My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost

Romeo & Juliet

The play starts with a sonnet followed by the whole “bite your thumb” confrontation. It’s like the language is reflecting the action on multiple levels. R&J is about the generation gap. Shakespeare would go on to address this again and again. Look at Hamlet. Polonious is the perfect example of an out-of-touch silly old guy, unprepared for the moral and ethical thoughtfulness of the younger generation. It’s also there in King Lear, of course, and the Henry IV plays, where Prince Hal, youthful and irresponsible, pals around with Falstaff, getting a taste of “real” life. As You Like It, too – rigid parents lay down the law and their rebellious daughter puts on men’s clothes and flees into the woods. Midsummer predates As You Like It, but it’s the same deal: Daughter, marry the man you don’t love or you will be put to death. In Romeo & Juliet, we have the square elders and the rambunctious youth. The “form” of life (which Juliet references) vs. the actuality of life. Rules vs. freedom. (also Venus vs. Mars … pretty important to how things play out. And nightingale vs. lark: which is also symbolic of night vs. morning.)

Romeo & Juliet is a tragedy, and it shows the deterioration of the old guard’s rules, their certainty of how the world should operate. In keeping with this, the play starts with sonnet, and sonnets have very specific forms and rules in terms of syllabels, length, rhyme scheme. You can’t just make up your own sonnet rules! Heaven forbid. But: “bite your thumb” nips at the sonnet’s heels, in all its slang and confrontation. The youth live in a world of their own, completely divorced from parental control or even parental awareness (it’s like Rebel Without a Cause: clueless parents, complicated tormented kids dealing with huge issues with no guidance OR role models). The kids – and they really are kids – break free of the conformity imposed on them by their society. They obviously pay a price for this rebellion – I mean, they all die – but the final scene – where the dads, who are much to blame for perpetuating the stupid feud, compete on building golden statues dedicated to their dead children – shows that the parents are still as uncomprehending as ever.

Most of the play happens at night. Day is to be gotten through, preferably as quickly as possible. Remember that plays in Shakespeare’s time were done in the open-air and in the afternoon. There weren’t even candles for footlights as came two centuries later. If you are going to place a play at night, then “night” has to be in the language. You can’t rely on effects. This is why Shakespeare includes language like “O night” to clue the audience in, or, whatever, “Hand me your torch, I can’t fucking see”. Whatever is happening atmospherically has to be spoken out loud. Romeo & Juliet is an extreme example of this (although it doesn’t hold a candle to the shimmering night scenes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where the whole play takes place at night, and the language is drenched in references to the moon, the silvery light, the dewdrops – the atmosphere is so thick you can SEE it.) Midsummer and R&J were written relatively close together and the plays have a lot in common. In fact, the Pyramus and Thisby play put on by the workers in the final scene is basically the Romeo & Juliet story.

As one of his most famous – and most performed plays – there’s a danger in taking it for granted. It was really worth it to go back and read it again, to not just assume I remember it. It’s so intense. The whole “star-cross’d” thing is pretty heavily laid out, and I feel like this is something Shakespeare moved away from as he got more sophisticated in plot- and world-building. Where people make bad choices and therefore they “fall”, it’s not that the stars are crossed and tragedy is your fate. Here, events conspire against these two kids from the start. There’s the feud, first of all. And then there are the three totally incompetent “advisers” and confidantes of R&J: Friar Lawrence, Mercutio and the Nurse. Mercutio and the Nurse are scene-stealers but they give bad advice, they are too cynical about love, and don’t really understand the stakes – and the Nurse actually betrays Juliet (Mercutio dies before a betrayal). Friar Lawrence infuriates me because the whole thing could have been avoided if he didn’t run out of the tomb because he “heard something”. After all THAT, you get spooked and aren’t there to tell Juliet what’s going on?

But what we have here is pure undistilled romance, with the most beautiful passionate erotic language Shakespeare ever used up to this point. He really understood first love and first sexual feelings. The play VIBRATES with it. It’s powerful because in a world of rules, Romeo and Juliet choose each other, and they do so at first sight. They’re toast from the moment they lay eyes on each other. The play is a frank acknowledgement of the power of chemistry. Even with all the star-cross’d stuff it’s very human and if not universal then … almost universal. Everyone remembers a high school crush. Where it feels like you’re swooning on a balcony every time he walks by you in the hallway.

