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Romeo and Juliet was written in 1595 by William Shakespeare as a play. It is classed as a tragic play, therefore involves a protagonist that has a peak in his or her life involving good fortune, but then on after good fortune turns quickly into bad, ending up in sadness and misfortune for the protagonist. All tragedies follow the same pattern, only changing the peak point and the speed of good fortune going bad. When mentioned, Shakespeare is often thought to be associated with romance and beautiful imagery, which in some cases is true, but this romance is a needle in a haystack amongst the violent, sexual, crude and malicious imagery. This is a trick that is used to make the romance stand out more, Romeo and Juliet is a very famous piece of Shakespeare's work, but is often thought to be extremely romantic and 'lovey-dovey', however with a deeper look underneath the surface it involves a lot of sex, violence, back-stabbing and corruption and isn't so romantic. William Shakespeare is an extremely well known and established writer to this day, despite his death centuries ago. This statement just shows the skill of Shakespeare, and also shows how good Romeo and Juliet is, therefore meaning that we still study it nowadays. In Shakespeare's time, writers stole each others ideas, adapting them to their own. Shakespeare may have just done this himself, but written it better, therefore receiving the great praise he still gets long past his death. At the time of Shakespeare, sonnets and particular rhyming patterns were extremely popular. Therefore Shakespeare has included some of these in Romeo and Juliet in quite clever ways actually. For example, upon the first meet, Romeo and Juliet perform a traditional sonnet, separating it between characters in a very clever way. This is just one example amongst others that spread out over all of Shakespeare's established works and productions.

From the very first scene in the very first act, it is clear the play will most probably include lots of violence and sex. Gregory and Sampson, the characters that start off the play are very crude and violent: 'Therefore I will push Montague's men from the wall, and thrust his maids to the wall.' In simple terms this means he intends to kill or injure the Montague men and rape the Montague women: clearly a lot of hate, crudeness, violence etc. but no love. Surely if Shakespeare wanted to make it blatantly obvious that the play was completely love orientated he would have started it with something much less sexual and violent? The first act in which Shakespeare could be said to be establishing himself, he chose to use violence and sex, which signals to me the rest of the play may have love in it from reputation, but more orientated around violence and sex. Gregory and Sampson also talk about 'maidens' and how they 'will cut of their heads'. This is another violent image shortly after the last, this one talking about stealing virginity as a maiden is a virgin and 'cutting of their head' would be taking their virginity.

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  • TheHairyGodmother 02/02/2011 14:19
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    Nice detailed review! Here's an E for you!

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