Romeo and Juliet

Grade Levels

Excerpt

Through dialogue, playwrights reveal a character’s motivations, personality traits, and relationships with other characters. Diction (word choice) plays an essential role in writing dialogue because it creates mood, develops characters, and establishes events in the play. The following activity will help students analyze passages of dialogue and determine how they inform scenes in the play.

William Shakespeare’s tragic story of star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet, continues to captivate audiences and remains his most popular play. Falling in love at first sight, Romeo and Juliet are doomed from the beginning: their families—the Montagues and the Capulets, respectively—maintain a blood feud that impacts every social layer of Verona, Italy, the play’s setting. Through a series of cruel ironies, each of the lovers ultimately commits suicide. The play is noted for the lyrical beauty of Romeo’s and Juliet’s professions of love and for the tragic conclusion of their secret marriage. The dialogue in act 3, scene 5, which takes place in Juliet’s bedchamber the morning after they have secretly married, illuminates the depth of Romeo and Juliet’s love and the implacable forces aligned against them.

Skills: character analysis, drawing inferences from text, interpreting diction for connotative meaning

Learning Objectives:
In completing this activity, students will

• analyze passages of dialogue to identify the speaker’s character traits, conflicts, and motivations;
• examine the diction in passages of dialogue to interpret the connotations of key words and explain how they create mood in the scene;
• determine from passages of dialogue characteristics of the speaker’s relationship with another character in the play.

About

Our eNotes Classroom Activities give students opportunities to practice developing a variety of skills. Whether analyzing literary devices or interpreting connotative language, students will work directly with the text. The main components of our classroom activities include the following:

• A handout defining the literary elements under discussion, complete with examples
• A step-by-step guide to activity procedure
• An answer key or selected examples for reference, depending on the activity

In completing these classroom activities, students will be able to classify and analyze different literary elements, thereby developing close-reading skills and drawing deeper inferences from the text.