Comparing Ortberg's Romeo And Juliet

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The Christian author and speaker, John Ortberg, Jr., has said,“Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate”, and no form of art displays this idea more accurately than Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, a cautionary tale of the trials and tribulations that accompany both love and hate. In this tale, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet fall in love with each other and concoct a plan to be together despite their families’ long standing rivalry. This plan, however, fails and leaves them both dead and the families left in ruins. The setting in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet plays a large part in the development of this cautionary tale and is insinuated through…show more content…
One of the clearest examples of this is in the balcony scene. In this scene, Romeo and Juliet have just fallen in love, but because of their families’ enemy status, Romeo is forced to sneak around to see Juliet. This action is shown through Juliet’s confusion after Romeo speaks, which implies that he was hiding and out of view from Juliet, and is also shown through her asking “What man art thou that, thus bescreened by night” (II.ii.56). This confusion and question implies that the scene is dark, and she cannot see Romeo. Another way the setting is shown is through the conflict between Juliet and her father. Capulet, while at his party, has a very calm demeanor when Tybalt makes a scene; however, later in the book when he confronts Juliet he is angry and irrational, and there is the implied stage direction that he attacks Juliet, which is demonstrated when he says “An you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets,/ For, by my soul, I’ll ne’er acknowledge thee”(III.v.204-205). This change in demeanor, which is assisted through stage directions, shows that Capulet acts differently in his home than he does in public, thus showing the setting with clarity in each scene. These implied stage directions all help show the setting in this

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