Romeo and Juliet Romeo Quotes

These are pretty big words coming from a teenager. All this abstract language—love as "smoke," as "fire," as a "sea," as "madness"—suggest that maybe Romeo knows more about love from books than, you know, actually being in love.

Romeo admits that Rosaline has vowed to remain "chaste" like "Diana," the goddess of virginity and hunting. In other words, Rosaline has sworn off boys and sex, which means that Romeo has no chance of winning her heart. What's interesting about this passage is that Romeo sounds a whole lot like a typical "Petrarchan lover." Petrarch, by the way, was a fourteenth-century Italian poet whose sonnets were all the rage in Renaissance England. In fact, Shakespeare's own collection of Sonnets are, in part, inspired by Petrarch's love poetry, which was written about "Laura," a figure who was as unavailable and unattainable as Romeo's current crush (Rosaline). Petrarchan poetry happens to contain a lot of metaphors that equate the pursuit of love with hunting and/or battle. In this passage, Romeo says that Rosaline is well "arm'd" against the "siege" of his love and "Cupid's arrow," which is an elaborate way to say that Rosaline is physically and emotionally impenetrable.

Romeo uses religious language to talk about Rosaline

Hmm, this is interesting. Romeo forgets all about his "love" for Rosaline the exactly second he sees Juliet, which makes us think that he was never really in love with Rosaline to begin with. But does this also mean that Romeo's desire for Juliet is nothing more than meaningless infatuation?

This is one of the most famous passages in the entire play, so let's take a close look, shall we? When Romeo and Juliet talk for the first time at the Capulet ball, Romeo uses his best pickup line: touching Juliet's hands and lips, he says, would be a kind of religious experience. (We've heard that before, haven't we? He used to say this kind of stuff about Rosaline.) Angling for a kiss, Romeo refers to his lips as a two "pilgrims" that would worship at a holy "shrine" (that would be Juliet's lips). A pilgrim, by the way, is a person on a religious pilgrimage to a holy place. Pilgrims were also called "palmers" because they often carried palm leaves on their journeys.

In response, Juliet teasingly puns on the word "palmer" to suggest that touching hands, "palm to palm," is like kissing (so Romeo, presumably, should be content with touching her hands instead of making out). But Romeo refuses to be shot down. Instead of walking away with his tail between his legs, he uses Juliet's hands=lips logic to argue that kissing the lips of Juliet (who has reached "saint" status by this point) would be just like praying, which involves placing ones palms together. Juliet seems playfully willing to go along with all this and allows Romeo to kiss her.

What's interesting is that, before Romeo can lock lips for a second time, Juliet says "you kiss by the book," which suggests that all of Romeo's moves (his pickup lines and even the way he kisses) are a bit scripted and cliché. So, Juliet's clearly smitten with Romeo but she also recognizes that Romeo isn't exactly original.

At the same time, however, the dialogue between Romeo and Juliet takes the form of a sonnet (up to the point where they kiss), which is incredibly romantic. So, while Romeo's moves are a bit predictable, we can also recognize that Romeo and Juliet's romance has the potential to be anything but conventional.

In this monologue, Romeo elevates Juliet to heavenly status by aligning her with the "sun" and the "stars." Sure, he's still working with some celestial metaphors—but at least it's starting to get slightly less abstract. He even mentions her name!

Again, Romeo uses over-the-top religious language to describe the experience of looking at Juliet but we get the sense that he's sincere and deeply in love.

Romeo asks Juliet to use language to express the love that they feel for each other, but Juliet tells him that's the wrong approach. The love they share has grown so great that they can no longer express it. (A similar idea occurs in King Lear, when Cordelia refuses to quantify her love for her father and says that language is not capable of expressing her devotion.)

Death becomes an act of love for Romeo, because he thinks that suicide will enable him to be with Juliet (he thinks she's dead). Check out "Symbols" for more on this.

We hear an echo of the Biblical Song of Songs here: "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it." Romeo just won't let up with the religious allusions—for him, love is a religious experience. (But not in the cliché way, he swears.)

Romeo is a bit of a drama queen when he spots blood from the recent street brawl between the Capulet and Montague servants. He dizzies himself here by relating the extremes of hate and love. We should also point out that the phrases, "O brawling love! O loving hate!", are perfect examples of "oxymoron." An "oxymoron," by the way, is the combination of two terms ordinarily seen as opposites. Keep your eyes open for these because Shakespeare uses a lot of them in the play.

