Romeo And Juliet Comic Relief Analysis

The Renaissance was a period of beautiful, enlightening artistic and scientific excavation. In the Renaissance, Marlowe introduced comic relief. He did that through his presentation of crude scenes in Dr. Faustus. The comic relief then came in the form of an interlude between two tragic sections. Of all the readings covered in class, this intersection of comedy and tragedy was striking, due to its paradoxical nature. An emphasis of the sadness resonated with me not of cheery fun. These literary tools such as long soliloquys, metaphorical wordplay and comic relief are what make literature a form of mutating and expanding art. Thus, I chose to discuss the importance and impact of comic relief in literary contexts. However, what I really seek

In Romeo & Juliet, the love story of the ages, Shakespeare doesn’t hold back with his intentional usages of comic relief. The first of which comes from Mercutio. In Romeo & Juliet, the comic relief is subtler to the point that it sounds serious. Shakespeare challenges the reader even more in these scenarios. After a heavy, charged scene (that of Romeo & Juliet meeting on the balcony in her rose garden), Shakespeare voices Mercutio calling for Romeo by talking about Rosaline (his former lover). “I conjure thee by Rosaline's bright eyes, By her high forehead and her scarlet lip.” It is subtle here because Mercutio still doesn’t know about Juliet but it is also subtle in the sense that it offers two elements to the scenario: 1) By mentioning Rosaline before the tragic love story of Romeo and Juliet, it appears that Shakespeare (through Mercutio) is offering us a conclusion from the Rosaline era. 2) Shakespeare lends an emotional value to the love of Romeo and Juliet by contrasting it through Mercutio’s focus on Rosaline’s physical appearance merely. “Shakespeare uses Mercutio's cynical attitude to distinguish Romeo and Juliet's love as innocent, spiritual, and intense. Because the audience is aware that Mercutio's speech falls on deaf ears, Mercutio's speech illustrates that the Romeo, the loves-truck youth, has begun to mature in his outlook on life and love.”