Puns and Paradox
We use puns, playing on the various definitions of a word or a similar sense or sound of different words,
all the time. So does Shakespeare, and puns and metaphors will be especially important in Romeo and
Juliet.
This wordplay begins with the first line of the play, when the chorus tells the audience that “civil blood
makes civil hands unclean.” Through the repetition of this word “civil,” Shakespeare invites us to think
about its different meanings and how they might be connected. What does it mean to be civilized?
What does it mean to be part of a community? Who is responsible for the “unclean hands” within this
story?
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To better understand this literary device, respond to the following puns mentioned in the first
scene. Consult the marginal notes provided to help you find and list definitions and examples of
each. Why might Shakespeare emphasize these words?
CHOLER
MOVED
WALLS
HEAD
WEAPON
CANKERED
“Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow”
A “paradox” is a special form of antithesis: a seemingly contradictory statement that may nonetheless be true. When
the witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth chant “fair is foul” and “foul is fair,” they capture an essential paradox of the
play’s protagonist, whose initial heroic strength will soon be used for bloody, monstrous deeds.
An “oxymoron” is a rhetorical figure in which incongruous or contradictory elements are combined (as in the
statement “a deafening silence”). When Juliet says “parting” is “sweet sorrow” (2.2.184), she suggests how pleasure
and pain are wrapped up together in her feelings for Romeo.
These literary devices—puns, paradoxes, oxymorons—create striking imagery but also suggest larger
ideas about conflicts and themes within the play as a whole. Much of Romeo and Juliet is about the
clash of seeming opposites that are surprisingly similar: Montagues and Capulets, love and hate, life and
death. Find a significant passage that uses an oxymoron, and explain how and why it is being used.
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