Homework, 20th September, 2016

This homework is due tomorrow (Wednesday). 

Romeo and Juliet - Prologue

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

Activities

1.      Demonstrate your understanding of the prologue by rewriting it in modern English so that it would make sense to someone who had never studied Shakespeare.

2.      Think of all the themes we discussed in class, e.g. love, death, conflict, etc. and choose one colour for each. Go through the original version of the prologue and, wherever you think one of those themes is referred to, underline it in the appropriate colour.

3.      Choose one of the themes and write a short explanation of how it is covered in the play as a whole, and how it is covered more specifically in the prologue. Try and relate it to the social and historical context of the storyline.

Example:

The theme of death is covered in the play as certain key characters (Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio and Tybalt) end up dead, and these are major turning points in the plot. The reason Shakespeare made death central to the play, as he did in many of his plays, is probably because it was so common in Elizabethan times that it was never far from people’s minds and was therefore fascinating to them. People may even have felt somehow reassured that death could affect nobility just as much as it affected the poor.

In the prologue we are told that two ‘star-cross’d lovers take their life’. Death, in this sense, is therefore inevitable, bound up in fate, so the question is not so much what will happen to them, but rather, how it will happen. Ultimately, their death is for the greater good because it helps to ‘bury their parents’ strife’, so it is being presented as something that is not as tragic as it might at first seem.