hello and welcome to this top grade video on juliet we're going to move through the quotations chronologically so that you can build a really powerful argument we begin with it is an honor that i dreamed not of this is juliet speaking to her mother telling her that she hadn't really dreamed of this possibility of being married now what's crucial here is that we know this is a complete lie she's being really careful to hide this from her mother which is why she calls it an honor but actually it's something she deeply fears why because this is a patriarchal society in which her father will choose the person she's going to marry she knows this because her mother was already married and had already had juliet when she was juliette's age yes she had given birth to juliet when she was 13 and of course her husband juliet's father is now round about 50. so we can see there is a massive age gap between the two juliet doesn't want that she wants to be able to escape this patriarchal arrangement and so how do we know this well what does she do when she first meets romeo she tells him to work out a plan to get them married marriage is an honor that is right at the forefront of her mind because she knows her parents are going to do it to her and she wants to escape that and do it for herself with someone she chooses our second quotation involves this sonnet that romeo and juliet speak together sharing lines as they first meet that's important of course because the sonnet was the form of a love poem and shakespeare is therefore indicating that these two people romeo and juliet are actually falling in love at first sight however shakespeare is also playing a bit of a game here because the language they use to explore their sexual passion and attraction is religious saints do not move though grant for prayers sake and what she means here is in the catholic church he would have had statues of saints that pilgrims would come and pray to and touch and kiss well that's why they don't move because they are statues but using this religious language to explore their sexual attraction towards each other is blasphemous it's sacrilegious it's dangerous they're taking something that's supposed to be holy and using it to describe their lust now there is another way that shakespeare is undermining convention here who chats up who well convention would say the mail should take the lead but that's not what's happening here romeo tries to take the lead he begins the sonnet but he just talks about holding on to her hand and therefore wanting to kiss it better because of his rough touch juliet says no because she has to play this game of being sexually unavailable but she has a deeper plan than that she wants to be sexually available and to do that she needs him to kiss her so her refusal of kissing the hand is really just a way for her to get him to kiss her on the lips this sudden change is called the volta all sonnets had a sudden change in them of alter and what happens here is that juliet is in control of that she is the one who tells romeo to kiss her she says that she will be as still as a statue to enable him to do that she has to do this because she can't actually make the first move of kissing but she makes his next line then move not while my prayers effect i take inevitable she is led up to this moment so that his only option is to kiss her on the lips score she has succeeded in finding an escape from her parents plans finding someone she can fall in love with now this view of juliet also portrays her as a bit manipulative a bit cunning and this all feeds into the idea of original sin this comes from the story of adam and eve and the whole thing about original sin is that we all carry that original sin with us the one that adam and eve took on when they listened to the serpent ate the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and then got expelled from eden by god as a punishment however eve received worst punishments in the form of period pains and childbirth because she was the one that the serpent first deceived and therefore she is seen as more guilty because she then corrupted adam so this allows shakespearean society to see women as naturally more manipulative more sinful and more evil than men now does shakespeare also believe this i don't think so that's why he spends so much time showing what a terrible father capulet is by virtue of being a patriarchal parent who's able to choose juliet's husband he sets that whole plot device up to be horrifying to the audience in other words shakespeare wants the audience to completely understand why juliet would want to break society's rules what makes romeo so attractive isn't just that they've fallen in love it's that she's suddenly got agency she's got power to make her own decisions albeit if she keeps those decisions secret from her parents so shakespeare is suggesting that women are forced to become manipulative and cunning in order to survive in this really oppressive society where they don't have the freedoms of men the next quotation is important for two reasons firstly it suggests that actually juliet is really interested in her sexual passion here rather than love at first sight and secondly it shows how the lovers are mismatched it's not necessarily fate that has doomed this relationship it is the fact that they shouldn't be together in the first place for lots of other reasons let me explain here she goes what's montague it is nor hand nor foot nor arm nor face nor any other part belonging to a man and you can see by placing this last in her thinking this is what she really wants to get to she's being modest here because that's the way girls at the time would have been brought up but actually the focus is on