On discovering that the lady, whose matchless beauty unexpectedly struck him, is young Juliet, the daughter of the lord Capulet, and the great enemy of the Montagues, he becomes aware that he has unknowingly engaged his heart to his foe. However, this realization cannot dissuade him from loving. When Juliet learns that she has fallen in love with her enemy, she shows great sorrow but her loyalty begins to go to Romeo because she thinks the feud is absurd:
The force of parental influence stands in the way of the lovers' happiness. Because they are foes, he can't vow his love to her, and she can't meet him anywhere.
Shakespeare founded the passion of the two lovers not on the pleasures they had experienced, but on all the pleasures they had not experienced. 9 All that was to come of life was theirs. At that untried source of promised happiness they quenched their thirst; their hopes were of air, their desires of fire. They were in full possession of their senses and their affections. Youth is the season of love, because the heart is then first melted in tenderness from the touch of novelty, and kindled to ecstasy. The expectation of pleasure made their passion and love even more infinite and inexhaustible.
The balcony scene is one of the most famous scenes in all of theater, owing to its beautiful and evocative poetry. It is more than a great lovers' meeting place. It is in fact the same as if Romeo had entered the Garden of Eden. When Romeo sees Juliet again, he wonders,
"But soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!” 10
Juliet is compared to the sun, and is one of the most giving characters in the play:
''My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.'' 11
Her love is so deep that she is prepared to cast off her family and social security just to be Romeo's wife:
“O, Romeo, Romeo! – Wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name.
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.” 12
Nevertheless, the desires and hopes of youthful passion bring with them many disappointments. Such is the transition in this play from the highest bliss to the lowest despair. Though the euphoria of love clearly dominates the scenes in Act II, some ominous foreshadowing is revealed. The friar's observation, in reference to Romeo's powerful love, that “these violent delights have violent ends” 13 , reinforce the presence and power of fate.
The Chorus tells us from the very beginning that the lovers are "star-cross'd", and doomed by the influence of malignant planets.
Before attending Capulet's ball, Romeo has a premonition:
“I fear, too early: for my mind misgives
Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars,
Shall bitterly begin this fearful date
With this night's revels, and expire the term
Of a despised life, closed in my breast,
By some vile forfeit of untimely death:
But He, that hath the steerage of my course,
Direct my sail!” 14
The sudden, fatal violence in the first scene of Act III, that is, the fights between Mercutio and Tybalt and then between Romeo and Tybalt, serves as a reminder that, for all its emphasis on love, beauty, and romance, Romeo and Juliet still takes place in a masculine world in which notions of honor, pride, and status are prone to erupt in a fury of conflict. Elizabethan society generally believed that a man too much in love lost his manliness. Romeo is clearly under the influence of that belief, as can be seen when he states that his love for Juliet had made him “effeminate.” 15 Once again, however, this statement can be seen as a battle between the private world of love and the public world of honor, duty, and friendship.
With their love censured not only by the Montagues and Capulets, but by the ruler of Verona , Romeo and Juliet's relationship puts Romeo in danger of violent punishment from both Juliet's kinsmen and the state. The viciousness and dangers of the play's social environment is a dramatic tool that Shakespeare uses to make the lovers' romance seem even more precious and fragile.
When Juliet understands that Romeo has killed Tybalt and been sentenced to exile, she curses nature that it should put “the spirit of a fiend” in Romeo's “sweet flesh” 16 . However, after criticizing Romeo for his role in Tybalt's death, she regains control of herself and realizes that her loyalty must be to her husband rather than to Tybalt, her cousin. She disapproves of the nurse for criticizing her husband, and adds that she regrets faulting him herself:
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., Act II, prologue
9 William Hazlitt, quoted in The Invention of the Human,by Harold Bloom, (Fourth Estate, 1999) , p. 91
10 Romeo and Juliet (Act II, i)
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., Act II, v
14 Ibid., Act I, iv
15 Ibid., Act III, i
16 Ibid, Act III, ii
