ROMEO AND JULIET
Themes, Motifs,
Symbols, and
Foreshadowing
THEMES
Theme is the main idea or the underlying meaning
in a work of literature.
THE FORCEFULNESS OF LOVE
• The play focuses on love, but specifically the
passion that forms from love at first sight.
• In order to be with the person they love, both
Romeo and Juliet have to break from the entire
social structure of their world, and even take their
lives.
• Shakespeare intentionally strays from typical
depictions of love, like other poets of his time, and
does not describe love as a perfect and simple
experience.
• Love in Romeo and Juliet is a brutal, powerful
emotion that captures individuals and
catapults them against their world, and, at
times, against themselves.
• Love, in this play, challenges the characters in
their relationships with family, friends, and
even religion, and demonstrates the chaos
that can ensue because of being in love.
THE INDIVIDUAL VERSUS SOCIETY
• The majority of the play focuses on the
lovers’ struggle against societal
institutions that oppose the existence of
their love.
• These institutions such as family,
religion, and honor often come in conflict
with each other.
• Family demands that both Romeo and
Juliet hate each other.
• Honor demands that Romeo fight for his
namesake.
• Religion demands that the two uphold
Christian ideals.
• Romeo and Juliet end up turning against all of
these forces in order to be together.
• They commit un-Christian acts, like their
suicide, and turn against family and friends.
• It is possible to see Romeo and Juliet as a battle
between the responsibilities and actions
demanded by social institutions and those
demanded by the private desires of the
individual.
THE INEVITABILITY OF FATE
• The first thing the chorus states is that the lovers are “star-crossed,” meaning
that their fate controls them. The prologue goes out of its way to spoil the
ending, but also to set up the major theme of fate.
• Shakespeare wants the audience to know how it will end, but still gives us
hope for a different conclusion, setting up the same scenario for the reader as
he does for the characters.
• Romeo and Juliet are somewhat aware of their fate, as they constantly see
omens of their death, and know that they should not be together.
• Fate controls all of the events surrounding the lovers: the feud
between their families, the horrible series of accidents that
ruin Friar Laurence’s plans at the end of the play, and the
tragic timing of Romeo’s suicide and Juliet’s awakening.
• These events are not mere coincidences, but rather
manifestations of fate that help bring about the unavoidable
outcome of the young lovers’ deaths.
• Despite all of their best efforts, and
Friar Laurence’s plans, Romeo and Juliet
cannot avoid their fate.
MOTIFS
Motifs are aspects that occur repeatedly in a
work and help to enhance the theme.
LIGHT AND DARK IMAGERY
• One of the most visual motifs in the play is the contrast
between light and dark.
• This is often expressed in terms of night/day imagery.
• The meaning of light/dark or night/day is different from one
might imagine. Light is not always good, and dark is not always
evil.
• Light and dark are typically used to demonstrate contrasts.
Juliet describes Romeo as the stars shining brightly in the
night sky, while Romeo describes Juliet as the sun who
banishes the “envious moon.”
• Night and day are again blurred the morning after
the lovers’ only night together. Romeo is forced to
leave for Mantua in the morning, and both he and
Juliet try to pretend that it is still night, and that the
light is actually darkness: “More light and light,
more dark and dark our woes” (3.5.36).
• In this scene, the contrast is between the romance
of the happy lovers, and the dark and terrifying
banishment that awaits Romeo.
OPPOSING VIEW POINTS
• Shakespeare includes numerous scenes in
Romeo and Juliet that hint at alternative ways
to evaluate the play.
• Mercutio mocks the viewpoints of all the
other characters in play.
• He sees Romeo’s devotion to love as a sort
of blindness that robs Romeo from his
ability to be his self.
• Similarly, he sees Tybalt’s devotion to honor as blind and
stupid.
• His punning and the Queen Mab speech can be interpreted
as making fun of virtually every type of passion evident in
the play. Mercutio serves as a critic of the delusions of
righteousness and grandeur held by the characters around
him.
• The servants also provide differing perspectives than the
main characters of the play.
• Shakespeare uses the drastic change in their speech to
represent the vast differences in their life. Servants speak
in prose, while nobles speak in verse.
• There is the Nurse who lost her baby and husband, the
servant Peter who cannot read, the musicians who care
about their lost wages and their lunches, and the
Apothecary who cannot afford to make the moral choice.
• The lower classes present a second tragic world to
counter that of the nobility.
• The nobles’ world is full of grand tragic gestures. The
servants’ world, in contrast, is characterized by simple
needs, and early deaths brought about by disease and
poverty rather than dueling and grand passions.
• Where the nobility almost seem to revel in their
capacity for drama, the servants’ lives are such that
they cannot afford tragedy of the epic kind.
SYMBOLS
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used
to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
• In Act 1, scene 1, the buffoonish
Samson begins a brawl between
the Montagues and Capulets by
flicking his thumbnail from
behind his upper teeth, an
insulting gesture known as
biting the thumb.
