Today, we say something is like Romeo and Juliet to describe a love that surpasses all boundaries, but a close reading of the play suggests the lovers’ feelings are more complicated than pure love. If we look, we can find plenty of evidence that Romeo and Juliet’s love for one another is, at least initially, immature. Romeo begins the play claiming to be passionately in love with another woman, Rosaline. When he sees Juliet, he abandons Rosaline before he has even spoken to his new love, which suggests that his feelings for both women are superficial. Juliet, meanwhile, seems to be motivated by defying her parents. She is unenthusiastic about her parents’ choice of husband for her, and at the party where she is supposed to meet Paris, she instead kisses Romeo after exchanging just fourteen lines of dialogue with him. When Romeo returns to see Juliet, she is focused on marriage. For Juliet, part of the appeal of marriage is that it will free her from her parents: “I’ll no longer be a Capulet” (2.2.). She compares Romeo to a tame falcon—a “tassel-gentle” (2.2.)—which suggests that she believes she can control him. Juliet’s love for Romeo seems at least in part to be a desire to be freed from her parents’ control by a husband who can’t control her either. Show More experienced characters argue that sexual frustration, not enduring love, is the root cause of Romeo and Juliet’s passion for one another. Mercutio tells Romeo “this drivelling love is like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole” (2.4.). Every time Romeo tries to demonstrate the seriousness of his love, Mercutio undermines him with sexual jokes. When Romeo risks returning to the Capulets’ house to see Juliet again, Mercutio calls after him that he is just sexually frustrated: “O that she were / An open-arse, thou a poperin pear!” (2.1.). The Nurse points out the sexual element of Juliet’s love. When she returns from meeting Romeo for the first time, the Nurse describes him in physical terms: “for a hand and a foot and body, though they be not to be talked on, yet they are past compare” (2.5.). Later, when Romeo is banished, the Nurse suggests that Juliet will be happier with Paris, because he is better looking: “An eagle, madam / Hath not so green, so quick, so fair an eye / As Paris hath” (3.5.). Yet, while the two characters may have initially fallen for each other due to a mixture of convenience and lust, Romeo and Juliet’s language shows their passion maturing into real love. In the opening scenes, Romeo makes Benvolio and Mercutio laugh with his clichés about love. When he sees Juliet, the clichés drop away, and he begins to describe his feelings in original terms. When they are together, Romeo and Juliet create a shared vocabulary. In their first meeting, they compose a sonnet together using the religious language of pilgrimage. They both start using astrological language to describe their love. As their relationship develops, they use less rhyme, which has the effect of making their language feel less artificial. These changes in the lovers’ language show that they are growing together. In their final scene before they part for good, Romeo and Juliet are on the brink of talking about something other than their thwarted love (“Let’s talk” (3.5.)) before being prevented from having their first real conversation by Romeo’s banishment. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is that the lovers never get the chance to see if their love will grow into a mature, enduring relationship.
Did you know you can highlight text to take a note? x Rosaline is the gorgeous and aloof woman Romeo crushes on until he meets the love of his life, Juliet. But, um, don't get excited, because we never see her, she has no speaking part, and she isn't even listed in the dramatis personae (the cast list). So, why the heck are we talking about Rosaline in our "Character Analysis"? Well, we may not hear directly from Rosaline (or even see her unless we watch, say, Zeffirelli's 1968 film adaptation of the play), but we do hear a lot about her from one of the play's major characters, Romeo. Rosaline and Love PoetryAccording to Romeo, Rosaline is beautiful and completely unavailable—Romeo tells us she's sworn off boys by taking a vow of chastity (1.1). In this way, she resembles the unattainable "Laura," a figure in Petrarch's popular 14th-century love poetry who never gives the poet (Petrarch) the time of day. Rosaline also seems to resemble the "Youth" in Shakespeare's Sonnets. (In Sonnets #1-17, the Poet spends a lot of time trying to convince the Youth, a young man who refuses to marry and have children, that he should get hitched so he can "bless" the world with a bunch of gorgeous kids.) In Sonnet # 4, for example, Shakespeare writes that if the good looking young man dies without having any kids, his "unus'd beauty must be tomb'd with [him]." Compare this with Romeo's complaint about Rosaline's vow of celibacy: O, she is rich in beauty, only poor So, Rosaline is in some ways a stock character. And that makes her even better as a foil to the very real Juliet. Romeo and the Real GirlWhere Rosaline is aloof and chaste, Juliet is totally responsive to Romeo's passion and makes no apologies for her sexual desire. (No wonder she's the one who gets the speaking role.) Directors who cast a