Month: December 2015

In the play Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare uses semantic field in various ways. Semantic field is a lexical set of semantically related items and Shakespeare implies this in a clever way. Fate is one of the main parts in the play as it shows in the how Romeo puts his destiny in the hands of God when he is saying “But he hath the steerage of my course, direct my sail”. This shows how he is asking God to control his future, and this leads up to Romeo meeting Juliet by coincidence, like how the man went up to Romeo asking him to read the guest list for him but could have chosen anyone. Romeo saw his crush rosoline was going to be there so he decided to turn up, however he would yet to meet his one true love Juliet at the capulet party. Later on in the play Romeo makes a very significant choice and as we know at the start for Romeo it is about a contest between fate and self decision making before he met Juliet at the capulet party he chose to follow fate and for God to be his guidence, but then he got banished from Verona and he found it desperately hard to cope and Juliet was the only     thing that gave him hope. The plan friar Lawrence and Juliet had made was not as successful as they hoped as the letter from friar Lawrence did not get delivered to Romeo so when Romeo found out that everyone thought Juliet was dead he had no evidence which denied her death and raw pain in his heart; so he was forced to believe it.  He started to break down in tears thinking his one true love was dead and he decided to rely on his self decision making by shouting out “is it e’en so? Then I defy you, stars! Thou know’st my lodging. Get me ink and paper, and hire post horses. I will hence tonight”. Shakespeare uses fate and coincidence to intrigue the readers and this effects how we think of fate in play play.

Shakespeare has already shown how he uses language features in the play Romeo and Juliet on many occasions, I am going to go in detail in act 2 scene 2. This particular scene is a prime example, one type of language feature he uses is metaphors. Romeo says “it is the east, and Juliet is the sun!”,Romeo is comparing Juliet to the sun because the sun is beautiful and he is saying she is beautiful.

Shakespeare also uses similes for example, “the brightest of her cheek would shame those stars, as daylight doth a lamp” ,in this quote Romeo compares Juliet to light because he considers the theme of light and dark as symbolic of the natural beauty of young love.

Shakespeare includes dramatic irony in this scene, this is when Juliet is standing on her balcony thinking she is talking to herself about her love for Romeo and how she wishes he was not a Montague. Since Romeo is standing right underneath her and she does not know but the audience does; that is dramatic irony.