Romeo and Juliet

Grade Levels

Excerpt

Constructing Love with Metaphors in Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2:

This lesson plan asks students to analyze the lovers’ first exchange in the famous balcony scene in order to determine how Juliet uses rhetoric to correct Romeo’s romantic discourse and ground his idealized love in reality. Students will closely examine Romeo and Juliet’s language in act 2, scene 2 to notice the difference in the metaphors both characters use: Juliet creates more logical metaphors that advance her thought process and dialogue, whereas Romeo crafts metaphors that resemble unrealistic tropes of Petrarchan love poetry. Students will discuss their interpretations of these metaphors with their peers and determine to what extent Juliet converts Romeo’s unrealistic romantic love into real love. Upon completing this lesson plan, students will be able to analyze complex metaphors and use their analysis to evaluate the romantic relationship in Romeo and Juliet.

Learning Objectives: 
By the end of this lesson, students will be able to

• examine complex Shakespearean metaphors to evaluate deeper meanings in the dialogue;
• distinguish rhetorical shifts in the characters’ conversation to evaluate the their thoughts and feelings;
• create an interpretation of the scene that displays/presents students’ awareness of both characters’ motivations;
• judge how this scene sets up the romance that develops throughout the rest of the play. 

Skills: close reading, drawing inferences, textual interpretation, lexical analysis

Common Core Standards: RL.3, RL.4, RL.5

Introductory Lecture:

While Romeo and Juliet, one of the most famous Shakespearean tragedies in the Western canon, is heralded as the greatest love story ever told, this claim is controversial.

Romeo, the main romantic hero of this love story, claims to be in love with another woman at the beginning of the play. We meet a morose Romeo in act 1, scene 2 bemoaning the lack of care his love Rosaline shows him and promising Benvolio that he will never fall in love with another woman. Romeo compares his love to a religion and swears that if he betrays his love for Rosaline, it will be heresy—a crime punishable by burning at the stake.

However, from the title, prologue, and general lore of the story, the audience knows that Romeo will spend most of the play in love with Juliet, not Rosaline. This contradiction seems to challenges the image of Romeo as the archetype of romantic love. Over the course of the play, Shakespeare uses subtle rhetorical shifts in the interactions between Romeo and Juliet in order to show the maturation of Romeo’s love. Juliet moves his love out of the realm of romantic fantasy in order to transform him from a fickle lover into the ideal romantic hero.

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Our eNotes Lesson Plans have been developed to meet the demanding needs of today’s educational environment. Each lesson incorporates collaborative activities with textual analysis, targeting on discrete learning objectives. We've aligned all of these lessons to particular Common Core standards, and we list the specific standard met by each lesson. The main components of each plan include the following:

Each of these lesson plans focuses on promoting meaningful interaction, analytical skills, and student-centered activities, drawing from the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts and the expertise of classroom teachers. Each lesson includes an instructional guide on how to present the material, engage students in an activity, and conclude the class.