Romeo and Juliet flashcards

Key points

• Lead with an idea the essay proves: Shakespeare presents love and hate as tangled forces that doom the lovers.
• Hold two ideas at once: fate is set against them, yet every step to the tomb is a human choice.
• Start each paragraph with a point that answers the question, and use events as evidence.

Key points

• The Prologue is a sonnet, the form of love poetry, yet it announces death: love and doom from the start.
• At their first meeting the lovers share a sonnet, finishing each other's lines: a perfect match.
• Its pilgrims, saints and shrine make their love feel sacred.
• The lovers speak in verse; the Nurse mostly speaks in prose, earthy and comic.

Key points

• To Romeo, Juliet is radiant: the centre of his world.
• Their love shines against the dark of night and the feud, and ends in the dark of the tomb.

Key points

• The Prologue tells the ending first, so the audience asks how and why, not what.
• Dramatic irony: Capulet plans Juliet's wedding to Paris while the audience knows she is married.
• Foreshadowing: hints of death make hopeful moments painful.

Key points

• In Act 1 she is dutiful, ready to like the man her mother chooses.
• She grows into a decisive woman who defies her parents and makes the final choice herself.

Key points

• He drops Rosaline the instant he sees Juliet, so we can question how deep his love runs.
• He acts on feeling: he kills Tybalt in rage and rushes to die beside Juliet.

Key points

• Tybalt kills Mercutio under Romeo's arm as Romeo tries to part them.
• Romeo kills Tybalt in revenge and is banished: comedy turns to tragedy.
• Mercutio jokes even as he dies, which makes the turn sharper.

Key points

• They meet, marry and die within a few days.
• The Friar warns against haste, yet marries them the next day: even the wise man rushes.
• His plan fails on timing: plague keeps his letter from reaching Romeo.

Key points

• Fathers held authority over daughters and arranged their marriages.
• Her refusal was shocking disobedience; her secret marriage for love defies the whole system.
• Capulet turns from protective in Act 1 to threatening to throw her out in Act 3.

Key points

• In a culture of male pride, backing down from a fight looks like cowardice.
• Mercutio fights Tybalt because Romeo's refusal seems a shameful surrender.
• The code turns a street quarrel into two deaths and Romeo's banishment.

Key points

• Many Elizabethans believed the stars governed their lives, so the lovers seem doomed from the start.
• Chance plays its part: plague stops the Friar's letter.
• Suicide was a sin against God and a crime, so their deaths would shock an audience.

Key points

• Love and death meet: the kiss that began their love ends Romeo's life.
• The Prince frames the deaths as punishment for the feud; only then do the families make peace.

Key points

• Take a few words, not a whole speech, and build them into your own sentence.
• Pick quotations with a word you can zoom in on, then say what it suggests to the audience.
• Short quotations are far easier to remember in a closed-book exam.

A quotation woven in

Key points

• Spell names and terms correctly: Montague, Capulet, Mercutio, Benvolio, soliloquy, oxymoron.
• Write in the present tense: "Shakespeare presents", not "Shakespeare presented".
• Keep sentences controlled, and put quotation marks round every quotation.
• Leave two minutes at the end to reread and correct.