Themes, Motifs, Symbols, and Foreshadowing Romeo and Juliet Themes, Motifs, Symbols, and Foreshadowing

Themes Theme is the main idea or the underlying meaning in a work of literature.

The forcefulness of love The play focuses on love, but specifically the passion that forms from love at first sight. In order to be with the person they love, both Romeo and Juliet have to break from the entire social structure of their world, and even take their lives. Shakespeare intentionally strays from typical depictions of love, like other poets of his time, and does not describe love as a perfect and simple experience.

Love in Romeo and Juliet is a brutal, powerful emotion that captures individuals and catapults them against their world, and, at times, against themselves. Love, in this play, challenges the characters in their relationships with family, friends, and even religion, and demonstrates the chaos that can ensue because of being in love.

The individual versus society The majority of the play focuses on the lovers’ struggle against societal institutions that oppose the existence of their love. These institutions such as family, religion, and honor often come in conflict with each other. Family demands that both Romeo and Juliet hate each other. Honor demands that Romeo fight for his namesake. Religion demands that the two uphold Christian ideals.

Romeo and Juliet end up turning against all of these forces in order to be together. They commit un-Christian acts, like their suicide, and turn against family and friends. It is possible to see Romeo and Juliet as a battle between the responsibilities and actions demanded by social institutions and those demanded by the private desires of the individual.

The inevitability of fate The first thing the chorus states is that the lovers are “star-crossed,” meaning that their fate controls them. The prologue goes out of its way to spoil the ending, but also to set up the major theme of fate. Shakespeare wants the audience to know how it will end, but still gives us hope for a different conclusion, setting up the same scenario for the reader as he does for the characters. Romeo and Juliet are somewhat aware of their fate, as they constantly see omens of their death, and know that they should not be together.

Fate controls all of the events surrounding the lovers: the feud between their families, the horrible series of accidents that ruin Friar Laurence’s plans at the end of the play, and the tragic timing of Romeo’s suicide and Juliet’s awakening. These events are not mere coincidences, but rather manifestations of fate that help bring about the unavoidable outcome of the young lovers’ deaths. Despite all of their best efforts, and Friar Laurence’s plans, Romeo and Juliet cannot avoid their fate.

Motifs Motifs are aspects that occur repeatedly in a work and help to enhance the theme.

Light and dark imagery One of the most visual motifs in the play is the contrast between light and dark. This is often expressed in terms of night/day imagery. The meaning of light/dark or night/day is different from one might imagine. Light is not always good, and dark is not always evil. Light and dark are typically used to demonstrate contrasts. Juliet describes Romeo as the stars shining brightly in the night sky, while Romeo describes Juliet as the sun who banishes the “envious moon.”

Night and day are again blurred the morning after the lovers’ only night together. Romeo is forced to leave for Mantua in the morning, and both he and Juliet try to pretend that it is still night, and that the light is actually darkness: “More light and light, more dark and dark our woes” (3.5.36). In this scene, the contrast is between the romance of the happy lovers, and the dark and terrifying banishment that awaits Romeo.

Opposing view points Shakespeare includes numerous scenes in Romeo and Juliet that hint at alternative ways to evaluate the play. Mercutio mocks the viewpoints of all the other characters in play. He sees Romeo’s devotion to love as a sort of blindness that robs Romeo from his ability to be his self.

Similarly, he sees Tybalt’s devotion to honor as blind and stupid. His punning and the Queen Mab speech can be interpreted as making fun of virtually every type of passion evident in the play. Mercutio serves as a critic of the delusions of righteousness and grandeur held by the characters around him.

The servants also provide differing perspectives than the main characters of the play. Shakespeare uses the drastic change in their speech to represent the vast differences in their life. Servants speak in prose, while nobles speak in verse. There is the Nurse who lost her baby and husband, the servant Peter who cannot read, the musicians who care about their lost wages and their lunches, and the Apothecary who cannot afford to make the moral choice.

The lower classes present a second tragic world to counter that of the nobility. The nobles’ world is full of grand tragic gestures. The servants’ world, in contrast, is characterized by simple needs, and early deaths brought about by disease and poverty rather than dueling and grand passions. Where the nobility almost seem to revel in their capacity for drama, the servants’ lives are such that they cannot afford tragedy of the epic kind.

symbols Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

In Act 1, scene 1, the buffoonish Samson begins a brawl between the Montagues and Capulets by flicking his thumbnail from behind his upper teeth, an insulting gesture known as biting the thumb. He engages in this juvenile and vulgar display because he wants to get into a fight with the Montagues but doesn’t want to be accused of starting the fight by making an explicit insult. Thumb biting

Because of his timidity, he settles for being annoying rather than challenging. The thumb-biting, as an essentially meaningless gesture, represents the foolishness of the entire Capulet/Montague feud and the stupidity of violence in general.

