Romeo And Juliett
...Juliet is a play based around two lovers, who have been brought up into families undergoing an ancient feud (the feud is between the Montague family and the Capulet family). The play is set in Verona in Italy and was written by an English play writer call William Shakespeare, in 1595-1596. Shakespeare was given the idea for this play from a poem named "The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet" by Arthur Brooke. Shakespeare then took the general story line of this poem and changed it into a popular play, which has lived on through the ages.
Shakespeare used many techniques in this play to prepare the viewing audience for the lover first meeting. His techniques set the mood of the play and related to what was happening. It is important to remember however, that the techniques Shakespeare used in this play was very popular at the time it was written, it would fill in for the lack of special effects.
Shakespeare opens the play with a prologue (a typical technique used in tragedies), which would be preformed by the chorus and was told in order to give the audience a brief outline of the play. Shakespeare would have used this in his plays to inform the audience of what was happening and get them excited for the forthcoming play. The prologue was preformed in a sonnet, which consists of 14 lines and 10 syllables per line. This was very popular in Shakespeare's day (Elizabethan times).
The prologue states that there are two families equally "alike in dignity" who make "new mutiny" from an "ancient grudge". In this prologue Romeo and Juliet are described as "a pair of star-cross'd lovers" who "take their lives" This is important, as the audience in Shakespeare's day, believed that the stars foretold your destiny and whatever the stars foretold could not be changed. So as a result we know that, these two lovers will fall in love and will take their lives as a...
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