• He engages in this juvenile and
vulgar display because he wants
to get into a fight with the
Montagues but doesn’t want to
be accused of starting the fight
by making an explicit insult.
THUMB BITING
• Because of his timidity, he
settles for being annoying
rather than challenging.
• The thumb-biting, as an
essentially meaningless gesture,
represents the foolishness of the
entire Capulet/Montague feud
and the stupidity of violence in
general.
• In Act 1, scene 4, Mercutio delivers a monologue
about the fairy Queen Mab, who rides through
the night on her tiny wagon bringing dreams to
sleepers. He gives this speech to Romeo to
convince him that dreams are nonsense.
• One of the most noteworthy aspects of Queen
Mab’s ride is that the dreams she brings
generally do not bring out the best sides of the
dreamers, but instead makes them dream about
whatever vices they are addicted to—for
example, greed, violence, or lust.
QUEEN MAB
• Another important aspect of Mercutio’s description of Queen Mab is that it
is complete nonsense, although vivid and highly colorful. Nobody believes
in a fairy pulled about by “a small grey-coated gnat” whipped with a
cricket’s bone (1.4.65).
• Mercutio’s description of Mab and her carriage goes to extravagant lengths
to emphasize how tiny and insubstantial she is.
• Queen Mab and her carriage do not merely symbolize the dreams of
sleepers, but they really symbolize the power of fantasies, daydreams, and
desires.
• Through the Queen Mab imagery, Mercutio suggests that all desires and
fantasies are as nonsensical and fragile as Mab, and that they are basically
corrupting. This point of view strictly contrasts with Romeo and Juliet’s.
• Friar Lawrence remarks that every plant, herb, and
stone has its own special properties, and that nothing
exists in nature that cannot be put to both good and bad
uses.
• Thus, poison is not intrinsically evil, but is instead a
natural substance made lethal by human hands. Friar
Lawrence’s words prove true over the course of the
play.
• The sleeping potion he gives Juliet is concocted to cause
the appearance of death, not death itself, but through
circumstances beyond the Friar’s control, the potion
does bring about a fatal result: Romeo’s suicide.
• As this example shows, human beings tend to cause
death even without intending to.
POISON
• Similarly, Romeo suggests that society is to blame for the
apothecary’s criminal selling of poison, because while there are
laws prohibiting the Apothecary from selling poison, there are
no laws that would help the apothecary make money.
• Poison symbolizes human society’s tendency to poison good
things and make them fatal, just as the pointless CapuletMontague feud turns Romeo and Juliet’s love to poison.
• After all, unlike many of the other tragedies, this play does not
have an evil villain, but rather people whose good qualities are
turned to poison by the world in which they live.
NIGHT
• Night is an important time in the play. It's when all
the passionate love scenes occur so, night seems to
shelter and protects the lovers, while the glare of
day threatens to reveal them.
• In contrast, the heat of the sun makes the young
men of Verona irritable and prone to violence and
the street brawls occur during the daytime.
• We often think of night as both a time for
romance and liberation, as well as a time of
danger, and the imagery of night and darkness
in Romeo and Juliet carries both night's
promises and its threats.
• Hidden in darkness, Romeo and Juliet's love is
free from the social rules that would divide
them.
• Therefore, night symbolizes protection and
shelter.
FORESHADOWING
Foreshadowing or guessing ahead is a literary
device by which an author hints what is to come. It
is used to avoid disappointment. It is also
sometimes used to interest the reader.
In Act One, scene four, as the men prepare to leave for the
Capulets' party, Romeo expresses a dark feeling of his
impending death.
ROM:
…for my mind misgives
Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars,
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night's revels and expire the term
Of a despised life, clos'd in my breast,
By some vile forfeit of untimely death. (113-118)
When Juliet first encounters Romeo, she asks the
Nurse who he is as he leaves the party, stating that if
he is married, she'll die a virgin, but her description
states that her grave will be her wedding bed. This
actually is what ultimately happens.
JUL:
Go ask his name.—If he be married,
My grave is like to be my wedding bed. (I.v.143-144)
In Juliet's very long speech in Act IV, scene three, she worries that she might wake from her drugged
sleep before Romeo arrives, surrounding by the bones of the dead. This is more accurate than she
could know—and Romeo will be among the bodies. First she wonders if she will not be smothered in
such a place:
JUL:
How if, when I am laid into the tomb,/ I wake before the time that Romeo/ Come to redeem me?
There's a fearful point!/ Shall I not then be stifled in the vault,/ To whose foul mouth no healthsome air
breathes in,/ And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes? (32-37)
Then Juliet goes further, wondering if she wakes among the bones and is driven mad by fear—even
finding Tybalt's enshrouded corpse—might she not kill herself? In truth, she will kill herself, but not as
she imagines: this is more foreshadowing.
JUL:
O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught,/ Environed with all these hideous fears,/ And madly play with my
forefathers’ joints,/ And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud,/ And, in this rage, with some great
kinsman's bone/ As with a club dash out my desp'rate brains? (51-56)