Question

20 POINTS, Reread Act IV Romeo Juliet, Scene 5 from lines 13 to 60. How does Shakespeare use figurative language to convey the grief felt by the Capulets, Paris, and the nurse? How does the language choice unify the grieving characters?

Answer 1

The most prominent figures of speech used in this excerpt are: apostrophes (addressing absent people, things or abstract notions), similes (comparisons), personifications (attribution of human characteristics to non-human objects or phenomena), metaphors (one word or phrase used to signify something else). The apostrophes, used by all the characters, convey their helplessness and add a lamentable tone to the scene, making it sound like a dirge. They are overwhelmed by grief ("O lamentable day", "O heavy day", "O woeful time"). Capulet's simile ("Death lies on her like an untimely frost / upon the sweetest flower of all the field") conveys an elegiac image of the world's cruelty and injustice. Capulet also uses personifications ("Death, that hath ta'en her hence to make me wail, / Ties up my tongue and will not let me speak"; "The night before thy wedding day / Hath death lain with thy wife. There she lies, / Flower as she was, deflowered by him"), which display death as a conscious, male figure who claimed Juliet for himself and violated her. Capulet's words provide a peculiar perspective on Juliet: in his view, she was obviously a passive and delicate little flower that waited to be picked by a man.