It’s also interesting to just keep in mind that on the Elizabethan stage, men – and boys – played all the parts. Essentially, it was drag. Meaning: we perform our gender, whether or not we choose to do so or not. Society tells us how to do that (which we clearly see in R&J). All of it is a performance. Those double entendres about womanhood and maidenhead and all the rest sounds very different when spoken by a 14-year-old boy.

Romeo and Juliet was written (probably) in the 1590s. And it still plays like a bat out of hell. Amazing.

Quotes on the play

 
As per usual, my quotes are getting out of control. But I do just a little bit a day, and in such terrible times, it’s weirdly meditative to organize everything into a commonplace book. And I will refer to all this again.
Sources I am using:
Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (2004)
Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951)
Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (1939)
William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Days (1817)
Riverside Shakespeare (1974) << I'm reading the plays from this edition. Lectures on Shakespeare, W.H. Auden (2002)
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom (1998)

I’ve read all of these before, so I’m just reading them again, chapter by chapter, along with the plays. So I’ll read the chapters, absorb it, taking notes, then I’ll read the play. This is what I am doing.

On Romeo’s sonnet to Rosaline in Act I, sc i:

“This is the language of Petrarchan formula, empty paradoxes and oxymorons — cold fire, sick health — stale poetic images that say nothing and mean nothing. When Romeo falls in love with Juliet, his language changes, and becomes sharply inventive, witty, and original.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Love at first sight is a common phenomenon in the Shakespearean world, and not something to distrust. Significantly, in Romeo & Juliet they do so in a sonnet, and it is a sonnet that ends sooneteering for the rest of the play. This is a most unusual sonnet, in that it is spoken by two people.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Night, that is to say, is a state of theatre, and a state of mind.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“The Nurse is a dangerously static character who does not change in the course of the drama. Like the Friar, she is established as a fixed type, and since she does not grow and change, while Juliet does, we can see at once her charm in a comic world, and her inadequacy for the darker world of tragedy.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Figures like Tybalt are representatives of an old order of heroism and revenge — on the one hand heroic, but on the other, unable to function in a modern world of politics and compromise, the world of The Prince, the world of law and language. Such characters never survive in Shakespeare’s plays. They all die, as did their historical models, usually before their time. They are like dinosaurs, heroic beasts unfit for a smaller world of accommodation and grace.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

^^ I love that.

“[Mercutio is] the man of infinite language, infinite fantasy, and infinite imagination… Mercutio is almost willing to fight because he doesn’t like Tybalt’s language.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

Going to war with someone because you can’t stand how they use language is not the worst reason to go to war.

“Mercutio is the spokesman for the power of dreams … for him dreaming is an aspect of possibility and change, of identity and expression, related to what a much later era would call ‘the unconscious’. And when he dies, this capacity of transformation through language and imagination dies with him.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“The language spoken by Romeo and Juliet themselves is increasingly a powerful, original, and all-allusive blank verse. By contrast, the characters they have left behind seem to relapse, as tragedy closes in upon them, into an older language of melodrama, the exclamatory periods of Senecan tragedy, a language not unlike that spoken by the lamenting queens in Richard III.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Boundlessness versus limitation is a key dialectic for Shakespeare in every sphere (language, politics, mortality, sexual passion, geography, stagecraft, etc.) In Romeo & Juliet, which we have seen to be exceptionally well-crafted play, the material world of “gold” and its limitations as lucre, ornament, and literal status symbol are measured against another kind of quality, associated with the quicksilver Mercutio and with the element of silver in the play. It is not overstating the case to say that gold versus silver constitutes another of the play’s defining feuds, and that the critique of gold leads to the stunning climax/anticlimax of the final scene, in which Capulet and Montague, having apparently learned nothing from their losses, vie to build gold statues, each for the other’s dead child.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Silver is mentioned three times in the play. In the orchard during the balcony scene Romeo speaks of the “blessed moon” that “tips with silver all these fruit tree-tops”. In the same scene he hears Juliet call his name and thinks “How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night, / Like softest music to attending ears!” Later in the play, at the news of Juliet’s supposed death, a group of musicians debates the question of why music is said to have a silver sound. All these associations are pleasant, combining love, sweet music, and the moon, protective goddess and virgin and regnant light of the nighttime world of privacy and passion.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“At the close of the play, the final tragedy would seem to be that no one left alive onstage has understood the play.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

^^ I really love that.

