Romeo and Juliet, written by Shakespeare, is well known for its portrayal of true love, but how does Shakespeare portray a believable love story? In my analysis, I chose to focus on the way Shakespeare uses a mirroring effect to show the genuine love Romeo and Juliet share for one another. Throughout the play, Romeo and Juliet display many similarities; in my performance, I focused on the way Romeo and Juliet describe each other using similar language and the way the characters react similarly to Romeo’s banishment. The three scenes I chose to focus on are Act II Scene II, more specifically, Romeo’s monologue in which he expresses his feelings about Juliet, Act III Scene II, when the Nurse informs Juliet of Romeo’s banishment, and Act III Scene III, when Romeo learns from Friar Lawrence that his punishment is banishment. The three scenes were combined into one scene with three actors instead of four. In addition, the group made choices regarding gathering the same props, similar costumes to highlight Romeo and Juliet, deliberately splitting the stage into two sides to portray a mirror and creating similar blocking for Romeo and Juliet. Deliberately portraying these similarities, especially in the creation of a double monologue, allowed me to prove Romeo and Juliet’s genuine love and its believability.
The scene starts with Romeo and Juliet performing a double monologue. There is not a double monologue in the play, but to highlight the similarities between Romeo and Juliet, I chose to stage Romeo’s first monologue from Act II Scene II, and Juliet’s monologue from the beginning of Act III Scene II simultaneously. While delivering the monologues, Romeo and Juliet sat back to back center stage facing the sides of the stage. The characters were represented back to back to visually show a mirror effect. While Romeo and Juliet say different words, they similarly compare each other to the stars, heaven, the moon, and the sun. When speaking an important part of the monologue, the actor shifted to face outward towards the audience. In addition, the actor’s voice crescendoed drawing the audience’s attention towards their important dialogue. During the double monologue, I drew attention to “The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars,/As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven/Would through the airy region stream so bright/That birds would sing and think it were not night” (2.2 19-23). Romeo is saying that Juliet is so bright she can turn night time into daytime. The mirror image is similar, but not exactly the same. It is the inverse of what is seen. Juliet makes an inverse point in her monologue. She says “Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,/Take him and cut him out in little stars,/And he will make the face of heaven so fine/That all the world will be in love with night/And pay no worship to the garish sun” (3.2 23-27). Juliet is saying that Romeo is so beautiful he should be turned into the best part of nighttime, the stars. During these sections of each character’s monologue, they both refer to brightness. This is a metaphor for how stunning they are to one another. By referring to each other in the same way, the audience can see that Romeo and Juliet have the same amount of deep love for one another. The monologues are significant because they portray the genuine love Romeo and Juliet possess for one another. Seperately, as seen in the written work, the monologues express strong love toward each other. However, in our performance, the monologues were performed simultaneously by the characters to emphasize the similarity of their feelings. As these feelings are expressed in monologues, each character is sharing their emotions with the audience, knowing they will not receive a response from the other character. The audience is the only witness to these feelings. In the written play, these monologues occur in different acts. The decision to stage the monologues as a simultaneous double monologue forces the audience to see the mirrored relationship between Romeo and Juliet.
Our costumes and staging are also very important to the idea of Shakespeare’s mirroring. Above I discussed the way Romeo and Juliet sat back to back. Throughout the scene, center stage was kept as a boundary with Romeo and Juliet on different sides of the stage. Following the double monologue, Act III Scene II and Act III Scene III were performed. These are the scenes in which Romeo and Juliet hear about Romeo’s banishment. In Shakespeare’s written work, Juliet hears from the Nurse and Romeo hears from Friar Lawrence. In my group’s performance, we combined the Nurse and Friar Lawrence into one character referred to as the Councillor. The Councillor appeared on both sides of the stage, first talking to Juliet and then Romeo. This character changes from one part of the scene to the next. He first appears as the frantic Nurse who tells Juliet that Tybalt was killed by Romeo, then he becomes the calm Friar Lawrence who advocates patience to a distraught Romeo. Both the Nurse and Friar Lawrence serve as advisors to Romeo and Juliet. Friar Lawrence and the Nurse were combined into one character to highlight the mirror image of Romeo and Juliet. Another choice we made was to make the similarities in the characters stand out by displaying similarities between the actors playing Romeo and Juliet. Traditionally, Romeo is played by a male and Juliet is played by a female. However in our version, both Romeo and Juliet were played by females. In contrast, the role of the councilor was played by a male. This made it obvious to the audience which characters were similar. While both Romeo and Juliet were played by females, the costume reflected the characters' written gender. Romeo wore a reddish-orange top with black pants and Juliet wore a red and gold dress. As you may notice, both characters wore similar colors. This, like the similarity of the actors, clearly portrayed our intent to the audience. The costumes and staging were added as finishing touches to our scene, but they drew the audience’s attention to important aspects of the mirroring effect that otherwise would have been missed.
