Title: Romeo and Juliet: Are Romeo and Juliet really in love? | SparkNotes
Headings: Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare
Are Romeo and Juliet really in love?
Romeo and Juliet SparkNotes Literature Guide
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Content: Today, we say something is like Romeo and Juliet to describe a love that surpasses all boundaries, but a close reading of the play suggests the lovers’ feelings are more complicated than pure love. If we look, we can find plenty of evidence that Romeo and Juliet’s love for one another is, at least initially, immature. Romeo begins the play claiming to be passionately in love with another woman, Rosaline. When he sees Juliet, he abandons Rosaline before he has even spoken to his new love, which suggests that his feelings for both women are superficial. Juliet, meanwhile, seems to be motivated by defying her parents. She is unenthusiastic about her parents’ choice of husband for her, and at the party where she is supposed to meet Paris, she instead kisses Romeo after exchanging just fourteen lines of dialogue with him. When Romeo returns to see Juliet, she is focused on marriage. For Juliet, part of the appeal of marriage is that it will free her from her parents: “ I’ll no longer be a Capulet” (2.2.). She compares Romeo to a tame falcon—a “tassel-gentle” (2.2.)—which suggests that she believes she can control him.