Romeo & JulietWilliam Shakespeare

Sofea, Doreen & Hafizan

Question #2Draw a table to compare the character

traits of the different characters in Romeo & Juliet.

Know The Characters…

1. Romeo 2. Juliet 3. Lord Capulet 4. Lady Capulet5. Lord Montague6. Lady Montague

Comparison Of

Characters

Love / Relationship

ROMEO MONTAGUE

• His relation to love is not simple/stable. At first he fall in love with Rosaline but she slipped of Romeo’s mind after he kissed Juliet for the first time and falls for Juliet.

• Juliet is no mere replacement. The love she shares with Romeo is far deeper, more authentic and unique than the cliché puppy love Romeo felt for Rosaline.

• Romeo’s love matures over the course of the play from the shallow desire to be in love to a profound and intense passion.

• Romeo’s deep capacity for love is merely a part of his larger capacity for intense feeling of all kinds. Put another way, it is possible to describe Romeo as lacking the capacity for moderation.

• Love compels him to sneak into the garden of his enemy’s daughter, risking death simply to catch a glimpse of her.

• Anger compels him to kill his wife’s cousin in a reckless duel to avenge the death of his friend.

• Despair compels him to suicide upon hearing of Juliet’s death.

• Such extreme behaviour dominates Romeo’s character throughout the play and contributes to the ultimate tragedy that befalls the lovers.

• Of course, though, had Romeo not had such depths of feeling, the love he shared with Juliet would never have existed in the first place.

JULIET CAPULET • Having not quite reached her fourteenth birthday, Juliet is of an age

that stands on the border between immaturity and maturity.

• At the play’s beginning however she seems merely an obedient, sheltered, naïve child. Though many girls her age, including her mother - get married, Juliet has not given the subject any thought. 

• When Lady Capulet mentions Paris’s interest in marrying Juliet, Juliet dutifully responds that she will try to see if she can love him, a response that seems childish in its obedience and in its immature conception of love.

• Juliet seems to have no friends her own age, and she is not comfortable talking about sex (as seen in her discomfort when the Nurse goes on and on about a sexual jokes.

• Even in Juliet’s dutiful acquiescence to try to love Paris, there is some seed of steely determination.

• Juliet promises to consider Paris as a possible husband to the precise degree her mother desires.

• While an outward show of obedience, such a statement can also be read as a refusal through passivity. Juliet will accede to her mother’s wishes, but she will not go out of her way to fall in love with Paris.

• Juliet’s first meeting with Romeo propels her full-force toward adulthood. Though profoundly in love with him, Juliet is able to see and criticize Romeo’s rash decisions and his tendency to romanticize things.

• After Romeo kills Tybalt and is banished, Juliet does not follow him blindly. She makes a logical and heartfelt decision that her loyalty and love for Romeo must be her guiding priorities. 

• Essentially, Juliet cuts herself loose from her prior social moorings—her nurse, her parents, and her social position in Verona—in order to try to reunite with Romeo.

• When she wakes in the tomb to find Romeo dead, she does not kill herself out of feminine weakness, but rather out of an intensity of love, just as Romeo did. 

• Juliet’s suicide actually requires more nerve than Romeo’s: while he swallows poison, she stabs herself through the heart with a dagger.

LORD CAPULET • The head of his family and father to Juliet, is about sixty years of

age but calls himself young.

• By personality, he is fiery, interfering, forgetful, and domineering; but at the same time, he can be hospitable, and generous, as he appears at his party. He delights in entertaining lavishly and personally welcomes and jests with his guests.

• Capulet dearly loves his daughter Juliet, but likes to have his way with her. He is very considerate of her feelings when he first speaks to Paris about their marriage; he states that his consent to the marriage depends upon her wishes, and tells Paris that he needs to woo and win her.

• Later, when Juliet is grieving over Tybalt, he overrules any consideration of her feelings. When she refuses to marry Paris, he becomes angry and calls her vile names, threatening to turn her out on the street and to disinherit her.

• He fixes the day of the marriage for Thursday and suddenly advances it to Wednesday. He is highly insensitive to the feelings of Juliet when she defies him.

LADY CAPULET •  She also has fewer redeeming qualities than he does. She ridicules his

age in the presence of others and endeavours to assert her authority over him.

• Capulet completely ignores her on all occasions thus showing she has no influence over him.

• She also has very little influence over her daughter; she has had little part in her upbringing and still treats Juliet as a child.

• When she learns that Romeo killed Tybalt, her nephew, she demands the death of Romeo.

• She is incapable of seeing any justice in Romeo’s fighting Tybalt over the death of Mercutio; her hysterical demands, however, make no impression on the Prince.

• Her wickedness comes to the forefront when she tells Juliet that she plans to seek revenge on Romeo for Tybalt’s death and will poison him through a servant.

• Lady Capulet, revealing very little that is admirable in her character, is created to be an unlikable and unsympathetic character.

• The shock that Lady Capulet receives over Juliet’s supposed death removes all superfluity from her, and the grief-stricken mother comes out.

• Her sorrow over the loss of her child is immense, which she clearly expresses with a string of adjectives. “Accurs’t unhappy, wretched hateful day!”, are genuinely from the heart.

• Lady Capulet is an unsympathetic, heartless, scheming woman, until she is overtaken by tragedy. 

LORD MONTAGUE• Lord Montague’s social position in Verona is the same as that of the

Lord Capulet, but he, his son Romeo, and his nephew Benvolio, are far from being eager to fight their enemies.

• Lord Montague is a foil to Lord Capulet. He is self-controlled, quiet, and dignified. He loves his son dearly and grieves over his strange behaviour and his secretiveness.

• His first words spoken in the play, “The villain Capulet! Hold me not, let me go,” are dramatically intended to inform the audience, at the outset, of the relations between the two houses.

• Even in this exclamation, the reader can see his mildness and self-control. He does not want to be involved in a fight with the Capulets.

• In the opening scene, he begs Benvolio to find out what is wrong with Romeo and he pleads with the Prince to consider that Romeo, in killing Tybalt, has only done what the law otherwise would have done.

• In the closing scene, he announces that he was grieved over Romeo’s exile; now he has to face his son’s death.

• He accepts Capulet’s hand but is too much overcome with grief to speak about forgetting the past enmity. He does, however, propose to raise a golden statue of Juliet for her everlasting remembrance. 

• He also worries over Romeo's relationship with Rosaline (with whom Romeo was in love at the beginning of the story), but cannot get through to his son.

LADY MONTAGUE • Lady Montague’s character is not much developed in the play.

• She speaks only once, stating her happiness that Romeo was not involved in the street fight in the opening scene.

• She is present with her husband in Act III, Scene 1, but says nothing, apparently overcome by the sentence of banishment of Romeo.

• In the closing scene, her husband reveals that she died in grief over Romeo’s exile.

• Lady Montague is cast in a more suave and womanly manner than Lady Capulet is. She says nothing but restrains her husband from fighting by throwing her arms around him.  

• She loves him and does not want him to be hurt or to engage in a fray forbidden by the Prince.

• She is more interested in her son’s welfare than in the cause of the fight. She is devoted to her husband and her son and in the end dies a sad death.

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Don't Waste Your Love

On Somebody, Who

Doesn't Value It.- William Shakespeare

End Of Slide