Monday 8 December 2014

What figures of speech are used in act 3, scene 3 of Romeo and Juliet?

At the beginning of the scene, Friar Laurence greets Romeo and uses personification to comment upon his clearly stressful state:


"Affliction is enamour’d of thy parts,And thou art wedded to calamity."


Here, two abstract nouns have been given the qualities of people ("personified") to highlight Romeo's agitated frame of mind. Romeo's reply also uses the same figure of speech:


"What sorrow craves acquaintance at my hand, That I yet know not?"


The friar...

At the beginning of the scene, Friar Laurence greets Romeo and uses personification to comment upon his clearly stressful state:



"Affliction is enamour’d of thy parts,
And thou art wedded to calamity."



Here, two abstract nouns have been given the qualities of people ("personified") to highlight Romeo's agitated frame of mind. Romeo's reply also uses the same figure of speech:



"What sorrow craves acquaintance at my hand, That I yet know not?"



The friar informs Romeo that he's been banished from Verona for killing Tybalt. Instead of being relieved at his being spared the death penalty, Romeo is crestfallen; banishment will keep him apart from his beloved Juliet. He uses a metaphor to describe how painful it is to be apart from her. Verona, where she lives, is depicted as heaven, implying not just that she is an angel, but also that Romeo's banishment from the city means that he's in a living hell without her:



"Tis torture, and not mercy. Heaven is here,


Where Juliet lives; and every cat and dog
And little mouse, every unworthy thing . . . 


There is no world without Verona walls,


But purgatory, torture, hell itself."



This is also an example of hyperbole. When the friar informs Romeo of his sentence, he uses a parallelism:



"Not body's death, but body's banishment."



Both clauses have the same grammatical structure. They are parallel.









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