The theme of friendship and enmity is evidently portrayed throughout the play, through the use of characterisation and relationships. Shakespeare conveys these themes by expressing the characters' emotions with techniques such as, similes, alliteration, irony, assonance, metaphors, oxymoron’s and foreshadowing. These techniques allow the audience to fully grasp the concepts of companionship and hostility.
The theme of enmity comes across as most clear in Act 3 Scene 1, where the death of two characters take place and the rivalry between the Montagues and Capulets is at its’ peak. “O Romeo, Romeo, brave Mercutio is dead…They fight…The citizens are up, and Tybalt slain” The theme of friendship is portrayed palpably throughout this scene also.
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He uses phrases such as "And if we meet we shall not escape a brawl", which is a technique known as foreshadowing, that gives the viewers' a look at what is to come in the future (the hostility between the two rivals). He also uses words like "fire-ey'd fury", which shows the technique of alliteration. This provides cadence to the text and makes the point of enmity come across sound stronger. The sentence "What eye but such an eye would spy out such a quarrel" is a perfect example of assonance. Assonance, much like alliteration, provides cadence to the wording and allows the character to speak smoothly. An example of a simile from the text can be found through lines 21 to 23 in Act 3, "Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat". Similes exaggerate the situation at hand by making comparisons to two alike things in order to emphasise the point being made. Metaphors basically do the same thing, however, when using a metaphor, you state that you are or that something is a totally different thing; once again, doing so to make the point more emphatic. An example of a metaphor from the text would be when an enraged Romeo kills Tybalt and calls himself a "fortune's fool". In this, he is trying to say that he was a victim of fate. Had he been somewhere else, the events that occurred might not have happened and the lover's eventually might not take their lives, thus living their lives in friendship, not