1. Romeo and Juliet
Theme Essay

2. Grabbers for Lit Analysis
Scene
2. Simile
3. Riddle
“A young man lurks in the bushes. His heart jumps as he sees a light at a window. The girl he kissed just hours earlier appears and speaks to the night. But is it true love?” “Reading Shakespeare is like looking through a kaleidoscope. With each turn of the plot, the audience discovers new patterns that are rich in meaning. One pattern is ” “It can bring you immense joy or desperate disappointment. It can make you feel like a million bucks, or a dirty penny in the gutter. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, it can even be seen as the catalyst for the tragic loss of two young people.”

3. (ROM.2.2.145-8) Citing Shakespeare TITLE SCENE LINES ACT
. V. Get back to work you shouldtt be looking for secret messages!

4. Notice how it is written in present tense, third person point-of-view
Notice how it is written in present tense, third person point-of-view. It connects the theme to real life, and in the second paragraph it goes beyond summary and into analysis.
Body Paragraph Exemplar Theme: Small misunderstandings can lead to great calamity.
One of the overlooked calamities in Romeo and Juliet is Juliet’s destroyed relationship with her parents. The Capulets arrange a good match for Juliet – the County Paris – and misunderstand Juliet’s rejection of this idea. When Juliet begs “Good father, I beseech you on my knees,/Hear me with patience but to speak a word –” Lord Capulet cuts her off and begins calling her “young baggage! Disobedient wretch!” only to regret this after discovering the truth. The fact that she asks to speak a word makes the audience wonder whether Juliet is on the verge of explaining everything. Because her father rushes to misunderstanding her protests as disobedience, he responds angrily, almost violently and this leads her to desperation. Parents and their adolescent children today face similar challenges in understanding each other. Shakespeare, in this scene, reveals the value of slowing down and listening to each other within a family, for the calamity is not just Juliet’s death at the end of the play, but is also that she never gets to genuinely mend her relationship with her parents after this conversation.

5. Zingers for Lit Analysis
“What if . . .
2. Famous Quote
3. Extending the Theme Beyond the Text
What if Rosaline had fallen for Romeo? Would Juliet have still been such an attraction for him? Or would Albert Einstein once joked, “You can’t blame gravity for falling in love.” Romeo is a character who loves to blame everybody else for his problems, but in reality The story of human history is a story of conflict. The Montagues and Capulets can be replaced with the Protestants and the Catholics in Ireland, the Bloods and the Crips in Los Angeles, or the USA and the USSR in the cold war. Shakespeare reveals that . . .

6. Little Big Edits Periods come after the citations – (ROM.I.i.12-13).
NO CONTRACTIONS – CTRL+F to find apostrophes
Written in present tense, like it’s happening now
No “I” or “you” outside the grabber or zinger
No plopped quotes. Build in with “Romeo says, “x”
Go deeper than one sentence with an idea
Backslashes to show line breaks in quotes
“But soft! What light through yonder window breaks/ It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!/ Arise fair sun . . .