I posted the seven quotes around the room, seven key passages from the second and third scenes of Romeo and Juliet act three. The kids spread out in groups of three or four and took four to five minutes looking at the quotes, completing three steps:
- Define up to three words on the Post-It note.
- Note any language tricks (inversions, elliptical constructions, parallel construction, figurative language, etc.).
- Discuss and note what earlier passages in the play this reminds you of; mark specific elements.
After time was up, they rotated to the next quote. (It’s called a gallery walk in edu-speak.)
The kids read Juliet’s thoughts about Romeo:
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he 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.
O, I have bought the mansion of a love,
But not possess’d it, and, though I am sold,
Not yet enjoy’d: so tedious is this day
As is the night before some festival
To an impatient child that hath new robes
And may not wear them.
And sure enough, they picked up on the parallels with Romeo’s words in the balcony scene:
But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she:
Be not her maid, since she is envious;
Her vestal livery is but sick and green
And none but fools do wear it; cast it off.
They read Juliet’s furious reaction to the news that her newlywed husband killed her beloved cousin:
O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!
Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feather’d raven! wolvish-ravening lamb!
Despised substance of divinest show!
Just opposite to what thou justly seem’st,
A damned saint, an honourable villain!
O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell,
When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend
In moral paradise of such sweet flesh?
Was ever book containing such vile matter
So fairly bound? O that deceit should dwell
In such a gorgeous palace!
And they caught the parallel with Romeo’s words in the first scene:
Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love.
Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O any thing, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness! serious vanity!
Mis-shapen 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.
And they actually think it’s, to use their words, pretty cool.