By William Shakespeare
 Born
April 23, 1564 in Stratford-uponAvon in England.
 Parents: Mary Arden and John
Shakespeare, a respected glove-maker.
 He attended the local grammar school
where he learned to read and write in
English and Latin.
 Shakespeare
married Anna Hathaway at
the age of 18, she was 26. They had three
children together: Susanna and the twins,
Judith and Hamlet.
 Around
1590, he left his family behind
and traveled to London to work as an
actor and playwright.
 Shakespeare eventually became partowner of the Globe Theater.
 In I594, Romeo & Juliet was performed for
the FIRST time– all male actors!
 Shakespeare
acted and wrote for this
company until he retired in 1612.
 By this time he had written thirty-seven
plays-comedies, tragedies, histories, and
romances and well over 150 poems.
 In 1610, Shakespeare returned to
Stratford
 Died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two.
 Not a single original manuscript has
survived due partly to the fact that they
were written strictly for performance.

Wordplay, bawdy jokes, and lofty language
appealed to Elizabethan audiences.

In Romeo and Juliet a prologue in sonnet form
summarizes the play for the audience


Most lines in the play, like the lines of a sonnet,
are in iambic pentameter—ten syllables of a
steady unaccented/accented pattern.
Monologues—long speeches by a single actor
onstage—let the audience understand the
thoughts of characters.
English
has changed in the
hundreds of years since
Shakespeare’s writing. In his day:
• wherefore meant “why”
• I would often meant “I wish”
• Hast thou meant “Have you”
• true shrift meant “true confession”
• Act III
Crisis, or turning point
• Act II
Rising
action
• Act I
Introduction
• Act IV
Falling
action
• Act V
Climactic moment, resolution
During the 1300s in Verona, Italy—the setting
for Romeo and Juliet—it was customary for a
father to arrange a suitable marriage for his
daughter.
 Whom
do you think this custom would have
benefitted?
 What
reaction might parents have had to
children unwilling to marry the person the
parents chose?
Several characters in the play try to “fix” the
crisis for Romeo and Juliet by deceiving
others.
If you try to make a friend’s troubles go
away, are you helping or meddling?

Do lies and deception usually help a crisis
or make it worse?

 What
kind of connection might there be
between time pressure and the impulse to
deceive?