Star Crossed Lovers
William Shakespeare wrote 37 plays in his lifetime. The love story of Romeo and Juliet has always been one of the crowd favorites, however. This is because Shakespeare makes the play relatable to all ages as he tells the sappy story of two love stricken teenagers. Shakespeare helps the viewers understand their young love by magnifying the confusing, awkward, and at times stupid aspects of true love. He then chooses to take these two characters and uses their families long-standing feud to emphasize how opposites really do attract. Shakespeare uses paradoxes in The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet to show the differences and similarities of love and hate.
Shakespeare uses religious imagery throughout the play to reinforce the purity of Romeo and Juliet’s love until Romeo kills Tybalt.
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Juliet happens to be in the Capulet’s orchard while she is saying this making the religious connection to Eve more realistic for the audience. Romeo has tricked Juliet into picking the forbidden fruit of love that is banned between their two families. Juliet knows Romeo is not a serpent nor does he have a face full of flowers, but her use of these descriptions show how paradoxically he is her lover and the murderer of her cousin at the same time. Therefore, Romeo is a snake who is disguised as a flower. Juliet next refers to Romeo as “Beautiful tyrant! Fiend angelical!”(III, ii, 75). She has used the opposite of each term used to illustrate Romeo’s betrayal. As angelical is a synonym to beautifully divine and immortal in the eyes of society, tyrant is equivalent to fiend or a barbarian. Angels are guardians over the people who look up to them and work miracles while tyrants are dictators who bully the people under them. These opposite remarks perfectly paint the picture of Juliet’s distress. She saw him as this one sided person because he was so handsome on the outside, she figured