William Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet

Paper 1: Prologue A prologue is meant to provide readers with a small introduction into the plot of a book or play. It is meant to help the readers understand what will be happening at some point in the story. The prologue to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet offers informative details to the readers about the play. Shakespeare expertly makes use of literary devices to provide a solid foundation to his works. In his prologue, Shakespeare uses third person objective, setting, and word choice to create an intriguing introduction to grab his audiences’ attention and pull them further into his play. While examining the prologue, I observed that Shakespeare used a third person objective point of view. Third person objective is when the writer

Shakespeare helpfully provides where the story line originates; “In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,” (Romeo. Prologue. Line 2.). The key word in the quote would be “Verona” since it informs the readers that the play’s setting is in a city in Italy. However, Verona is a broader piece of the setting given to the readers. Shakespeare also gives a more specified hint as to where the action of the play will be taking place; “Two households, both alike in dignity, / … / … / Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean” (Romeo. Prologue. Lines 1-4.). This centralizes the setting to a more concentrated place that is more easily imaginable than the whole city of Verona, Italy. This allows readers to picture a rich villa or town and two wealthy houses that are constantly trying to crush each other with the end result being a ton of bloodshed from both

Plays incorporate a wide range of word choice in order to reflect the emotions and thoughts of the character or scene that they are trying to portray. Within his prologue, Shakespeare foreshadowed the tragedies that the main characters would suffer from with words such as “star-cross’d” (Romeo. Line 6.), “misadventured” (Romeo. Line 7.), and “death-mark’d” (Romeo. Line 9.). The words that Shakespeare used have negative connotations associated to them. This allows the readers to make an educated guess about how the events in the play are going to end. Shakespeare also used word choice as a way to express to the readers the degree of hatred between the two rivaling households; “The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love, / And the continuance of their parents’ rage, / Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,” (Romeo. Prologue. Line 9-11). The hatred between the two families was so bad that nothing except their children’s death could get them to stop fighting each other. The readers can learn of this due to Shakespeare’s use of word choice to convey the key points that will appear later on within the actual