antithesis examples in romeo and juliet

Love and Hate in Romeo and Juliet

By Chris Nayak Globe Education Learning Consultant

I love you! I hate you!

Have you ever said those words? Did you mean them? Have you had them said to you? How did that make you feel?

In Romeo and Juliet, the emotions of love and hate are the lifeblood of the play. Everything that happens seems to be caused by one, or both, of these two forces.  Shakespeare frequently puts them side by side: ‘Here’s much to do with love but more with hate’ , ‘my only love sprung from my only hate’ . Such juxtaposition of conflicting ideas is called antithesis, and Shakespeare loves using it. In every one of his plays, this clash of opposing ideas is what provides the dramatic spark to make the play come to life.

But in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare makes frequent use of a particular type of antithesis: the oxymoron. This is when two conflicting ideas are contained within a single phrase, maybe in just two words.  We use oxymorons in everyday speech:

‘Act naturally’, ‘organised chaos…’

Romeo uses many of them:

‘Cold fire, sick health…’

Later, Juliet joins in:

‘Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical…’

But this play has many more oxymorons that any other Shakespeare play. Why does he choose this literary technique for Ro meo and Juliet ?

For me, it’s the perfect way of capturing how you feel when you’re young. The extremes of new and worrying feelings and the fact that you can flip from one emotion to the opposite in a heartbeat.

How can you in one moment having  carefree and happing conversation with your parents, brother or sister or friend and then because of a look or a comment, you are filled with anger and hatred for people you know that you love/ Although it was a long time ago, this is exactly how I remember being as a teenager. And an oxymoron is just that – two extremes expressed in a second. Adults tend to qualify, quantify, and have more shades of grey. Perhaps they grow out of having feelings like this. But for some young people, this is how life is experienced.

Romeo shares this last viewpoint. When the Friar tells Romeo to see the positives in his banishment, Romeo attacks him, saying ‘thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel’ . And why doesn’t the Friar feel this way? Because he’s old, says Romeo. ‘wert thou as young as I…then mightst thou speak’ .

The type of love and hate that Shakespeare is depicting in this play belongs to young people, and oxymorons are the way to show it. Of course, some of the older characters feel their version of these emotions (Lord Capulet and Lord Montague join the brawl in the first scene), but Shakespeare’s focus is on the younger generation.

But are love and hate really opposites?

Even though Shakespeare sometimes places them in opposition, maybe they are not as different as we might think. In the play, there seem to be a lot of similarities between people when they are full of love, and when they are full of hate.

Romeo’s describes the hate he feels when Tybalt kills his friend Mercutio as a fire raging inside him. ‘Fire-eyed fury be my conduct now’ he says. The Prince is similar, ordering the families to ‘quench the fire of your pernicious rage’ .

But Romeo uses similar imagery when burning with passion for Juliet. ‘She doth teach the torches to burn bright’ , he says. ‘Juliet is the sun’ , a ‘bright angel’ . Juliet also expresses her love in the same way: Romeo is her ‘day in night’ .

The author Elie Wiesel once said that ‘the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference’ . Despite all the opposites and contrasts in this play, maybe Shakespeare thinks the same.

What do you think?

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• About Shakespeare
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Article: Opposites

Jonathan Bate describes how Shakespeare emphasises the convergence of opposites in Romeo and Juliet: youth and age, day and night, poison and medicine, and of course: love and hate.

This article first appeared in the show programme for the our 2006 Romeo and Juliet .

The earth, that's nature's mother, is her tomb. What is her burying, grave that is her womb... Within the infant rind of this small flower Poison hath residence and medicine power.  (Friar Lawrence, Act 2 Scene 3)

Day and night, the earth as both womb and tomb, herbs and flowers that are simultaneously poisonous and medicinal, virtue and vice, God's grace and our own desires: 'such opposèd kings encamp them still In man as well as herbs.'

Give Shakespeare an idea and he is equally interested in its opposite. Opposition is indeed the key to  Romeo and Juliet : the lovers are doomed because they are from the two opposed houses of Capulet and Montague. In a violent world, violent delights have violent ends. Youthful passions boil over not only into poetry and embraces, but also into insult and sword-fight.

Friar Laurence's soliloquy cuts to the quick of the play's double vision. It is structured around the rhetorical figure of oxymoron, the paradox whereby opposites are held together. Versions of the figure recur throughout the play, from Romeo's 'heavy lightness, serious vanity' to the duet of nightingale and lark in the great scene of lovers parting at dawn.

At the beginning of the play, Romeo is in love with Rosaline. Or rather, he is in love with the  idea  of being in love. We never actually see Rosaline: she exists solely as the idealised love-object of Romeo. She is nothing more than a literary type, the beautiful but unavailable mistress of the sonnet tradition that goes back to the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch. The Petrarchan lover thrives on artifice and paradox. The fire in his heart is dependent on his lady's icy maidenhood 'Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health! Still-waking sleep that is not what it is!'