“The theme of Romeo & Juliet is love and violence and their interactions. In it these two mightiest of mighty opposites meet each other squarely — and one wins. And yet the other wins.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Shakespeare convinces us it is no mere infatuation, but love indeed in its divine sense. Passion it is, of course, but that contaminated term has in our day become helpless to express it. Purity would be the perfect word for it if the world had not forgotten that purity is siply Greek for fire.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“The resemblance of Mercutio to the Nurse is more easily overlooked, together with the analogy between the part he plays in Romeo’s life and the part she plays in Juliet’s. Yet it is scarcely too much to say that the entire play is built around that resemblance and that analogy.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

Goddard observes that in 200 lines, Mercutio and Tybalt are slain, and Romeo is banished. 40 of these lines are introduction and 60 are epilogue. Everything else happens in just 100 lines. He goes on about those 100 lines:

“It may be doubted whether Shakespeare to the end of his career ever wrote another hundred that surpassed them in the rapidity, inevitability, and psychologic truth of the succession of events that they comprise. There are few things in dramatic literature to match them.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Those who think that Jesus, and Juliet, and Romeo were fools will have plenty of backing. The ‘fathers’ will be on their side. They will have the authority of the ages and the crowd. Only a philosopher or two, a few lovers, saints, and poets will be against them.”
— Harold Goddard, sounding like the Stage Manager in Our Town, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“And now, [when Tybalt and Mercutio fight], condensed into the fractional part of a second, comes the crisis in Romeo’s life. Not later, when he decides to kill Tybalt, but now. Now is the moment when two totally different universes wait as it were in the turning of a hand. There is nothing of its kind to surpass it in all Shakespeare, not even a Hamlet or a King Lear, not, one is tempted to think, in all the drama of the world. Here, if anywhere, Shakespeare shows that the fate we attribute to the stars lies in our own souls.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

On Romeo promising vengeance:

“It is as if Dante’s Divine Comedy were comprised into eighty lines and presented in reverse — Romeo in an inverted ‘pilgrimage’ passing from Paradise, through Purgatory, to the Inferno.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

Romeo’s love looked on a tempest — and it was shaken.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare – lots of people make the connection to the sonnets with R&J and also LLL.

“Shakespeare, like Dante before him and Milton after him, knew where the stars are, knew that heaven and hell, and even earth, are located within the human soul.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Here again the heroine transcends the hero.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Juliet, abandoned even by religion, must fall back for courage finally on love alone.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Fear is the evil ‘star’ that crosses the lovers. And fear resides not in the skies but in the human heart.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Shakespeare’s happy endings are, almost without exception, suspect.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

On Romeo’s outcry at Tybalt’s first brawl:

“[Romeo’s lines] neither the sense nor the occasion is very evident. He is not yet in love with an enemy, and to love one and hate another is no such uncommon state as can deserve all this toil of antithesis.”
— Dr. Johnson

“[Romeo & Juliet] are always polluted with some unexpected depravations. His persons, however distressed, have a conceit left them in their misery, a miserable conceit.”
— Dr. Johnson

Oh God, my guy.

