Romeo: in love before the play starts

When the play starts, Romeo is already heartbroken, over a girl called Rosaline. She never appears and never says a word, yet Shakespeare spends Romeo's first scene on her. There is a reason, and you can hear it.

Romeo has his own video here, one of several on the characters, and the plot from start to finish sits in the Overview.

Shakespeare introduces Romeo as a type his audience would know at once: the lovesick young man of fashionable love poetry. Here are two lines Romeo speaks about two different girls. One: But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? Two: O brawling love, O loving hate. Which of those two lines is about Rosaline, and how can you tell? The second. It is all about the speaker's own feelings, while the first looks out at somebody else. His first real line comes just after a street fight, and he turns it straight to his own feelings: Here's much to do with hate, but more with love. Then he piles up oxymorons, which are opposite words pressed together: Why, then, O brawling love, O loving hate. Pairs of opposites like these were the standard kit of love poetry in Shakespeare's day, which is why they sound borrowed. Each one describes Romeo's feelings, not Rosaline. He even announces that he is not himself: Tut, I have lost myself, I am not here, This is not Romeo, he's some other where. The Romeo you meet first is a man describing his own misery, and the girl he is miserable about never gets a single image. Then he sees Juliet at the feast, and by that night, under her window, his language has turned outwards: But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Now the images are light, the sky and distance, and every one of them is about her.

That is what Rosaline is for. Shakespeare gives Romeo the borrowed language first so that you can hear it stop. His images change owner: he stops describing himself and starts describing her.

Whether the new love is real is argued in the video on love. Here the point is the change you can hear, because it gives you two Romeos to quote.

Shakespeare's other habit with Romeo is speed: a decision that takes about half a line, and a world that answers it at once. An hour after his wedding, Tybalt calls him a villain, and Romeo answers with a line that refuses the feud out loud. And so, good Capulet – which name I tender As dearly as mine own – be satisfied. He loves the Capulet name because he has just married into it, and nobody on stage can hear why. Mercutio fights in his place, Romeo steps between them, and Tybalt stabs Mercutio under his arm. All Romeo can say is: I thought all for the best. Minutes later he chooses to fight Tybalt himself, and kills him. He chose to kill Tybalt. Why is it strange that he then calls himself fortune's fool? Because the choice was his. O, I am fortune's fool hands his own decision to luck, a moment after he made it. Banished to Mantua, he wakes one morning in high spirits: If I may trust the flattering truth of sleep, My dreams presage some joyful news at hand. He is reading his dream exactly backwards, because the news on its way is that Juliet is dead. When Balthasar tells him, how long does Romeo take to decide to die? About half a line. Is it e'en so? Then I defy you, stars! Four words of shock, then a decision. That speed is how Shakespeare writes Romeo, and this decision is the one that kills them both.

Time to bring back his lines, one missing word at a time, and then a line that is not his. On Rosaline: O brawling love, O loving what? Hate. Why, then, O brawling love, O loving hate. Next, under her window: It is the east, and Juliet is the what? The sun. It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Now, after Tybalt dies, Romeo calls himself whose fool? Fortune's. O, I am fortune's fool. Try Juliet's oxymoron, O serpent heart, hid with a flow'ring face. Borrowed, or real? Real. Romeo's opposites about Rosaline describe a feeling with no person in it, while Juliet's describe two true facts about one man.

If you can hear the gap between Romeo on Rosaline and Romeo on Juliet, that's in the bag, and it has earned your thumbs up before you move on. If not, keep it saved, and write his two kinds of line side by side once, because that is what makes the difference stick.

Next in the chapter: Mercutio: the funniest man in Verona, and the first to die.

For more, visit scholafly.com, or watch the next video.