Electronic Text Exercise for Romeo and Juliet
by Fran Teague
(This exercise can be used with any electronic text and a search engine.To open an excellent search engine, press here. )
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Electronic Text Exercise for Romeo and Juliet (This exercise can be used with any electronic text and a search engine.To open an excellent search engine, press here. ) |
Poetic Language Looking over your answers to the following questions (in the order of the play) and the mini-glossary, write a brief paper about the play's characteristic literary figures and patterned languages.
1. What does the fray in Act I have "much to do with," according
to Romeo? What does it have more to do with?
2. When, according to old Capulet, do "lusty young men" feel
comfort?
3. What is Romeo's reply when Benvolio fears that they will "come
too late" to Capulet's ball? The interchange echoes several times
later in the play; can you find two or three more act-scene-line numbers?
4. How does "yonder lady o'er her fellows show"?
5. What does Juliet say her wedding-bed will be if the man she has just
met is married?
6. What is Juliet's exclamation when she learns from the Nurse that Romeo
is a Montague?
7. What is "the earth that's Nature's mother" as the Friar meditates
on the herbs that he is gathering?
8. What will Romeo be like when he lies on the wings of night?
9. After hearing of Romeo's banishment, Juliet says she'll go to her wedding-bed.
What will happen there?
10. What does the Friar say that Romeo is wedded to when he is in hiding
at the Friar's cell?
11. What does Lady Capulet angrily wish Juliet were married to when the
girl refuses to marry County Paris?
12. What has happened to Paris's wife the night before his wedding day,
according to old Capulet?
A Miniglossary of Literary Terms
Adapted from Western Wind, by John Frederick Nims (NY: Random
House, 1974).
Image is "a piece of news from the external world or from our own bodies which is brought into the light of consciousness by one of the senses. . . . We can think of images as differing from ideas or thoughts in that images are always made up of sense data" (3).
Paradox "was a fact of life long before it was a literary figure. . . . In its Greek form, the word meant not what you would expect to be true. . . . Awareness of paradox is often expressed by means of oxymoron, which might be translated from the Greek as cleverly stupid or paraphrased as absurd on purpose. It links in one syntactical unit, words that seem to cancel each other out" (79-80).
"Parallelism which contrasts words or ideas (often by means of but or a word like it) is called antithesis; it emphasizes conflicting materials by setting them sharply together (328).
"In the childhood of the individual, in the childhood of the human race, in the mind of the dreamer, we find extensive use of personification. The child may pet or punish his toy wagon for being good or bad. Early human societies show a tendency toward animism or psychism, toward attributing life to lifeless things" (59).