“Romeo & Juliet, in other words, is still a youthful play; its author, no less than its hero and heroine, is furiously literary. He has written at last a tragedy which is crowded with life, and which will become one of the best-known stories in the world; but it is crowded at the same time with clevernesses, it keeps the odor of ink.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“the airy sprightliness [of their] juvenile elegance …”
— Dr. Johnson on Romeo’s and his friends’ language

“Lightness goes out suddenly with the death of Mercutio. Yet everything is sudden in this play.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Romeo and Juliet maintains a brilliant shutter-movement of black and white, of cloud and lightning, of midnight and morning.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“One of the reasons for the fame of Romeo & Juliet is that it has so completely and clearly isolated the experience of romantic love.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Capulet is Shakespeare’s first portrait in a long gallery of fussy, tetchy, stubborn, unteachable old men: the Duke of York in Richard II, Polonius, Lafeu, Menenius. He is tart-tongued, breathy, wordy, pungent, and speaks with a naturalness unknown in Shakespeare’s plays before this.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“The lovers are alone. Their condition is unique. Only by the audience is it understood.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“However unnatural the positions may be in which he places his characters, however improper to them the language which he makes them speak, however featureless they are, the very play of emotion, its increase, and alteration, and the combination of many contrary feelings, as expressed correctly and powerfully in some of Shakespeare’s scenes, and in the play of good actors, evokes even, if only for a time, sympathy with the person’s representation.”
— Leo Tolstoy, who pretty much hated Shakespeare

“Few other plays, even by Shakespeare, engage the audience so intimately.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“At least it is clear that one who has witnessed Romeo and Juliet has been taken apart and put together again.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Romeo & Juliet are in love, but they are not love-sick.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Days

“[Shakespeare] has founded the passion of the two lovers not on the pleasures they had experienced, but on all the pleasures they had NOT experienced.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Days

^^ I love this.

“… the delight of novelty, and the seeing no end to the pleasure that we fondly believe is still in store for us. The heart revels in the luxury of its own thoughts, and is unable to sustain the weight of hope and love that presses upon it.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Days

“One generation pushes another off the stage.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Days

“It was reserved for Shakespeare to unite purity of heart and the glow of imagination, sweetness and dignity of manners and passionate violence, in one ideal picture.”
— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

“Romeo is Hamlet in love. There is the same rich exuberance of passion and sentiment in the one, that there is of thought and sentiment in the other. Both are absent and self-involved … Hamlet is abstracted from everything. Romeo is abstracted from everything but his love, and lost in it.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Days

“The character of Mercutio in this play is one of the most mercurial and spirited of the productions of Shakespeare’s comic muse.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Days

“Art is divided not between the good and the bad, but between the interesting and the boring, and what is interesting is the exceptional.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture on Romeo & Juliet

“Now consider the nature of falling in love. Its elements include, first as Martin Buber explains in I and thou, the discovery of a thou instead of an I, Thou demands a relation to an I. Thou must be mysterious, numinous. From the discovery of thou comes the discovery of an I in its fullness and unity. The I becomes more active, more interested, and ashamed of the condition it is in. It wants to be better.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture on Romeo & Juliet

“If they became a married couple, there will be no more wonderful speeches — and a good thing, too. Then the real tasks of life will begin, with which art has surprisingly little to do. Romeo & Juliet are idolators of each other, which is what leads to their suicides.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture on Romeo & Juliet

“[The Nurse] should have kept her mouth shut.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture on Romeo & Juliet

“Romeo & Juliet is the kind of tragedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream hints at when it mentions the possibility that crazy young love is potentially tragic as well as potentially comic; A Midsummer Night’s Dream chooses comedy, but Shakespeare states the them in a tragic minor mode at the outset — “So quick bright things come to confusion” — and repeats it in a farcical mode with the Pyramus play at the happy end.”
— Frank Kermode, Riverside Shakespeare

“Youth in this play is a separate nation; its customs are not understood by the old.”
— Frank Kermode, Riverside Shakespeare

Exactly.

“To choose such folk as these for tragic heroes was aesthetically well-night an anarchic gesture.”
— H.B. Charlton

“Shakespeare understood the mixture of rhetorical levels, the clash of styles, which a complex theme requires. He is like Chaucer, perhaps, making his effects from the contrast between a formal rhetoric based on [Brooke’s] book, and a kind of anti-rhetoric; a plainness in itself perhaps as artificial as the ornateness against which it is played off. There is a sudden clearing of the verse, a move from the formality befitting the conventional nature of Romeo’s love for Rosaline (as much a convention as the feud itself) to an apparent denial of formality by plainness; it is summed up by Juliet’s words at her window:

Fain would I dwell on form, fain, fain deny
What I have spoke, but farewell compliment!

