89 pages • 2 hours read
William ShakespeareRomeo and Juliet
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1595A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Celestial Bodies
The beautiful and impersonal forces of the heavens are a constant note in Romeo and Juliet. From Romeo’s first impassioned speech in which “Juliet is the sun” to Juliet’s “take him and cut him out in little stars” (II.2.3, 3.2.22), the lovers see each other in celestial terms. These images suggest the grandeur and exaltation of love—in particular, how it causes a beloved person to seem to shine.
However, the lovers run into trouble when they talk about the moon. Associated with both virginity and changeability, the moon holds both Romeo and Juliet’s deepest fears: Romeo that Juliet will deny him, and Juliet that Romeo will fall out of love with her as easily as he fell into love with her.
The symbolic weight of the sun, moon, and stars also relates to the roles that day and night play in the story. Romeo and Juliet can rarely be together by the light of day. When they argue over whether the bird they’re hearing is a nightingale or a lark, they point to one of the play’s great tragedies: Their love never sees the bright, certain light of the sun. In its celestial imagery as in so much else, Romeo and Juliet explores The Beauty and Danger of Love.
Medicines and Poisons
When Friar Lawrence is introduced, he’s cutting herbs in his garden, musing on their powers. A medicinal plant, he reflects, can do as much evil as good if abused; a poisonous herb, meanwhile, can have healthy effects if dosed correctly. He goes on to add that it’s much the same with people:
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs—grace and rude will;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant (II.3.28-31).
A plant is like a person in that its virtues can easily turn into vices, and vice-versa. While the warning about “the canker death” plainly foreshadows the passion-driven demise of Romeo and Juliet, Friar Lawrence’s ideal of moderation is hard to meet and doesn’t stop him from becoming entangled in the lovers’ tragic fate.
Juliet’s sleeping potion and Romeo’s poison appear in very similar guises, and the two lovers go through a similar process of working themselves up to drink their final drinks—even toasting each other across space and time as a last shared act. While Juliet’s potion only makes her sleep, this hardly matters: In the end, it’s not the nature of the drug but all the forces around it that determine whether she lives or dies. Friar Lawrence’s sleeping potion is in the end no less an agent of tragedy than Romeo’s real poison. Human efforts to moderate have only so much power against the vagaries of fate.
Fate
The opening lines of the play let the audience know that it will be a tale of “star-cross’d lovers.” A Renaissance audience would know that these were the stars of destiny itself. Though there were certainly skeptics, people took astrology seriously, and many believed that the disposition of the stars and planets at one’s birth had a genuine influence over one’s fate.
Fate, as represented by the stars, is both inexorable and mysterious. Throughout the play, human hopes are dashed by coincidence and accident, and dreams give true (if murky) pictures of what’s to come. No one’s plan works out in this world—or, if it does, it leads to unintended and terrible consequences. The ending is set from the beginning, no matter what anyone does.
Romeo is quick to see the workings of fate in these unhappy accidents, crying, “then I deny you, stars!” (V.1.25), at the news of Juliet’s death. The irony of his words highlights the impossibility of understanding or controlling destiny. Romeo implies that it was Juliet’s fate to die and his to love (but that he will circumvent this), but the Prologue has established that both lovers are doomed; Romeo is fulfilling fate in attempting to “deny” it.
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