Shakespeare exploits his talent for realistic and plausible dialogue to make his characters and situations come alive. These two passages illustrate his great linguistic skill in portraying real people on the stage and making them memorable as individual credible full bodied characters, especially Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet. Passage 1 # The Dialogue when Romeo and Juliet meet for the first time ROMEO [To JULIET] If I profane with my unworthiest hand*

Dramatic Techniques in Romeo and Juliet # COMPRESSION OF TIME # Shakespeare compresses the nine months action of Brooke’s poem into less than five days in the interests of swiftness, power and unity of action. Sunday The play opens with a Street brawl at nine o’clock in the morning between Romeo’s Montague clan and Juliet’s Capulets. . Romeo and Juliet meet at a party that same night. After the party Romeo gets into Capulet’s garden and from the ground talks to Juliet at her window.

Language of Romeo and Juliet # Shakespeare is renowned for the poetic imagery of his language and for the word pictures he creates. His reputation is well founded because while he was writing English was not the dominant language – it was Latin. Shakespeare culminated what Chaucer had begun; to make English a respectable language for expressing complex, personal and imaginative ideas. There is only one reason why Shakespeare’s plays are still alive and read 400 years after they were written; his mastery of clear, powerful visual language.

The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet # The Source of the plot was borrowed from Arthur Brooke’s long poem “The Tragicall Hystorye of Romeus and Juliet (1562). While Shakespeare unashamedly borrows his story lines, he imbues them with so much life or vitality that they outshine the original sources and therefore become immortal or at least timeless classics. Originality was not important in Elizabethan times. It is Shakespeare’s skill in story telling, character portrayal, dialogue and enlivening his scenes by rich, concise or crystal language that helped to bring this story to life for all time.