In the following soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is awaiting the arrival of her love interest, Romeo. Read the soliloquy carefully. Then write a well-organized essay in which you analyze how Shakespeare uses elements such as allusion, figurative language, and tone to convey Juliet’s emotions.
In the extract from Act 3 Scene 2 from the play Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare describes the scene where Juliet is waiting for the arrival of Romeo in the Capulet's house. Shakespeare shows Juliet's anticipation for the sexual aspect of love and for Romeo by emphasising on her impatience for the night to arrive faster and her extreme admiration towards Romeo's beauty. Furthermore, by conveying Juliet's thoughts and emotions, Shakespeare highlights her naiveness through her idealistic, romantic imagination of love.
To start with, Shakespeare illustrates Juliet's extreme urge and anticipation to meet Romeo. This is clearly reflected in her eagerness for the arrival of night time from line 1 to line 4 in the scene. By alluding to and personifies the sun as Phoebus Apollo, the sun god in Greek mythology, who is able to command the sun to either rise or set, Juliet is expressing her yearning for the day to pass and the night to arrive.
In the scene, Shakespeare also conveys Juliet's impatient and frustrated while waiting for Romeo. By doing so Shakespeare is also reflecting on the inexperience of Juliet. By metaphorically describing love as a mansion, Shakespeare shows Juliet's frustration at having to wait for her wedding night. By representing her husband, Romeo, with the "mansion of love", Juliet is conveying the idea that Romeo is as important and precious to her as a luxurious and beautiful home. Her anticipation for Romeo is clearly shown in her readiness to "possess'd it", to consummate her marriage to Romeo. By further expressing her dissatisfaction of only getting married and her strong wish to "enjoy" the mansion of love live or act as a wife, Shakespeare highlights Juliet's frustration from waiting and her impatience for the night with Romeo. Through such characterisation of Juliet, Shakespeare is indicating that Juliet's impatience, frustration and anticipation of Romeo and the night are because of her inexperience as a wife, as an innocent child in the area of love. With this Shakespeare is reminding readers that Juliet is still a young girl at an age of 14 and is not yet completely mentally mature. This is possibly a factor to her impulsivity when she was married to Romeo not long after they met, when she later threaten the Friar with her life to come up with a plan to save herself from being married to Paris, and at the end when she kills herself not long after Romeo's death with a stab.
Moreover, Shakespeare suggests Juliet's extreme admiration fascination of Romeo's beauty, and at the same time . She seems almost equally as superficial as him and as eager to experience the physical side of a relationship. An initial key point is how Juliet likens Romeo to a force so bright that if you “cut him out” he would make the night sky blaze. And she extends the metaphor making out that people will be so struck by this splendid night that they will prefer night to day; she is clearly infatuated with his beauty and her hyperbolic imagery in which she obsessively dwells upon his literal brilliance intensifies this notion. Furthermore, the idea of Juliet's innocence and impulsivity is again reinforced by Shakespeare with her imaginative language, the "little stars", "heaven" and the lovely night are as if the imaginary world of a young child, indicating Juliet's naive and immature thinking, emphasises the fact that she could not wait to grow up and experience what the adult world has to offer.
To summarise, Shakespeare indicates Juliet's eagerness and longing for the lovely night and the beauty of Romeo through descriptions of her thoughts and emotions in detail, with the use of allusion, personification and various figurative language. He is ultimately conveying that Juliet is still a young, immature and naive figure. These are the factors that lead to Juliet's impulsivity at the key turning points of her life, and are the factors that pushed her to the final tragedy.