As the Friar recognies, this is mere 'doting', not true loving. And so long as Mercutio is around, the bubble of poetic language keeps on being pricked - is it not just a matter of rhyming 'love' with 'dove'? Romeo still poeticises on seeing Juliet, though he speaks in more richly textured imagery:  'It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night As a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear.'

When the lovers meet at the Capulet ball, they weave a verbal dance that answers to the motions of their bodies and hands: their initial dialogue is wrapped into the form of a sonnet. But over the next few scenes their language evolves into something more fluid and more natural. You can hear Shakespeare growing as a poet even as you see the love between Juliet and Romeo growing from infatuation at first sight to the conviction that each has found the other's soul-mate.

Love is a chemistry that begins from a physiological transformation - Romeo is 'bewitched by the charm of looks' - but it becomes a discovery of the very core of human being:  'Can I go forward when my heart is here? Turn back, dull earth, and find thy centre out.'

What haunts the lover is the suspicion that it might all be a dream. Mercutio spins a tale of how love is but the mischief of Queen Mab, midwife of illusion. Romeo blesses the night, but then acknowledges his fear that: 'Being in night, all this is but a dream, Too flattering-sweet to be substantial.'

Juliet has to deal with another fear. For a girl in Shakespeare's time, chastity was a priceless commodity. To lose her virtue without the prospect of marriage would be to lose herself. In the speech that begins 'Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face', Juliet reveals quite remarkable self-understanding. She is acutely aware that in love the stakes for a woman are far higher than those for a man. Here Shakespeare's poetic language becomes the vehicle of both argument and emotion. The artifice of rhyme is replaced by blank verse that moves with the suppleness of thought itself.

In the original production, the lines would have been spoken by a young male actor of perhaps around the same 13 years as the character of Juliet. By highlighting extreme youthfulness (in the source, Juliet is 16), Shakespeare makes a bold implicit claim for his poetic drama. Both actor and character are speaking with maturity far beyond their years: such, the dramatist implies, is the metamorphic potency of the mingled fire and powder of love and art.

Though younger than Romeo, Juliet is more knowing. She senses the danger in his talk of idolatry. In the soaring love-duet that is their final scene together before Romeo's exile, she wills the song to be that of the nightingale rather than the lark because she knows that the break of day will mean the end of their night of love and the dawn of a harsh reality in which she will be reduced to the status of a bargaining chip in the negotiations between Verona's powerful families.

According to the social code of the time, it is the duty of the young to obey the old. Marriage is a matter not of love, but of the consolidation and perpetuation of wealth and status. Arthur Brooke, author of the  Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet  which Shakespeare had before him as he wrote, told his readers that the moral of the story was that young lovers who submit to erotic desire, neglecting the authority and advice of parents and listening instead to drunken gossips and superstitious friars, will come to a deservedly sticky end.

Shakespeare's play, by contrast, glories in the energy of youth. It does not seek to advance a moral, but offers instead the tragic paradox that the heat in the blood that animates the star-crossed lovers is the same ardour that leads young men to scrap in the street and to kill out of loyalty to their friends.

The kinship of love and revenge, the perpetual war between the generations: Shakespeare will return to this territory in later plays such as  Hamlet  and  King Lear . The final scene takes place in an ancestral tomb, but those who lie dead are the flower of a city's youth - Mercutio, Tybalt, Paris, Juliet and her Romeo.

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Romeo and Juliet

William shakespeare, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Romeo and Juliet Aside

An aside is a short speech, passage or phrase uttered by a particular character in a drama or play . The dialogue or phrase spoken by the character is meant to be heard by the audience but not by the other characters on the stage. In Shakespearean tragedies , in particular, asides are spoken in an undertone to give a glimpse into the character’s thoughts and intentions to bridge the gap between the audience and the character delivering the aside. In “Romeo and Juliet”, asides are delivered by a variety of characters. Some of these insightful and enjoyable asides are discussed below:

Aside in “Romeo and Juliet”

Example # 1.

“Is the law on our side if I say “Ay”?

(I. i. 48-50)

The remark above is made by Sampson, a servant of the Capulet house. After expressing his hatred for the Montague clan, Sampson bites his thumb at the Montagues’ servants to provoke them. The Montagues’ servants are offended by this gesture and ask Sampson if he is biting his thumb at them. Since Sampson does not want to break the law by initiating a street brawl, he asks his fellow servant, Gregory, if he will be penalized by the law by admitting the truth to their question. It is noteworthy that Sampson’s question reflects his wit . Moreover, the question is posed in a hushed tone , so that only Gregory and the audience could hear him.

