Romeo and Juliet: Literary Devices & Plot (Acts 3/4)

• Soliloquy: Speaking thoughts aloud when alone, often heard by the audience.
• Monologue: A long speech by one actor in a play or movie.
• Aside: A comment meant to be heard by the audience but not by other characters.
• Dramatic irony: When the audience knows information the characters do not.
• Metaphor: Applying a word or phrase to an object or action it doesn't literally apply to, like "love is a battlefield."
• Simile: Comparing two things for emphasis, like "as quiet as a mouse".
• Oxymoron: Contradictory terms, such as "bitter-sweet."
• Pun: A play on words.
• Allusion: An indirect reference to something.
• Personification: Giving human characteristics to non-human things, like "the moon smiled down at the earth."
• Foreshadowing: A small hint of a future event.

Acts 3 and 4 Plot

• Romeo kills Tybalt, Juliet's cousin.
• Romeo is banished, separating him from Juliet.
• Tybalt wounds (kills) Mercutio during the fight.
• Juliet is devastated by Tybalt's death and Romeo's exile.
• Friar gives Juliet a sleeping potion to fake her death and avoid marrying Paris.
• Juliet's father, unaware of the plan, rushes her marriage to Paris.
• Juliet drinks the potion, and her family believes she is dead, planning her burial.
• Friar Laurence sends a messenger to inform Romeo of the plan.
• Romeo doesn’t receive the message and only hears of Juliet's death.
• Romeo travels to Verona, enters the Capulet tomb, and kills himself upon seeing Juliet's "dead" body; he kills Paris before this.
• Juliet wakes up after Romeo's death and kills herself with Romeo's dagger.
• The Montagues and Capulets reconcile after seeing their children dead.

Quotes

• "We talk here in the public haunt of men. Either withdraw unto some private place, or reason coldly of your grievances, or else depart. Here all eyes gaze on us."

  • Benvolio says this to Tybalt and Mercutio to avoid a public fight.

• "Alack, alack, is it not like that I, so early waking, what with loathsome smells, and shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth, that living mortals, hearing them, run mad— O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught, environèd 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?"

  • Juliet expresses her fears about the reality of faking her death to herself in a monologue, imagining waking up in the tomb.

• "Death is my son-in-law; Death is my heir. My daughter he hath wedded. I will die and leave him all. Life, living, all is Death’s."

  • Lord Capulet says this to those present after Juliet is found "dead" on her wedding day to Paris, expressing his grief.

• “All things that we ordained festival turn from their office to black funeral– our instruments to melancholy bells, our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast, our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change; our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse, and all things change them to the contrary.”

  • Capulet speaking to Friar Laurence about Juliet's "death".

• "Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath, hath had no power yet upon thy beauty. Thou art not conquered. Beauty’s ensign yet is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks, and death’s pale flag is not advanced there."

  • Romeo expresses amazement at Juliet's beauty even in death, unaware she is not truly dead.