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Romeo And Juliet Analysis

Decent Essays

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a very popular play that most people recognize for its ability to display true love, fate, and revenge all in one play. This was a romantic tragedy that shows the adversities faced by two young adults who fall in love at first sight, While comparing “Romeo and Juliet”, “The Holy Sonnet 18”, and “The Bait” all use religious imagery and the purity of love throughout all three of these works. Throughout this piece I will analyze and break down a specific passage in the text that highlights the religious imagery in the play the most while comparing it to the religious imagery used in Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 18” and “The Bait”. l argue that and show how Shakespeare and Donne are successful in their writing pieces because they are able to create a sense of love that does not only rely on passion but the ability to use religion as a way of showing the purity that a person could have for their beloved, whether a partner or a religious sense of purified love that is shared. In the specific passage that I have chosen comes directly from Act 1 scene 5 of Romeo and Juliet. This is the beginning of the play when Romeo and Benvolio go to the ball where he meets Juliet for the first time. The two come in contact and quickly learn that it is love at first sight even though they are from families of the opposing side. The portion of the passage that I have chosen to highlight takes place when the couple meet and exchange their vows of love and agree that they should take each other hand in marriage the next day. William Shakespeare begin to use religious imagery to express the love of these two young people in Act 1 of Scene 5, although these two have just met in this scene Shakespeare uses a pilgrim as a metaphor to use to compare Romeo to. In this scene the pilgrim is used show that Romeo is moving towards Juliet’s shrine which is also another sacred religious term. Romeo is used in line 105 to even make reference to a prayer that he must recite while he is kissing Juliet’s sacred lips, and also he states in a particular portion of this passage that “Now my sin has been taken from my lips by yours (Shakespeare line 106). Shakespeare uses a form of reverse psychology to suggest that in order

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