#form&structure

[chartersengdept]

2 Minutes on Structure: 'Kamikaze'

Buy my revision guides in paperback on Amazon*:Mr Bruff’s Guide to GCSE English Language https://amzn.to/2GvPrTV Mr Bruff’s Guide to GCSE English Literature...

[chartersengdept]

This lecture on Romeo and Juliet tackles the issue of the spoiler-chorus, in an already-too-familiar play. This podcast is suitable for school and college students.

[chartersengdept]

Romeo and Juliet: Rhetoric and Stagecraft

In this module, we think about Romeo and Juliet as a play to be acted and seen, focusing in particular on: (i) the play’s prologue, which provides a summary of plot, reminds the audience that they are watching a play (“where we lay our scene”) and even tells them how long it’s going to last (“the two-hour traffic of our stage”); (ii) the ways in which acting worked in early modern England (e.g. learning only their own parts, not the whole play) and how this might have impacted how the play was performed; (iii) the early modern practice of using boy actors to play female roles, the extent to which the early modern audience were able to separate (male) actor from (female) roles, and the potential for homoerotic tensions in the play – even between male and female characters; (iv) the play’s (and its characters’) interest in the way people act, what they are doing, their posture and gestures, etc.; (v) the different ways of acting out the thumb-biting scene (“Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?”, 1.1.42); and (vi) Mercutio’s use of meiosis (i.e. understatement) in Act 3, Scene 1 and the ways in which visual effects might have been used to contribute to (or undermine) his rhetoric.

[chartersengdept]

Friar Lawrence speaks these lines just before he marries Romeo and Juliet at the end of act two. Up until this point in the play, Shakespeare has been showing the audience the “violent delights” - the violent conflict between the waring households contrasted with the delights of Romeo and Juliet’s love. However, moving into act three Shakespeare focuses the consequences of these “violent delights” as the play shifts firmly into tragedy. The lines foreshadow the “violent end” of the conflict and the deaths of Romeo and Juliet. The two households are consumed by hate and Romeo and Juliet are consumed by their love for each other. Ultimately, no one can escape and all are destroyed.    

[chartersengdept]

[chartersengdept]

[chartersengdept]

[chartersengdept]

Romeo & Juliet: Three Acts of Comedy, Two of Tragedy

In this first module, we explore the ‘generic engineering’ of Romeo and Juliet – Shakespeare’s deployment of comedic devices in a play that ultimately turns out to be a tragedy.