Theme Of Love And Hate In Romeo And Juliet

Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet is a classic love story about “two star-crossed lovers” who are battling love and hate between each other and their families. Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet are deeply in love, but even with all of this love, there is still a brawling hate between the two families. The Montagues and Capulets are known to be the two families who have had a long lasting feud in the city of Verona, where in this story this “ancient grudge breaks to new mutiny”. Romeo and Juliet fall madly in love with each other while having to deal with their parent’s expectations to be loyal to their own families and to do as they say. This creates hatred in both Romeo and Juliet as they wish they could just be together without the constant

Romeo shows this contrast between love and hate many times throughout the play but the scene in which he best demonstrates this contrast is in scene 1, act 3. This scene demonstrates this contrast in Romeo’s character as it shows how he has to battle his love for Juliet and his close friend Mercutio with his hate for the Capulet’s and Tybalt after he kills Mercutio. Juliet is the other character that best demonstrates this contrast because she goes through many situations where she is torn between her emotions of love and hate. One scene that best captures these situations is act 3, scene 2, where Juliet becomes torn between feeling hate or love for what she has just discovered has happened. This is the scene where she finds out Romeo has killed Tybalt and she does not know whether to hate him or to be happy and love him that he was not killed in the fight. Another scene that shows the situations Juliet is put in is in act 3, scene 5 when Juliet does not know whether to feel hatred toward her dad for marrying her off to someone she does not love or to feel love towards him because she knows he did it out of his love for her. Romeo and Juliet’s characters demonstrating this contrast is very important to the play as a whole because it shows how they have to struggle with the pressures of their family’s and society's expectations that they can't keep up with. These expectations are so impossible for them to keep up with, that it leads to both of the character’s tragic demise. Not only are Romeo and Juliet’s deaths due to impossible expectations they face, but also due to them no longer wanting to have to fight between their emotions of love and hate, when they just want to be