As part of our recent test on Romeo and Juliet, I included seven passages from the play for identification.
The instructions:
Identify the following passages. Who is the speaker? To whom is he/she speaking? How is this a critical passage in the play?
Here are the passages
- A plague on both your houses!
- I pray thee, good Mercutio, let’s retire:
The day is hot, the Capulets abroad,
And, if we meet, we shall not scape a brawl;
For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring. - Compare her face with some that I shall show,
And I will make thee think thy swan a crow. - ‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet; - There is no world without Verona walls,
But purgatory, torture, hell itself. - What if it be a poison, which the friar
Subtly hath minister’d to have me dead,
Lest in this marriage he should be dishonour’d,
Because he married me before to Romeo? - Death, that hath suck’d the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty:
Thou art not conquer’d; beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.
Some are easy; at least one is a little obscure (but covered in class as one of many examples of the Bard’s incessant foreshadowing).
See how many you can get. No Googling!