— Frank Kermode, Riverside Shakespeare

“Romeo & Juliet is unmatched, in Shakespeare and in the world’s literature, as a vision of an uncompromising mutual love that perishes of its own idealism and intensity.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Bastard Faulconbridge in King John, Richard II, self-destructive King and superb metaphysical poet. The fourfold of Juliet, Mercutio, the Nurse, and Romeo outnumber and overgo these earlier breakthroughs in human invention. Romeo & Juliet matters, as a play, because of these four exuberantly realized characters.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Shakespeare, at this point in his career, may have underestimated his burgeoning power, because Mercutio and the Nurse go on seducing audiences, readers, directors, and critics.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“The permanent popularity, now of mythic intensity, of Romeo & Juliet is more than justified, since the lay is the longest and most persuasive celebration of romantic love in Western literature.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Unprecedented in literature (though presumably not in life), Juliet precisely does not transcend the human heroine. Whether Shakespeare reinvents the representation of a very young woman (she is not yet fourteen) in lve, or perhaps does even more than that, is difficult to decide. How do you distance Juliet? You only shame yourself by bringing irony to a contepmlation of her consciousness.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Shakespeare allows nothing like Rosalind’s supreme intelligence to intrude upon Juliet’s authentic rapture.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“His pathetic strains are always polluted with some unexpected depravation.”
— Dr. Johnson

“Death has long been Romeo’s rival and enjoys Juliet at the last.”
— Molly Mahood

“I think that I speak for more than myself when I assert that the love shared by Romeo and Juliet is as healthy and normative a passion as Western literature affords us. It concludes in mutual suicide, but not because either of the lovers lusts for death, or mingles hatred with desire.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Mercutio is the most notorious scene stealer in all of Shakespeare, and there is in tradition (reported by Dryden) that Shakespeare declared he was obliged to kill off Mercutio, lest Mercutio kill Shakespeare and hence the play.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Mercutio is a major instance of what D.H. Lawrence was to call ‘sex-in-the-head.'”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Mercutio is victimized by what is most central in the play, and yet he dies without knowing what Romeo & Juliet is all about: the tragedy of authentic romantic love.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Mercutio’s incessant bawdiness is the mask for what may be a repressed homoeroticism, and like his violence may indicate a flight from the acute sensibility at work in the Queen Mab speech until it too transmutes into obscenity. The Nurse is even more complex, her apparent votaos, amd her propulsive flood of language beguile us.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

On Act III, scene 5:

“The crucial scene where [the Nurse] fails Juliet … Juliet’s shock is a new effect for Shakespeare.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Juliet, and not Romeo, or even Brutus in Julius Caesar, dies her second death as a prefiguration of Hamlet’s charismatic splendor.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Mere sexuality will do for comedy, but the shadow of death makes eroticism the companion of tragedy. Shakespeare, in Romeo & Juliet, eschews Chaucerian irony, but he takes from The Knight’s Tale Chaucer’s intimation that we are always keeping appointments we haven’t made.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Romeo & Juliet is a training ground in which Shakespeare teaches himself remorselessness and prepares the way for his five great tragedies, starting with the Hamlet of 1600-1601.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“We become lovers when we see Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet makes us students. The blood of Duncan is upon our hands, with Timon we rage against the world, and when Lear wanders out upon the heath the terror and madness touches us. Ours is the white sinlessness of Desdemona, and ours, also, the sin of Iago. Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognizance. And the soul itself, the soul of each one of us, is to each one of us a mystery. It hides in the dark and broods, and consciousness cannot tell us of its workings. Consciousness, indeed, is quite inadequate the explain the contents of personality. It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves.”
— Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W.H.

