Key Quotes (Romeo and Juliet)

Prologue

• Two Households both alike in dignity

• Star Crossed Lovers, take their life

• With their death bury their parents’ rage

I.I

• Disturb

• Fray

• Windows

• Smoke

• Lost

• Rich

• Blind

• Gregory + Sampson + Tybalt (C) vs Abraham (M)

• Benvolio: ‘I do but keep the peace’

• They Fight

• Enter Cap + Mon + Prince

• Prince: ‘If you ever disturb our streets again, / Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace’

• Lady Montague: ‘Right glad I am [Romeo] was not at this fray’

• L. Montague: ‘shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out', / makes himself an artificial night’

• Enter Romeo

• Romeo: ‘Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs’

• Romeo: ‘Tut I have lost my self, I am not here, / This is not Romeo, he’s some other where.’

• Romeo: ‘Rich in beauty, only poor, that when she dies, with beauty dies her store’

• Romeo: ‘He that is strucken blind, cannot forget / The precious treasure of his eyesight lost’

I.II

• Stranger

• Devout

• L. Cap: ‘My child is yet a stranger in the world, / She hath not seen the change of 14 years’

• Romeo: ‘ When the devout religion of mine eye, / maintains such falsehoods, then turn tears to fires […] / Transparent heretics be burnt for liars’

I.III

• honour

• Juliet: ‘ [Marriage] is an honour that I dream not of’

I.IV

• Thorn

• Dreamers

• Consequence

• Sail

• Romeo: ‘[love] is too rough, / too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like a thorn’

• Mercutio: ‘That dreamers often lie’

• ‘Romeo: Some consequence yet hanging in the stars, / Shall bitterly begin his fearful date’

• Romeo: ‘He that hath the steerage of my course, / Direct my sail: on lusty gentleman’

I.V

• Heart

• Youth

• purg’d

• wedding bed

• sprung

• Romeo: ‘Did my heart love till now […] / For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night’

• Capulet: ‘virtuous and well-governed youth’

• Romeo: ‘Thus from my lips, by thine my sin is purg’d’

• Juliet: ‘If he be married, / My grave is like to be my wedding bed’

• My only love sprung from my only hate, / too early seen, unknown, and known too late’

II.CHORUS

• bewitched

• passion

• Chorus: ‘bewitched by the charm of looks’

• Chorus: ‘passion lends them power, time means to meet, / Tempering extremities with extreme sweet’

II.I

• conjure

• befits

• Mercutio: ‘I conjure thee by Rosaline’s bright eyes’

• Benvolio: ‘Blind is his love and best befits the dark’

II.II

• jests

• Arise

• messenger

• name

• inconstant

• idolatry

• afeared

• bondage

• Romeo: ‘[Mercutio] jests at scars that never felt a wound’

• Romeo: ‘Arise fair Sun and kill the envious Moon’

• Romeo: ‘as glorious to this night being o’er my head, / As is a winged messenger of heaven / Unto the […] eyes / Of mortals’

• Juliet: ‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy’

• Juliet: ‘O swear not by the Moon, th’ inconstant Moon’

• Juliet: ‘Swear by thy gracious self, / Which is the god of my idolatry’

• Romeo: ‘I am afeared / being in night, all this is but a dream’

• Juliet: ‘Bondage is hoarse, and may not speak aloud, / else would I tear the cave where Echo lies, / and and make her airy tongue more hoarse than mine’

II.III

• womb

• forgot

• forsaken

• young men

• Friar: ‘What is [Mother Nature’s] burying grave, that is her womb’

• Romeo: ‘With Rosaline, my ghostly father no, / I have forgot that name, and that name’s woe’

• Friar: ‘Is Rosaline that thou didst love so dear, / so soon forsaken?’

• Friar: ‘Young men’s love then lies / not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes’

II.IV

• love song

• fan

• Mercutio: ‘Alas poor Romeo, he is already dead, […] / run through the ear with / a love song’

• Mercutio: ‘to hide her face, for her fan’s the fairer face’

II.V

• lead

• Juliet: ‘But old folks, many feign as they were dead, / Unwieldly, slow, heavy and pale as lead.’

II.IV

• love-devouring

• violent

• moderately

• Romeo: ‘Do thou but close our hands with holy words, / then love-devouring death do what he dare’

• Friar: ‘These violent delights have violent ends’

• Friar: ‘therefore love moderately, long love doth so, / too swift arrives, as tardy as too slow. — Enter Juliet somewhat fast’

III.I

• quarrel

• satisfied

• effeminate

• Benvolio: ‘And I were so apt to quarrel as thou art, any / man should buy the fee-simple of my life for an hour and a quarter’

• Romeo: ‘so good Capulet, which name I tender / As dearly as mine own, be satisfied’

• Romeo: ‘O sweet Juliet, / thy beauty hath made me effeminate’

III.II

• garish

• damned

• mangled

• Juliet: ‘That all the world will be in love with night, / and pay no worship to the garish Sun.’

• Juliet: ‘[Romeo is] a damned saint, an honourable villain’

• Juliet: ‘What tongue shall smooth thy name, / When I thy three-hours wife have mangled it?’

III.III

• mercy

• cursed

• happy

• blessings

• Friar: ‘[Banishment] is dear mercy, and thou seest it not’

• Romeo: ‘As if that name / hot from the deadly level of a gun / did murther her, as that name’s cursed hand / murder’d her kinsman.’

• Friar:' ‘The law that threaten’d death becomes thy happy friend, / and turns it to exile, there art thou happy.’

• Friar: ‘A pack of blessings light upon thy back’

III.IV

• N/A

III.V

• woes

• pale

• blood

• Romeo: ‘More light and light, more dark and dark our woes’

• Juliet: ‘thou art so low, / As one dead in the bottom of a tomb, / Either my eyesight fails, or thou look’st pale.’

• Romeo: ‘And trust me love, in my eye so do you [look pale]: / dry sorrow drinks our blood.’

IV.I

• long

• Juliet: ‘Be not so long to speak, I long to die’

IV.II

• N/A

• N/A

IV.III

• green

• ghost

• Juliet: ‘Where bloody Tybalt yet but green in earth, / lies festering in his shroud, where as they say, / at some hours in the night, spirits resort’

• Juliet: ‘Methinks I see my cousin’s ghost, / seeking out Romeo’

IV.IV

• N/A

• N/A

IV.V

• tongue

• Capulet: ‘[death] ties up my tongue and will not let me speak’

V.I

• Emperor

• gold

• Romeo: ‘I dreamt my lady came and found me dead / And breath’d such life with kisses in my lips, / that I reviv’d and was an Emperor’

• Romeo: ‘There is thy gold, worse poison to men’s souls’

V.II

• corse

• Friar: ‘Poor living corse, clos’d in a dead man’s tomb.’

V.III

• maw

• monster

• bell

• Romeo: ‘Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death’

• Romeo: ‘The lean abhorred monster keeps / thee here in dark to be his paramour?’

• Lady C: ‘O me, this sight of death, is as a bell / that warns my old age to a sepulchre’