that part she dare not name it is the sexual attraction that she feels for romeo that's what's uppermost in her thoughts remember this speech is a soliloquy she does not know that romeo can hear it so these are her true thoughts this is shakespeare's way of saying dear audience member you sure this is just love at first sight or could it be sexual attraction and lust now secondly we come to this extraordinary image of a rose oh be some other name what's in a name that's which we could call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet so when she asks what's in her name she could have chosen any symbol but she picks on a rose this is a symbol of femininity in other words she's taking her masculine lover or he's not a lover yet but the husband to be romeo and portraying him in the most feminine way she can as a rose this hints at the gender divisions that there are in society so when romeo kills tibolt he complains that juliet has made him effeminate she's made him womanly and that's exactly what happens here before she even speaks to him again she's portraying him as a female character and personality which will not work in this patriarchal society it shows how from the beginning they are mismatched now of course this metaphor is also there for her to explore the mismatch of him being a montague and her being a capulet and this reminds us that rosaline was also a capulet shakespeare deliberately starts the play with romeo in love with the wrong person not because she won't return his favors but because she's a capulet it could never work romeo appears to be addicted to the idea of pursuing the wrong woman juliet is also pursuing the wrong man and describing him in female terms making him less manly as it would be seen at the time a clear signal that they're not as well matched as they both believe now in quotation 4 we return to this idea of them being mism now in quotation 4 we return to this idea of them being mismatched juliet's language hist hist is a call that she would make to a peregrine falcon she imagines romeo as a falcon a very masculine image you might think the falcon is a hunter the peregrine falcon the tassel gentle that meant peregrine was associated with princes and royalty however she is in charge of the falcon she is therefore taking on the masculine role as this society would see it controlling romeo this brings us straight back to eve controlling adam it's a sign of original sin in elizabethan society women were subservient to men yet julia imagines herself taking the lead we can argue she doesn't have the lead because she's wishing for a falconer's voice therefore saying that she doesn't have this control of him but maybe she does maybe she still has the lure it's just not the voice that she can use to do it because she can't yell out at this time people will hear her romeo be discovered he'll be killed but actually in the relationship she does see herself as in control after all she's just said if thy purpose is marriage send me word tomorrow and romeo's gone okay i'll marry you so she's in total control in our fifth quotation we'll see how juliet tries to control romeo by using the conventions the patriarchal conventions of the time so she's asking him if he's willing to marry her and if so send word tomorrow look at the pressure she puts on him basically she's saying if you want to enjoy having sex with me and let's face it that is what you want and i want it to the only way that can happen in our society is for us to be married you know that romeo she's saying so get a move on arrange that marriage in return though i'm not just going to offer my undying love and sexual passion oh no i'm going to give you all my fortunes now why that's important is that the bride's father would pay a dowry a load of money to the groom the husband for marrying his daughter well capulet is lord capulet and the nurse told romeo that anyone who married juliet would get the chinks they would be rich juliet isn't naive enough to think that romeo will only marry her for love and this is why she introduces not just fortune as fate but fortune as finance extreme wealth and she's saying i'm gonna give it all to you it's gonna be at your feet this is a masterful piece of negotiation and we know it works because when romeo goes to the friar he tells the friar i'm going to marry juliet the daughter of rich capulet doesn't have to say that capulet's rich the friar knows who capulet is why does he say the capulet's rich because he's thinking about the very fortune that juliet is going to lay before him very subtle isn't it you probably missed it first time round but juliet is no fool and she knows that to get a man in this patriarchal society you're going to have to pay again this undermines the idea of it being all about love and it also shows juliet's maturity even for a girl as young as 13 and her smarts in quotation number six we can see another way that the lovers are mismatched juliet associates love and sexuality with death so she personifies night time as a black brown knight a lover who's coming to see her and then her real lover romeo will come well knight of course is a homophone so you know n-i-g-h-t is the same sound as the knight on horseback with a k and she's imagining romeo as this royal kind of figure who's going to come to her bed and consummate the marriage but night is also a symbol of death of blackness and she immediately leaps in the second line to when i shall die so she's imagining this fate of death immediately and linking it to being with romeo so clearly she's linking being with romeo to dying this reveals the mismatch but die also had another meaning in shakespearean it was slang if you like for sexual orgasm and so she's also