Mercutio’s “Consort” and
“fiddlestick” puns
- Comedy (comic relief)
Mercutio’s “A plague on both your houses”
- Tragedy (foreshadowing death, sets the
universe against them – a curse)
Juliet waiting for Romeo “Come gentle night,
come loving, black-browed night;” “All the
world will be in love with night”
- Tragedy (Reversing universal archetypes,
sets the universe against them)
Romeo saying “banished” is
equal to “death”
- Tragedy (foreshadowing
death)
Juliet says Romeo looks like he’s “in a
tomb” and “pale” and he says she
does, too.
- Tragedy (foreshadowing death)
Juliet manipulates her sentences
when talking to her mother
- Comedy (keeping her option
of loving Romeo open)
Mercutio’s pun “you shall find
me a grave man”
- Comedy (comic relief)
Romeo’s banishment
- Tragedy (society is against him,
no option to be with Juliet)
Romeo’s exclamation, “O, I am
fortune’s fool”
- Tragedy (fate is against them)
Friar reminding Romeo how lucky he is –
Juliet loves him, he killed the guy who
wanted to kill him, he wasn’t executed –
“There art thou happy.”
- Comedy (Luck helping the
protagonists “win”)
Friar making a plan to get Romeo and
Juliet back together
- Comedy (manipulating circumstances
to help the protagonists “win”)
Romeo and Juliet invert meanings of light
and dark as he’s leaving her room “More
light and light, more dark and dark our
woes”
- Tragedy (going against the universe)
Juliet’s parents say “I would the fool
were married to her grave,” call her
“carrion”
- Tragedy (foreshadowing death)
Romeo fighting and killing Tybalt
- Tragedy (forced into it by
society, no options)
Juliet’s father says that she will
marry Paris without asking her
- Tragedy (no option)
Romeo and Juliet have
the chance to be
together one night
- Comedy (“winning”)
Capulet tells Juliet she will
marry Paris or be kicked out
of the house
- Tragedy (no options)
Juliet will kill herself if Friar can’t
give her a solution “Myself have
power to die”
- Tragedy (no options)