opening scene, Romeo and Juliet is a play of conflict and opposition, both in physical and conceptual terms: something highlighted by Romeo’s words as he contemplates the debris left by the fight that initially disturbs the streets of Verona: ‘Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love’ (I.i.173). As well as being ‘much to do with hate’ and ‘love’, the play also has ‘much to do’ with another set of binary opposites: death, fate and corruptibility set against incorruptibility – the transfiguring and transcending of an imperfect world. This second, wholly positive, message is related more by the imagery of the play than by its action or the import of its characters’ lines, but it is nevertheless essential to the final impact of the drama as Liebestod, and it further explains why most theatre-goers find the play much more life-affirming and positive than might initially appear from a bald plot-summary of the various disasters that befall the two lead characters. More, perhaps, than any other Shakespeare play, the most profound intentions of Romeo and Juliet are ‘carried’ and communicated by its imagery.
Perhaps a better word than ‘corruptibility’ in this context – at least one more resonant with the poetry of Shakespeare’s time – would be ‘mutability’. As Edmund Spenser wrote in a stanza intended for The Fairie Queene of his imagined allegorical figure of Mutabilitie:
Ne shee the lawes of Nature onely brake,
But eke of Iustice, and of Policie; […]
And death for life exchanged foolishlie:
Since which, all liuing wights haue learn'd to die,
And all this world is woxen daily worse. […]
By which, we all are subiect to that curse,
And death in stead of life haue sucked from our Nurse.
an hour before the worshipp’d sun
Peer’d forth the golden windows of the east
A troubled mind drove me to walk abroad (I.i.116-8)
Away from light steals home my heavy son, […]
Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out
And makes himself an artificial night. (I.i.135,137-8)
If you have found our critical notes helpful, why not try the first Tower Notes novel, a historical fantasy set in the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions.
Available HERE where you can read the opening chapters.
Available HERE where you can read the opening chapters.