At a glance
William Shakespeare, written around 1595 · a tragedy in five acts · read across seven weeks, aloud, in this room
What this text deals with
Suicide, violence between young men, and adults arranging a thirteen-year-old’s marriage. We read the last of those as the play presents it: as a horror the text is aware of.
Before we start
Two things worth knowing:
The Prologue gives away the ending. In fourteen lines you are told that both of them die and that the feud dies with them. That is deliberate — see Plot and Structure — and it changes the question from what happens to how does this happen to people who could have stopped.
Juliet is thirteen. The play says so. Productions often cast adults, which quietly softens what the adults in the play are doing. Watch for it.
How we will read it
- Aloud, always, with parts swapped every scene.
- Paraphrase the hard speeches in the margin, line by line, per Reading Shakespeare.
- Watch two productions of key scenes, after reading them — never before.
- Stage one scene yourselves, which is The Scene, Staged.
What to track from the first scene
| Thread | Watch for |
|---|---|
| Light and dark | Who uses the images, and how the meaning reverses by Act 3 |
| Haste | Every character telling somebody to slow down or hurry up |
| Names | ”Deny thy father and refuse thy name” — the play is about property and inheritance as much as about love |
| Who speaks alone | Which characters get soliloquies, and which never do |
| Hands and touch | From the shared sonnet at the party to the tomb |
Questions we will argue about
- Whose tragedy is this? The Prologue blames the parents; the title names the children.
- Is the Friar a good man with a bad plan, or a man who repeatedly chooses concealment over conflict?
- Does the play believe in love at first sight, or is it examining people who do?
- Mercutio dies in Act 3 and the play changes. What exactly changes?
The essay
Everything above feeds The Literary Essay, which asks for one argument about the play, proved with three passages and complicated once.
Curriculum connection
B1.1
read a variety of student- and teacher-selected texts from diverse cultures and historical periods, identifying specific purposes for reading (e.g., compare the diction and imagery used in a contemporary poem and a poem on the same theme from a different historical period; develop a character sketch based on a brief biography of a historical figure they admire to prepare for a short role-play presentation; use an electronic database to locate information from various sources about religious or cultural practices of an ethnic group different from their own)
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B2.1
identify a variety of characteristics of literary, informational, and graphic text forms and explain how they help communicate meaning (e.g., explain the function of setting in a short story; explain the function of rhyme in a sonnet; explain the role of a refrain or repeated phrase in a ballad or story; explain the function of transition words in an opinion piece or argument; explain the role of a comparison and contrast structure in a persuasive essay or a book review; explain why some characters in a Shakespeare play speak mainly in verse and others mainly or only in prose)
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B2.3
identify a variety of elements of style in texts and explain how they help communicate meaning and enhance the effectiveness of the texts (e.g., determine the differences in meaning or effect when the same symbol, such as the sun or water, is used in two different poems; compare the images, symbols, and literary devices used in an Aboriginal myth and a Greek myth; explain how a mythical allusion in a piece of literature or an advertisement enhances the theme or message; determine what effects are achieved in works by two different authors, one of whom uses a variety of sentence types while the other does not)
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B1.3
identify the most important ideas and supporting details in texts, including increasingly complex texts (e.g., flag key passages that reveal character in a text; highlight or make notes about ideas or details that support the author’s thesis; prepare a series of tableaux to represent key events in a story; determine what essential information is conveyed by the captions in a graphic text)
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