Sexual Imagery In Romeo And Juliet Analysis

Sexual imagery in Romeo and Juliet can be shown through Romeo, who openly craves sex. This would make the audience much more aware of the sexual connotations of the play. An example of Romeo craving sex is:
“Romeo O, she is rich in beauty, only poor
That, when she dies, with beauty dies her store
Benvolio Then she hath sworn that she will still live chaste?
Romeo She hath, and in that sparing makes huge waste; Cuts beauty off from all posterity.”
In this quote, we are able to see that Romeo is upset that Rosaline, the woman he pines after at the beginning of the play, intends to remain chaste, and to never have sex. Romeo’s reaction to finding this out suggest that Romeo is not actually in love with Rosaline because of her personality,

Instead, she spends most of the passage claiming that she cannot believe he has done something like this because of his good looks, showing the reader that she does not care for his personality and is instead only with him due to her arousing sexual desires. This shows how the sexual imagery has already become much more overt in the play itself, further developing the idea that Shakespeare wanted to ease the audience into the sexual nature of the play instead of putting it all in straight away. This kind of sexual imagery was strange for the time that the play was written as women were not seen to have sexual desires, especially not young girls, and this would have made the play controversial for the time as the audience would have felt uncomfortable that something so unheard of was happening. However, the idea itself is embedded as a subtext rather than an idea that is made evident throughout the scene, furthering the idea that the sexual imagery is more concealed than it would have been had the play been written in the modern

Having been written 199 years after Romeo and Juliet, The Monk is much more open to sexual imagery, due to the openness brought about by literature before it. As well as this, in the mid-18th century most of England and Europe had undergone a cultural revolution, which made many people and readers think about sex in “ways that would make some contemporary readers blush” . This caused Lewis to write much more sexual imagery into The Monk, which would advance the overt nature of sexual imagery even further. However, though sexual imagery had become more overt, The Monk was still controversial for its