Romeo worries that his murder of Tybalt, an act of hatred, may have destroyed Juliet's love for him.

Romeo uses a metaphor of wealth and spending to suggest that Rosaline's vow of chastity is akin to hoarding ("sparing") her "rich[es]" (her "beauty). By refusing to have sex and, therefore, children who might carry on her legacy, Rosaline is basically "wast[ing]" her "beauty," which will "die" with her instead of living on in her children.

We see the same kind of metaphor at work in Shakespeare's "procreation" sonnets (Sonnets 1-17), where the poet urges his friend to have children instead of being miserly with his beauty.

Compare Romeo's speech above to Sonnet #4, below:

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty's legacy?
Nature's bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free.
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.
Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tomb'd with thee,
Which, used, lives th' executor to be. (Sonnet #4)

We're pretty sure there's some version of this pickup line still in use today.

Romeo plans his wedding night with Juliet at the same time he plans the wedding itself. Sex and marriage go hand in hand for him—but he's not just a horny teenager. Sex and marriage went hand in hand for everyone. In fact, marriages weren't considered valid unless the two people had had sex (consummated it), so this is every bit as important as the actual ceremony with the Friar.

When the Romeo learns from Friar Laurence that he's been banished from Verona, he flips out and accuses Friar Laurence of being too old to understand this passionate situation. According to Romeo, if Friar Laurence were "young" and in the same situation as Romeo, he'd be "tear[ing] out [his] hair." But, again: isn't this what kids always say? (And if they do, does that make it untrue?)

Romeo's whining about Rosaline's celibacy, but that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is the way he goes about describing love and sex with the language of hunting and battle. Rosaline, he says, won't be "hit with Cupid's arrow" because she's "well arm'd" against his romantic advances. (Romeo also compares Rosaline to Diana, goddess of hunting and of chastity.) Romeo's sexual advances ("loving terms") are also likened to a "siege" (an attack). This conceit (elaborate metaphor) is pretty typical of romantic poetry. Compare Romeo's lines to the following love poem from Edmund Spenser's Amoretti, a collection of poems first published in 1595. (Psst. It's NOT about deer hunting.)

Like as a huntsman after weary chase,
Seeing the game from him escap'd away,
Sits down to rest him in some shady place,
With panting hounds beguiled of their prey:
So after long pursuit and vain assay,
When I all weary had the chase forsook,
The gentle deer return'd the self-same way,
Thinking to quench her thirst at the next brook.
There she beholding me with milder look,
Sought not to fly, but fearless still did bide:
Till I in hand her yet half trembling took,
And with her own goodwill her firmly tied.
Strange thing, me seem'd, to see a beast so wild,
So goodly won, with her own will beguil'd. (Amoretti LXVII)

Do you think this passage where Romeo compares Juliet to a "rich jewel" is good enough to stand on its own as a piece of poetry? So did John Gaugh, the author of a seventeenth-century version of "Dating for Dummies." In his 1639 book, The Academy of Compliments, Gough "borrows" Romeo's lines and places them in a poem he calls "Encomiums on the Beauty of his Mistress." You can compare Romeo's lines (above) to Gough's poem (courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library).

This dialogue Romeo and Juliet forms a near perfect Shakespearean sonnet (a popular poetic form). A Shakespearean (a.k.a. an English sonnet) has fourteen lines in iambic pentameter. There are three quatrains (groups of four lines), followed by a rhyming couplet (two lines) that wraps the poem up. Sonnets also feature a "turn" somewhere in the middle or in the final two lines, where the poem takes a new direction or changes its argument in some way. This change can be subtle or really obvious. Typically, the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG but, you'll notice that Shakespeare does something a bit more unusual here by repeating the rhyme "this" and "kiss" in the first and the second quatrains. So the rhyme scheme here is ABAB CBCB EFEF GG.

If you want to learn more about Shakespeare's sonnets, check out our discussion of Sonnet 18 and then come back.

When Romeo waxes poetic about Juliet here, he elevates her to heavenly status by first equating her with the "sun" and then by comparing her eyes to stars that "twinkle" in the skies. It's marginally better than a pickup line ("Was your father a thief? Because he must have stolen the stars to put them in your eyes"), but not much.

Friar Laurence is pretty skeptical when he hears that Romeo has forgotten all about Rosaline and is now in love with Juliet. Not only that, but the Friar makes fun of Romeo, for reciting ("by rote") cheesy and meaningless love poetry to Rosaline rather than being able to "spell" or read it himself.