How Is the Theme of Loe Presented in Romeo and Juliet?

1308 Words6 Pages
In this essay I am going to explain how the theme of love has been presented in Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare shows many different types of love from the unreturned love between Romeo and Rosaline to true love between Romeo and Juliet. Their love was hard ending in a tragic death. Elizabethans believed that true love is one that happens at first sight, like Romeo and Juliet. At the very beginning of Romeo and Juliet, before the play even starts, Shakespeare uses a prologue to give us an outline of what happens during the play. We find out that the play involves a young couple, Romeo and Juliet. Their love is a hard one as their parents is in a feud that has been going on for generations, so long that no one knows what it’s about anymore. Their love is fragile and vulnerable and one that needs protecting from their families. By putting this information in the prologue the audience already feels sympathy for the young couple as we know that their love will be a tragic one ending in death. Their families’ feud is described as an, “ancient grudge”. This tells us just how long their feud has been going on for and it’s so old that they forgotten about how it started in the first place. ‘Ancient’ is a powerful word, you wouldn’t describe something that happened a few years ago ancient. Shakespeare uses these words to tell us what the grudge actually is, which are not important at all, just a useless, pointless argument. By adding this in the audience feels even more sorry for Romeo and Juliet as their not allowed to be together over something as pointless as this. The prologues speaks about how the couples lives end in a tragic death whereas if their families forgot about the feud they would still be alive and well, happily with one another. Every ones lives would have been so much better. In act one scene one Shakespeare introduces what negative effect love can have. He

More about How Is the Theme of Loe Presented in Romeo and Juliet?

Open Document