Importance Of Foil In Romeo And Juliet

Amelia VanGessel

Mrs. Gump

English 9-2 Honors

15 May 2023

Character Foil is the Most Important Literary Device

“A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life, Whose misadventur’d piteous overthrows Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife. The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,” (Shakespeare 698). This quote means that Romeo and Juliet are not meant to be together according to their family feud and because of the position on the planets they were born. Character foil can be found many times throughout The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. In this tragedy, there are two families in the town of Verona. They fight a lot and their children, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet, get secretly married. A major fight

For example in the text it states, “We talk here in the public haunt of men. Either withdraw unto some private place, Or reason coldly of grievances, Or else depart. Here all eyes gaze on us,” (Shakespeare 748). This quote shows how Tybalt and Benvolio are foil characters during the fight. Benvolio is trying to break up the fight while Tybalt wants to keep going. You can figure out what Tybalt is doing while Benvolio is saying this. Even if Tybalt’s actions are not directly stated, you can infer what he is doing based on Benvolio’s words. In addition, the character foil between Rosaline and Juliet also displays how you are able to predict the actions of other roles in the play due to what you know about their character foils. Juliet and Rosaline are foil characters because Rosaline wanted nothing to do with Romeo when he was in love with her (Shakespeare 708). Alternatively, Juliet loved Romeo back after spending a couple of hours with him (Shakespeare 728). We know that Juliet kills herself because she cannot stand to marry Paris while she is secretly married to Romeo. Since we know Rosaline and Juliet are foil characters, we can infer that Rosaline does not take her own life, which is