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

1. A plague on both your houses!
2. 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.
3. Compare her face with some that I shall show,
   And I will make thee think thy swan a crow.
4. ‘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;
5. There is no world without Verona walls,
   But purgatory, torture, hell itself.
6. 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?
7. 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!