Tuesday 12 August 2014

How can I analyze this quote that the Friar says to Romeo in Act 3 of Romeo and Juliet? "Thy tears are womanish. Thy wild acts denote / The...

To analyze any quote, you must take context into account. In this case, Romeo has just married Juliet then gotten into a sword fight with her cousin Tybalt and killed him. For this, the Prince of Verona has decreed that Romeo be banished. Instead of being happy that the sentence isn't death, Romeo collapses into histrionics about how banishment is a fate worse than death, since everyone can see and love Juliet but Romeo (and...

To analyze any quote, you must take context into account. In this case, Romeo has just married Juliet then gotten into a sword fight with her cousin Tybalt and killed him. For this, the Prince of Verona has decreed that Romeo be banished. Instead of being happy that the sentence isn't death, Romeo collapses into histrionics about how banishment is a fate worse than death, since everyone can see and love Juliet but Romeo (and talking about himself in the third person only makes him sound more pathetic). Friar Laurence keeps trying to explain why this isn't a bad thing, but Romeo interrupts him over and over to rail about how awful his life is now that he's banished; he begins to rail about how he'll commit suicide because he cannot be with her (surely, if Juliet was here to see how pathetic he is, she'd be asking herself, "What did I get myself into?"). Friar Laurence eventually gets fed up and verbally slaps him in the tirade this quote comes from. 


He essentially says, "You're crying like a woman. You're acting crazy and you have no more sense than a beast. You're behaving like a woman even though you look like a man." 


A modern version of this tirade would be, "Romeo, man up!"

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