“That law of unity … the unity of feeling is everywhere and at all times observed by Shakespeare in his plays. Read Romeo and Juliet — all is youth and spring, — youth with its follies, its virtues, its precipitancies;–spring with its odours, its flowers, and its transiency; it is one and the same feeling that commences, goes through, and ends the play. The old men, the Capulets and the Montagues, are not common old men, they have an eagerness, a heartiness, a vehemence, the effect of spring; with Romeo, his change of passion, his sudden marriage, and his rash death, are all the effects of youth; — while in Juliet love has all that is tender and melancholy in the nightingale, all that is voluptuous in the rose, with whatever is sweet in the freshness of spring, but it ends with a long deep sigh like the last breeze of the Italian evening. This unity of feeling and character pervades every drama of Shakespeare.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Recapitulation and Summary of the Characteristics of Shakespeare’s Dramas”

Quotes from the play

Cank’red with peace, to part your cank’red hate.
— PRINCE, Act I, sc i, 95

Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O an thing, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is.
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
— ROMEO, Act I, sc i, 176-182

BENVOLIO:
Be ruled by one, forget to think of her.
ROMEO:
O, teach me how to forget to think.

Go, girl, seek happy nights to happy days.
— NURSE, Act I, sc iii, 105

But let them measure us by what they will,
We’ll measure them a measure and be gone.
— BENVOLIO, Act I, sc ii, 9-10

If love be rough with you, be rough with love;
Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.
— MERCUTIO, Act I, sc iv, 27-8

ROMEO:
I dreamt a dream tonight.
MERCUTIO:
And so did I!
ROMEO:
Well, what was yours?
MERCUTIO:
That dreamers often lie.
— Act I, sc iv, 49-52

True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy.
— MERCUTIO, Act I, sc iv, 96-8

Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crowd.
— ROMEO, Act I, sc v, 47-8

ROMEO:
Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purg’d.
JULIET:
Then have my lips the sin that they have took.
ROMEO:
Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urg’d!
Give me my sin again.
JULIET:
You kiss by th’ book.

^^ That has to be one of the sexiest most romantic exchange in his entire work. “O trespass sweetly urg’d” is beautiful, and really describes the anxiety/desire of first kisses, etc. And then the demand “Give me my sin again” is freakin’ hot. That’s all. I love how Juliet cuts him down to size a little bit when she comments on his kissing style.

Some consequence yet hanging in the stars.
— ROMEO, Act I, sc iv, 307

But patience lends them power, time means, to meet
Temp’ring extremities with extreme sweet.
— CHORUS, Act II, 13-14

He jests at scars that never felt a wound.
— ROMEO, Act II, sc ii, line 1

Fain would I dwell on form, fain, fain deny
What I have spoke, but farewell compliment!
— JULIET, Act II, sc ii, 88-89

So loving-jealous of his liberty.
— JULIET, Act II, sc ii, 181

Why is not this a lamentable thing, grandsire, that we should be thus afflicted with these strange flies, these fashion-mongers, these pardon-me’s, who stand so much on the new form, that they cannot sit at ease on the old bend? O, their bones, their bones!
— MERCUTIO, Act II, sc iv, 31-35

The generation gap never changes!

Why, is not this better now than groaning for love? Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo; now art thou what thou art, by art as well as by nature, for this drivelling love is like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole.
— MERCUTIO, Act II, sc iv, 88-93

Do thou but close our hands with holy words,
Then love-devouring death do what he dare,
It is enough I may but call her mine.
— ROMEO, Act II, sc vi, 6-8

BENVOLIO:
And if we meet we shall not ’scape a brawl,
For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.
MERCUTIO:
Thou art like one of these fellows that, when
he enters the confines of a tavern, claps me his
sword upon the table and says “God send me no
need of thee” and, by the operation of the second
cup, draws him on the drawer when indeed there is
no need.
BENVOLIO:
Am I like such a fellow?
MERCUTIO:
Come, come, thou art as hot a jack in thy
mood as any in Italy, and as soon moved to be
moody, and as soon moody to be moved.
— Act III, sc i, 3-13

Benvolio speaks in verse and Mercutio replies in prose. I don’t know, this seems deliberate, lol.