After our double monologue, in the remaining two thirds of the scene, we focused on utilizing the left and right sides of the stage as a mirror and its image in order to visually show our audience mirroring effect used by Shakespeare. The scene started on the right side with Juliet hearing about Romeo's banishment from the Nurse, following this Romeo hears about his punishment from Friar Lawrence. In these parts we wanted to promote the reactions toward banishment of our characters- both have a similar reaction. When Juliet is talking to the Nurse she says "Tybalt is dead, and Romeo - banished;'/ That 'banished,' that one word 'banished,'/Hath slain ten thousand Tybalts" (3.2 ). In this quote, Juliet is expressing that banishment is worse than death. She is upset that Romeo is banished because she will not get to see Romeo again. Romeo similarly says to Friar Lawrence "Ha, banishment! be merciful, say 'death;'/ For exile hath more terror in his look,/ Much more than death: do it say 'banishment'" (3.3 ). Romeo, like Juliet, feels that death is much worse than banishment. This relates directly to their genuine love because they think banishment is worse because they will be separated. To stage this idea all characters said the word ‘banished’ or ‘banishment’ louder than the rest of our dialogue. This also created an emotion to the word which allowed the audience to feel the characters emotions about banishment. In the scenes, both characters also mention killing themselves. This demonstrates that they would rather die than be apart from one another. It is true to say that they may be scared because they have never lived outside of Verona, however Romeo makes their motivation clear by saying that every unworthy thing may look at Juliet, but because he is banished he cannot see her again. In our performance, we highlighted the angry and upset emotions of Romeo and Juliet after hearing about Romeo’s banishment to show their genuine love for one another. In addition, the blocking was very important. We decided to focus on the physical reaction as well as the emotional one. For example, in the part between Romeo and the Councillor, the Councillor says “O, she says nothing, sir, but weeps and weeps;/And now falls on her bed; and then starts up,/And Tybalt calls; and then on Romeo cries,/And then down falls again” (3.3 ). He is referring to the way Juliet reacts. Our actress playing Juliet fell back on a mattress and looked very upset. Shortly before the Councillor says this to Romeo, Romeo similarly falls down on a mattress. However, Romeo’s reaction when he falls is different. He falls in a manner that suggests he has given up hope. This is suggested because he collapses with a look on his face of disbelief and boredom. In contrast to Juliet who wants to believe the best of Romeo, Romeo is staring into the face of his punishment with less hope of mercy. This relates to the idea of their mirrored reactions because they both wish they could be together, however slightly different because one still has a small amount of hope. These last two thirds of our performance also strongly emphasized the genuine love Romeo and Juliet share. Our emphasis on the word “banishment” and our blocking reinforced the same idea as the double monologue- to portray the mirroring effect and the effect’s ability to prove Romeo and Juliet’s genuine love to the audience.
In conclusion, the purpose of our performance of Romeo and Juliet was to emphasize Shakespeare’s use of mirroring to display Romeo and Juliet’s pure love for one another. The similarity in the way they feel about one another and their reaction to banishment both prove that their love is believable. They both express their honest perception of one another to the audience without the other person, and they also share the thought that the would rather die than be separated. For these reasons Romeo and Juliet’s love is believable. Specifically to our audience, these similarities were made much more obvious than in Shakespeare’s written work due to our attention to the mirror effect. The scenes we chose had to do with their decisions regarding their relationship. This is significant because when it comes to love, Romeo and Juliet are not the most rational characters, but they show a love so powerful, they both are willing to sacrifice everything to be together. In addition to this passion, our Romeo and Juliet pay special attention to the lines we added emphasis to and our blocking to draw attention to the mirror effect because it has so much to do with their love. For this passionate love to be true and believable to the audience, both characters had to demonstrate a similar level of love. Our goal was to express this passion accurately through the similarity in blocking, costumes, props, and staging. I think we accomplished our goal by causing our audience to notice the mirror effect and the believable genuine love Romeo and Juliet share.
Citations
Shakespeare, William. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. N.p.: Folger Shakespeare Library, n.d. Print.
*Note: It was double spaced and blogger changed the format. It also changed some of the indentations and spacing of the paragraphs
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