Queen Mab In Act 1, scene 4, Mercutio delivers a monologue about the fairy Queen Mab, who rides through the night on her tiny wagon bringing dreams to sleepers. He gives this speech to Romeo to convince him that dreams are nonsense. One of the most noteworthy aspects of Queen Mab’s ride is that the dreams she brings generally do not bring out the best sides of the dreamers, but instead makes them dream about whatever vices they are addicted to—for example, greed, violence, or lust.

Another important aspect of Mercutio’s description of Queen Mab is that it is complete nonsense, although vivid and highly colorful. Nobody believes in a fairy pulled about by “a small grey-coated gnat” whipped with a cricket’s bone (1.4.65). Mercutio’s description of Mab and her carriage goes to extravagant lengths to emphasize how tiny and insubstantial she is. Queen Mab and her carriage do not merely symbolize the dreams of sleepers, but they really symbolize the power of fantasies, daydreams, and desires. Through the Queen Mab imagery, Mercutio suggests that all desires and fantasies are as nonsensical and fragile as Mab, and that they are basically corrupting. This point of view strictly contrasts with Romeo and Juliet’s.

Friar Lawrence remarks that every plant, herb, and stone has its own special properties, and that nothing exists in nature that cannot be put to both good and bad uses. Thus, poison is not intrinsically evil, but is instead a natural substance made lethal by human hands. Friar Lawrence’s words prove true over the course of the play. The sleeping potion he gives Juliet is concocted to cause the appearance of death, not death itself, but through circumstances beyond the Friar’s control, the potion does bring about a fatal result: Romeo’s suicide. As this example shows, human beings tend to cause death even without intending to. poison

Similarly, Romeo suggests that society is to blame for the apothecary’s criminal selling of poison, because while there are laws prohibiting the Apothecary from selling poison, there are no laws that would help the apothecary make money. Poison symbolizes human society’s tendency to poison good things and make them fatal, just as the pointless Capulet-Montague feud turns Romeo and Juliet’s love to poison. After all, unlike many of the other tragedies, this play does not have an evil villain, but rather people whose good qualities are turned to poison by the world in which they live.

night Night is an important time in the play. It's when all the passionate love scenes occur so, night seems to shelter and protects the lovers, while the glare of day threatens to reveal them. In contrast, the heat of the sun makes the young men of Verona irritable and prone to violence and the street brawls occur during the daytime.

We often think of night as both a time for romance and liberation, as well as a time of danger, and the imagery of night and darkness in Romeo and Juliet carries both night's promises and its threats. Hidden in darkness, Romeo and Juliet's love is free from the social rules that would divide them. Therefore, night symbolizes protection and shelter.

foreshadowing Foreshadowing or guessing ahead is a literary device by which an author hints what is to come. It is used to avoid disappointment. It is also sometimes used to interest the reader.

In Act One, scene four, as the men prepare to leave for the Capulets' party, Romeo expresses a dark feeling of his impending death. ROM: …for my mind misgives Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars, Shall bitterly begin his fearful date With this night's revels and expire the term Of a despised life, clos'd in my breast, By some vile forfeit of untimely death. (113-118)

When Juliet first encounters Romeo, she asks the Nurse who he is as he leaves the party, stating that if he is married, she'll die a virgin, but her description states that her grave will be her wedding bed. This actually is what ultimately happens. JUL: Go ask his name.—If he be married, My grave is like to be my wedding bed. (I.v.143-144)

In Juliet's very long speech in Act IV, scene three, she worries that she might wake from her drugged sleep before Romeo arrives, surrounding by the bones of the dead. This is more accurate than she could know—and Romeo will be among the bodies. First she wonders if she will not be smothered in such a place: JUL: How if, when I am laid into the tomb,/ I wake before the time that Romeo/ Come to redeem me? There's a fearful point!/ Shall I not then be stifled in the vault,/ To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in,/ And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes? (32-37) Then Juliet goes further, wondering if she wakes among the bones and is driven mad by fear—even finding Tybalt's enshrouded corpse—might she not kill herself? In truth, she will kill herself, but not as she imagines: this is more foreshadowing. O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught,/ Environed with all these hideous fears,/ And madly play with my forefathers’ joints,/ And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud,/ And, in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone/ As with a club dash out my desp'rate brains? (51-56)