Romeo & Juliet, 1.2

I feel that we’ve been around this block before, but today’s class was as unfocused and as unruly as any in recent memory. You often didn’t listen to each other, and some of you took every opportunity to have whispered conversations to each other while classmates were trying to hold a discussion about Act 1, Scene 2. If the fact that such activity communicates a lack of respect for your classmates and me is not enough of a deterrent, remember, I grade your discussions.

Happily, some of you managed to eke out some fine insights into the play. You seemed particularly interested in Capulet’s solicitude of his daughter’s happiness. He tells the eager Paris, “My child is yet a stranger in the world” (1.2.8). You noted that the word stranger suggests that Juliet does not know the ways of the world. She’s still an outsider, living a cloistered existence. You might also have noted that Capulet refers to Juliet as “My child” rather than has “my daughter,” emphasizing her inexperience and innocence,

Capulet also compares Juliet to a fruit or flower, urging Paris to wait “two more summers” before he thinks “her ripe to be a bride” (1.2.10-11). Juliet here is his hothouse orchid. If you think about the ripening process of plants, you also will recognize that it is a process of aging and decay. Ripe fruit bears a pungency unknown to unripe fruit, as well as a fullness and sweetness of flavor. Very soon, in the heat of summer (remember heat also represents passion), ripeness turns to decay, symbolic of a lost innocence.

Interestingly, Capulet also tells Paris that Juliet must consent to marry him, and to test Paris’s resolve he invites him to his party to see other beautiful women, “Earth-treading stars,” in comparison to Juliet (1.2.25). Think about the connotations of stars and how they shine in contrast to the night sky. This image will return.

You also spent some time noticing that Benvolio, who gives the same advice to Romeo that Capulet gave to Paris, suggests that women, or loving women is like a disease. He counsels Romeo to go to the Capulet feast, there to compare Rosaline to other beauties, to “Compare her face with some that I shall show./And I will make thee think thy swan a crow” (1.2.93-4). The swan and crow antithesis picks up the motif of contrasting light to dark, by the way. Benvolio urges Romeo to “Take thou some new infection to the eye,/And the rank poison of the old will die” (1.2.51-2). The beauty of a woman is likened to an infection, something virulent and dangerous, something so insidious that takes over one’s body against one’s will, just like a disease.

Benvolio has some strange ideas about medicine, but you all agreed that the site of the infection being Romeo’s eyes suggests how superficial his “disease” or love is. He bases his infatuation, what he calls his “devout religion” of his eyes on physical beauty alone (1.2.95).