How shakespeare presents romeo’s feelings in act 1 scene 1 and act 2 scene free essay sample

Love is an important theme in most of Shakespeare’s play, including in Romeo and Juliet because love is a stronger force than all the animosity and forces of fate in Romeo and Juliet. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s play, Shakespeare explores Romeo’s change in attitude to love between Rosaline and Juliet. In Act 1 Scene 1 Shakespeare introduces us to Romeo’s passionate desire towards Rosaline through the use of oxymoron, monologues and vivid imagery. In contrast, in Act 2 Scene 2, when Romeo is addressing Juliet, his language shifts through the use of light, religious and mythical imagery to reflect his newly found romantic love to Juliet. In Act 1 scene 1, Shakespeare explores the attitude of an infatuated and unsettling love of Romeo to Rosaline. Romeo talks about his new found feeling love. â€Å"Ay me, sad hours seem long. Was that my father that went hence so fast? † This quotation shows that Romeo’s mood is sad, depressed, lifeless which makes time seems so long to him. We will write a custom essay sample on How shakespeare presents romeo’s feelings in act 1 scene 1 and act 2 scene or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Romeo is having a new experience to love and he’s having hormonal waving attention because even his father’s big car passed by, he didn’t even noticed it on the moment, he noticed after his father had passed him. Romeo is blindly in love and is confused at the same time. † Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs. Being purged, fire sparkling in lover’s eyes†. This is a metaphor, a comparison where something is shown to be something else. This example shows that as Romeo is in love with Rosaline, he feels that love makes him blind and it’s torturing. In this example, love is compared as a smoke and Romeo is saying that love is like when smoke goes into your eyes, you would feel just like love, making you blind. The sighs that is in this quotation is the comparison with disappointment about love that is really a lot and is floating everywhere like smoke that floats everywhere in the air. Romeo feels that he’s confused and being tortured by loving Rosaline. Romeo talks about his new-found feeling ‘Alas that love, whose view is muffled still’, highlighting his sense of confusion. This notion is furthered through the use of binary opposition throughout Romeo’s oxymoron ‘O brawling love, O loving hate’. This monologue of strong contrasting images of love and hate in one sentence suggests that Romeo finds the intensity of his emotion towards Rosaline destabilising and his emotion is not calm and peaceful. Indeed, the deployment of oxymoron throughout Romeo’s speech such as ‘heavy lightness’ or ‘cold fire, sick health’ suggests that the character so overwhelmed by his feelings that he loses the sight of his common sense and spins and turns into mad love towards Rosaline. In Act 2, Scene, 2 Romeo’s attitude to love shifts from an infatuated love towards Rosaline to more true and youthful love he feels for Juliet. When Romeo sets his eyes on Juliet for the first time, he uses light imagery to express his feelings ‘Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon’. For Romeo, Juliet is the sun who has brought brightness into his life like the sun that brought brightness to people’s lives. This beautifully romantic imagery highlights the purity of Romeo’s feelings and underscores to the reader the powerful force of love that Romeo is now entangled in. Moreover, Shakespeare uses religious imagery to strengthen Romeo’s feelings. He refers Juliet as a ‘bright angel’, who is ‘a winged messenger of heaven’ . This religious imagery highlights the perfection of Romeo’s love to Juliet just as angels and saints are good and perfect, to Romeo, Juliet is so too. Interestingly, in Act 2 Scene 2 Romeo’s speech becomes more structured and less broken down by the constant repetition of ‘o’ that he often used in Act 1 Scene 1. â€Å"The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars†. Romeo is comparing that Juliet is small but brighter than the stars. â€Å"Love goes towards love as schoolboys from their books, but love, toward school with heavy looks†. This suggests that Romeo is inexperienced, he’s energetic and fast and also straight forward. Through change in syntax, Shakespeare signals to the reader Romeo’s changed attitude to love , he is no longer bewildered, but he is ascertained in his strong and passionate feeling to Juliet. There are also similarities of how Romeo express his feelings between the two girls. He uses lots of metaphorical imagery to describe his feelings. However, Romeo often describes Juliet as light and sweetness. â€Å"look thou but sweet† and â€Å"Juliet is the sun†. As a conclusion, Romeo’s feelings are expressed by Shakespeare differently in Act 1 scene 1 and Act 2 scene 2. His love for Rosaline is not a true love and it is as if he was forced to love because Romeo uses complicated language, his lines are stiff like he is reading or reciting poem. Despite this, Romeo’s expressed feelings for Juliet is truer because he uses more simple words and uses only specific imagery to compare Juliet as light. Even though Romeo had mistaken as love with Rosaline, he then finally finds his true love.