Men’s eyes were made to look, and let them gaze;
I will not budget for no man’s pleasure, I.
— MERCUTIO, Act III, sc i, 54-55

Good King of Cats, nothing but one of your nine lives, that I mean to make bold withal, and, as you shall use me hereafter, dry-beat the rest of the eight.
— MERCUTIO, Act III, sc i, 77-79

No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but ’tis enough. ’Twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague o’ both your houses! Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death! A braggart, a rogue, a villain that fights by the book of arithmetic!
— MERCUTIO, Act III, sc i, 96-102

He even dies charismatically. “‘Twill serve.”

Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night.
— JULIET, Act III, sc ii, 5

Come, night. Come, Romeo. Come, thou day in night,
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow upon a raven’s back.
Come, gentle night; come, loving black-browed night,
Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
— JULIET, Act III, sc ii, 17-25

Say thou buy ay,
And that bare vowel I shall poison more
Than the death-darting eye of cockatrice.
I am not I, if there be such an ay,
Or those eyes shut, that makes thee answer ay.
— JULIET, Act III, sc ii, 45-49

Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feather’d raven! wolvish ravening lamb!
Despised substance of divinest show.
Was ever book containing such vile matters so fairly bound?
— JULIET, Act III, sc ii, 74-84

He made you for a highway to my bed,
But I, a maid, die maiden-widowed.
Come, cords, come, nurse, I’ll to my wedding bed,
And death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead!
— JULIET, Act III, sc ii, 134-137

Hang up philosophy!
Unless philosophy can make a Juliet
Displant a town, reverse a prince’s doom,
It helps not, it prevails not. Talk no more.”
— ROMEO, Act III, sc iii, 57-60

You tell ’em, Romeo!

CAPULET:
And bid her — mark you me? — on We’n’sday next —
But soft, what day is this?
PARIS:
Monday, my lord.
CAPULET:
Monday! ha ha! Well, We’n’sday is too soon.
A’ Thursday let it be — a Thursday, tell her.
— Act III, sc iv, 17-30

Dialogue is really dialogue now. These made-up characters are actually talking to each other.

JULIET:
Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day.
It was the nightingale, and not the lark.
Nightly she sings on yond pomegranate tree.
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.
ROMEO:
It was the lark, the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale.
— Act III, sc v, 1-7

Time’s up, kids.

More light and light, more dark and dark our woes!
— ROMEO, Act III, sc v, 36

How, how, how, how, chopp’d logic! What is this?
“Proud,” and “I thank you” and “I thank you not.”
And yet “not proud,” mistress minion you?
Thank me no thankings, nor proud me no prouds.
— CAPULET, Act III, sc v, 149-152

The man is losing his shit. And it’s all Friar Lawrence’s fault.

JULIET:
Speakst thou from thy heart?
NURSE:
And from my soul too, else beshrew them both. Amen.
JULIET:
Amen.
NURSE:
What?
JULIET: Well, thou hast comforted me marvellous much.
— Act III, sc v, 239-243

Such a terrible moment.

PETER:
Answer me like men:
[sings:] When griping griefs the heart doth wound
And doleful dumps the mind oppress,
Then music with her silver sound—
Why “silver sound”? Why “music with her silver
sound”? What say you, Simon Catling?
FIRST MUSICIAN
Marry, sir, because silver hath a sweet sound.
PETER
What say you, Hugh Rebeck?
SECOND MUSICIAN :
I say “silver sound” because musicians sound for silver.
PETER:
Pretty too! -—What say you, James Soundpost?
THIRD MUSICIAN:
Faith, I know not what to say.
PETER:
O, I cry you mercy. You are the singer. I will say
for you. It is “music with her silver sound” because
musicians have no gold for sounding.
— Act IV, sc v, 125-141

This goes very well the whole silver (good) vs. gold (bad) symbolism in the play.

The time and my intents are savage-wild,
More fierce and more inexorable far
Than empty tigers or the roaring sea.
— ROMEO, Act V, sc iii, 37-39

So much passion, you just want to swoon.

How oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry, which their keepers call
A lightning before death!
— ROMEO, Act V, sc iii, 88-90