linking sex to death in the third line she's characterizing that death as the death of a tragic hero how does that work well all the constellations in the sky are named as you know and many of them are named after heroic figures from greek tragedy so not only is she imagining her own death she's imagining romeo having a tragic death presumably as a result of their marriage and then the gods using this death in some way to create a new pattern of stars in the heavens yes that portrays romeo as a hero but also a tragic hero one who must die as a result of their marriage our seventh quotation happens when she's discovered that romeo has killed tybalt and he's not yet arrived to have sex with her so what does she imagine she imagines death as a lover coming to her bed and taking her maidenhead her virginity why is she obsessed with her virginity here well because that's what her father and wider society has done if you think about juliet she is never alone out in public she's always accompanied by the nurse why would society do that romeo and his friends go out alone all the time it's to guard their virginity their virginity is money in the bank capulet can marry his daughter to another rich family providing she's still a virgin so there's a massive price on this the whole family fortunes in a way depend on it but it also shows us with this contrast of wedding bed and maidenhead that rhyme shows us how much she's obsessed with the idea of having sex with romeo this marriage is not all about love at all it's about having the freedom to express sexual desire something that this society prohibits now there is an autobiographical point about shakespeare here he did not wait to have sex till he was married his wife who was eight years older than him at 26 and he was 18 was already three months pregnant when they got married so we can clearly use that as evidence that shakespeare himself does not believe in this patriarchal view of preserving virginity and so shakespeare himself rejects this patriarchal arrangement that we see in romeo and juliet he wants the audience to be critical of it in our eighth quotation we're going to look at juliet's reaction to her parents which is extreme romeo is banished she said to speak that word is father mother tibot romeo juliet all slain all dead in other words rather than hear that romeo is banished she would rather hear that tybalt is dead well he is but also her mother and her father she would rather her parents were dead than romeo was banished this is an extreme point of view shakespeare uses it to show how terrible the influence of juliet's father and her mother are on juliet but he's also doing it to point out that juliet is immature so another historical fact that will help you here is that shakespeare based the play on a well-known poem from about 60 years before in the poem julia is 16. 16 still young but shakespeare has deliberately made her much younger at 13 in order to play up her immaturity doing this allows him to show how society and in particular men are willing to exploit young women through this control of their sexuality quotation number nine dramatizes how society and patriarchal control has damaged juliet so to speak to her father she has to get on her knees she has to show complete subservience and then she has to be incredibly polite to him she has to lie in effect she calls him good father even though he's behaving in a completely unreasonable way and threatening to throw her out on the streets for a life of prostitution she asks hear me with patience but to speak a word and capulet refuses she's not allowed to say a single thing she's totally silenced and this is symbolic of how society silences women and silences their desires so juliet's rebellion against her family no longer seems like the immature actions of a young woman they seem the logical thing you would do if you had hope now the fact that she's 13 helps us understand why she still believes in hope she hasn't been ground down by this society yet shakespeare uses this to get the audience to question whether in their own society women are actually ground down by male control the final quotation is symbolic on so many levels let's start with the patriarchal one she kills herself not with poison which would be the female way to kill herself because romeo's drunk that she's killing herself with the dagger a male instrument so she's displaying male courage here in rebelling against society but let's look further at this image the dagger represents masculinity and it represents romeo so it also suggests that her death is caused by masculinity and romeo remember romeo had this dream about some consequence yet hanging in the stars if he went to the capulet ball so he knew it was going to result in death but he went anyway so romeo in a very real sense is to blame for juliet's death and then we have the sexual imagery her body becomes the sheath and she inserts the dagger into it this is obviously a sexual metaphor which shakespeare is using to say that the control of sexuality is what's led to juliet's death and so rather than allow her father and mother particularly her father to choose who her sexual partner will be she deliberately chooses to kill herself so this symbolism attacks patriarchal control and if you think about it it comes back to this debate about whether romeo and juliet are truly in love by ending on this sexual image i think shakespeare is pushing us a little bit more to sexual passion feel free to disagree now if you'd like to see how to use this in some essay writing then you might consider buying my guide and if you don't want to spend the money check out one of the videos appearing over here no over here see you soon on my channel