Rosaline can use the actresses to play up these differences; in Zeffirelli's 1968 film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, Rosaline is lovely but she's also very stiff and at least a decade older than Romeo. Meanwhile, his Juliet is a young, lively, mischievous beauty who can't keep her hands off of Romeo. How would you cast her? Rosaline appears in Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, merely as a reference to her at the beginning of the play. Rosaline’s appearance in Romeo and JulietRosaline is not a character in Romeo and Juliet – we never meet her, we don’t see her or hear her voice. She has very little influence on the drama as it unfolds, but as a reference point she does have some function in the play. When we first see Romeo Montague he is wandering about on the outskirts of Verona. There has just been a brawl in the middle of town among the servants of the two feuding households, the Montagues and the Capulets, that has drawn a lot of people, and the Prince has addressed them and warned them that if it happens again the perpetrators will be severely punished. Romeo is surprisingly not present, as he is usually at the forefront of the things that are happening in town, and all his friends are there. His mother has sent his cousin, Benvolio, to find him. She is worried about her son because he has been acting strangely lately. Benvolio finds him and discovers the reason for his strange behaviour. Romeo is lovesick and he has been wandering about in a dreamy state. He has seen a girl and fallen in love with her. He has not spoken to her and she doesn’t even know that he exists but, like many teenage boys, he’s fallen for her and can think of nothing else. She has evoked a lot of silly romantic ideas in him and he is wandering about in a trance, unaware of anything that is going on around him. The girl is Rosaline. That’s all he, or we, know about her. And we are not going to know anything more about her than that, and nor is he. Romeo gets over RosalineOther friends join the two boys and while they are laughing and making fun of the love-struck Romeo a messenger appears. He is looking for the people on the list he is carrying. It is a list of people the wealthy businessman, Mr Capulet, is inviting to a party he is having at his house. Romeo and Benvolio are not on the list, of course, because they are Montagues and are more likely to be murdered than welcomed in Capulet’s house. The boys discuss gatecrashing the party but Romeo says that he doesn’t want to go. One of them says that Rosaline is bound to be there and this is his big chance. Romeo hesitates but finally agrees. Wearing masks, which is what partygoers usually did, the boys go, unrecognised, to the party. There is no sign of Rosaline but Romeo sees Juliet and completely dismissing Rosaline from his mind, falls madly in love with her. The rest is history. So we can say that the missing character, Rosaline, has a minor function as a dramatic device. A dramatic device is something that serves to drive the plot. It creates a new plot momentum or a plot twist. A major dramatic device would be the killing of Mercutio and, particularly, the subsequent death of Tybalt. Another would be the messenger carrying the message of Friar Lawrence’s plot to unite the couple being quarantined before he can deliver the message to Romeo. Romeo’s going to the party, influenced by the argument that Rosaline is bound to be there, is a minor dramatic device. He agrees because of that argument but he might have been persuaded to go anyway because, although he is now dreamy he is usually a vital, enthusiastic, adventurous teenager, and, in fact, a leader in such things as gatecrashing parties.  Romeo woos Juliet – not Rosaline Rosaline and Romeo’s Emotional DevelopmentThere is another, possibly more important, function of Rosaline. She is a marker of Romeo’s emotional development. If a writer wants to show us an emotionally immature teenage boy, what better method than to show all of us who are males, what we were like when we first fell in love with a girl we had only seen. All teenage boys go through that, and at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare spends some time depicting Romeo as a boy in that state. He does that because one of his preoccupations in this play is to trace a young man’s emotional development from teenage love freak to mature young adult. The young lovers land themselves in a bad situation by defying the rigid conditions of their society and they plan to work their way around them, led by Juliet, who has a practical mind and a determination to have what she wants. Romeo is swept up in that but before long he has to take some of the responsibility, which is a sobering process, leading to swift maturing as the tragic events unfold. In the final scenes of the play we see Romeo as a young man having to deal with grave misfortune, and if we look back to the Romeo of the early scenes, he is hardly the same person. Shakespeare has shown us a boy in love with a dream develop into a man grappling with a real situation. Romeo’s obsession with the idealised Rosaline has become a practical reckoning with an ill-fated life brought on by his relationship with a real woman. Top quotes about Rosaline
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