Early Shakespeare

625 Words2 Pages

One of William Shakespeare’s earliest plays, Romeo and Juliet (c. 1594) is a well-known tragedy about the relationship of two “star-crossed” (1.P.6) lovers whose families have been quarreling for many years. Romeo, a Montague, and Juliet, a Capulet, fall deeply in love after meeting at a ball held in the Capulet’s house. Shakespeare was still gaining an audience when he wrote Romeo and Juliet, so he used many well-known styles and techniques in order to give the audience what they wanted. As G.B. Harrison explains, Shakespeare shows the best and the worst characteristics of his early, immature style in Romeo and Juliet.

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare uses an excess of figurative and rhetorical language, along with nonce imagery. The opening scene in Act I begins with a series overdone puns: “we’ll not carry coals…we should be colliers…we be in choler…draw your neck of collar” (1.1.1-4). The audience would find these literary devices quite humorous in Shakespeare’s time, and they were used to opening scenes like this that would help call the theater to attention. G.B Harrison sho...

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