In Act I Scene I Romeo is described to behave mysteriously or suspiciously by the other characters. Montague suggests that Romeo ‘privately in his chamber pens himself’ which means that Romeo has been locking himself in his bedroom. He has also been seen ‘with tears augmenting the fresh morning’s dew’. This suggests that he has been crying so much that his tears have been adding to the ‘dew’ (the dampness on the grass) in the ‘morning’ on his walks. This reveals to the audience that Romeo is depressed about something so the audience want to know what is wrong with him. This sense of mystery created keeps the audience interested as Shakespeare had to work hard to make sure that he kept his contemporary audience entertained so that they would not heckle or throw things at the actors on stage.
In what ways are the difficulties of love and lovers presented by Shakespeare in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and in Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘The Laboratory’.
Another way in which the difficulties of love are presented is in Act II, Scene VI, Friar Lawrence is incredibly worried and expresses his concerns to Romeo that he is too much in love with Juliet. He says “ These violent delights have violent ends” which could be seen as Friar Lawrence foreshadowing the end of the play as the ‘violent delights’ means Romeo and Juliet’s love for one another and ‘violent ends’ signifies the ‘end’ of both their lives. He suggests that Romeo should ‘love moderately’ which means…
A second dramatic monologue by Robert Browning presents the difficulties of love in the same way as ‘The Laboratory’ in the extent to which it shows the obsessive madness of the speaker. In ‘My Last Duchess’ the speaker is male, he is the Duke of Ferrara and throughout the poem (as he is showing an emissary around his palace) he goes on a relentless diatribe about his ‘last Duchess’…