Love is the dominant and most important theme in many Shakespeare's dramas. However, the kind of love that Shakespeare writes about is not just any kind of love. Love, for him, defies the stars and makes the world go round. It is the most powerful emotion that captures individuals and makes them oppose their world, and, at times, fight against themselves. It is the noblest of all passions. That kind of love is prepared to seek refuge and salvation even in death, when other solutions seem impossible.

Romeo and Juliet, the most famous love story in the English literary tradition, is a perfect example of what the forcefulness of love means. The love between Romeo, the young heir of the Montagues, and Juliet, the daughter of the house of Capulet is violent, ecstatic, and overpowering force that supersedes all other values, loyalties, and emotions.

Despite the fact that he lives in the middle of the violent feud between the two families, Romeo is not at all interested in violence. His only interest is love.

His first love is Rosaline, who doesn't return his love. Analyzing the nature of his love for Rosaline, we can see that Romeo is in love just exactly as the culture of the day said a young man was supposed to be in love. Rosaline exists in the play only to demonstrate Romeo's passionate nature, his love of love. From the many oxymorons and clichés in Romeo's speech, like “Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health” 4 , it is easy to guess that Romeo has read bad love poetry.

In the popular love poetry of Shakespeare's time, the focus was always on the sufferings of the male lover. The lady is beautiful, and her beauty strikes a man through the eyes, into the heart, making him fall in love. He suffers and tries to tell the lady of his suffering, so she may pity him and return his love. But she cruelly rejects his advances, and so he suffers, both from the fire of love and the coldness of her heart. Benvolio knows that it has been ever thus, and sympathizes, saying:

“Alas, that love, so gentle in his view,

Should be so tyrannous and rough in proof!” 5

Rosaline is incapable of returning her love to Romeo. She is cold, chaste and unattainable. She rejects his love not because she does not love him, but because she rejects love in general. In her coldness and chastity, Rosaline is directly contrasted to Juliet - the beautiful, passionate and strong-willed daughter of Capulet . Shakespeare's intention was to contrast sharply Romeo's mooning over Rosaline with the fresh, spontaneous passion which Juliet will inspire in him.

The meeting of Romeo and Juliet at the feast of Capulet's captures the excitement of the intense passion that springs up at first sight between the two protagonists. When Romeo first sees Juliet, he says:

“Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight!

For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night” 6

Suddenly struck with the exceeding beauty of Juliet, he compares her immediately to the brilliant light of the torches that illuminate Capulet's great hall: "O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!" Juliet is the light that frees him from the darkness of his perpetual melancholia.

3 William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
4 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (Act I, i)
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., Act I, v