“Did my heart love till now ? forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night .”

(I.v. 59-60)

The above dialogue is spoken by Romeo when he first catches a glimpse of Juliet at the Capulet ball. Although Romeo makes the above startling revelation to himself in a barely audible tone, the audience also serves as a witness to this aside that expresses Romeo’s first declaration of love. Awestruck by Juliet’s beauty, Romeo asserts that he has never experienced authentic love, nor witnessed true beauty until he has first set his eyes on Juliet.

Example # 3

“What, dares the slave Come hither covered with an antic face To fleer and scorn at our solemnity? Now, by the stock and honor of my kin, To strike him dead I hold it not a sin.”

(I.v. 63-67)

The above aside is delivered by Tybalt when he first witnesses Romeo’s presence at the Capulet ball. In a state of extreme rage, Tybalt refers to Romeo Montague as a slave and pledges to himself that if he were to strike Romeo dead, it would not be construed as a sin. Although Tybalt is surrounded by other characters in this scene, he remarks the above exclusively to himself. The members of the audience are the only ones who hear about Tybalt’s strong disapproval of Romeo.

Example # 4

“Is she a Capulet? O dear account! My life is my foe’s debt.”

After discovering that Juliet is the daughter of his family’s sworn enemies, the Capulets, Romeo expresses these words above to himself. Stated in an anxious undertone, the audience is the only one who becomes aware of Romeo’s worry pertaining to the newfound discovery. This aside reveals Romeo’s strong love for Juliet and makes the audience realize that since Juliet is the center of Romeo’s universe, he has essentially handed over his life to his enemy’s daughter.

Example # 5

“She speaks. O, speak again, bright angel, for thou art As glorious to this night, being o’er my head, As is a wingèd messenger of heaven.”

(II.ii. 28-35)

The dialogues mentioned above is an aside delivered by Romeo during the balcony scene. After gazing at Juliet and listening to her speak, Romeo is consumed by an overwhelming feeling of love for Juliet and exclaims that Juliet is as bright, beautiful and untainted as an angel. Hence, this aside gives the audience a glimpse into Romeo’s passionate love for Juliet.

Example # 6

“Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?”

(II.ii. 40)

The above quote is spoken by Romeo after Juliet reveals her intense love for Romeo during the balcony scene. Immensely moved by Juliet’s repeated affirmations of love, Romeo asks himself if he should quietly listen to Juliet’s passionate love confessions, or respond to her overwhelming admission of selfless love. The audience is the only one to witness this conflicting aside made by Romeo.

“Villain and he be many miles asunder.— God pardon him. I do with all my heart, And yet no man like he doth grieve my heart.”

(III.v. 86-88)

This passionate aside remark is made by Juliet after she is informed of Tybalt’s brutal murder by Romeo. To conceal her true feelings for Romeo, Juliet has to pretend that she will never forgive Romeo for this horrific act in her family’s presence. However, unable to conceal her love for Romeo from herself, Juliet asks God to forgive Romeo in the above dialogue. She further states that she has already forgiven her soul mate. The above aside, therefore, highlights Juliet’s firm desire to stay steadfast in her commitment to Romeo.

“I would I knew not why it should be slowed. — Look, sir, here comes the lady toward my cell.”

(IV.i. 16-17)

The above aside is expressed by Friar Lawrence to himself after Paris asks the Friar if he knows the reason why Lord Capulet wants to hasten Juliet’s marriage. The reality is that Friar Lawrence has already served as a witness at Juliet’s wedding but has not disclosed this fact to anyone. He, therefore, says to himself in a hushed voice that he wishes he was not aware of the reason why Juliet’s marriage to Paris must be slowed down, i.e., the fact that Juliet is already married to Romeo.

Example # 9

“ I am almost afraid to stand alone Here in the churchyard. Yet I will adventure .”

(V. iii. 9-10)

This particular aside is delivered by Paris’ page as they approach Juliet’s tomb to pay their respects and scatter flowers on her tombstone out of reverence. The above aside is a candid admission of the page highlighting the fear people usually experience while visiting graveyards and tombs. In this particular instance, the page’s aside, and his fear incites a certain element of fear in the audience as well.

Example # 10

“For all this same, I’ll hide me hereabout. His looks I fear, and his intents I doubt.”

(V.iii. 43-44).

This remark is made by Balthasar, Romeo’s servant after Romeo asks him to leave him alone while the two are standing outside the tomb. Although Balthasar follows Romeo’s advice and leaves, he experiences a certain degree of uneasiness because of the passionate despair and conviction evident from Romeo’s face. Hence, mistrusting Romeo’s intentions, Balthasar decides to hide near the tomb to watch over Romeo. The above aside makes the audience aware of Balthasar’s caring nature.

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