I need help about Juliet!

[silentz]

i need her personality or characteristics and the evidence from the play...ts so confusing smeone help me out?

[Shea]

i need her personality or characteristics and the evidence from the play...ts so confusing smeone help me out?

Um,... What's confusing? She's one of my favorite characters, and I didn't find anything about Juliette to be confusing at all. Not to be rude, but as this is your first post, we need to know that we aren't doing your homework for you. If you've read the play, what did you find to be confusing?

[Nemerov]

Is she really one of your favorite characters? What so great about her? I always thought her character to be rather flat. But I haven't read it since high school . So I might well be wrong. Enlighten me.

Silentz, what's confusing? We'll probably be able to help you. But we need more information.

Go!

[simon]

I agree with you Nemerov, to me Juiliette seemed an obsessed child, one who doesn't really know what she is getting into. She was caught up in her emotions like all 14 year old girls are and they think the current heart throb will last forever and nothing else matters, and the play is about the extremes which infatuation will lead to. She's flat in the sense that she doesn't learn anything, her opinions don't change, clearly she can't learn from her death since she's dead. But others can learn from it in future persuits.

[Shea]

Hmmm, I hope I'm not doing Silentz homework for them, but,... I don't find Juliette to be flat at all. In fact I find her to be one of the strongest characters in the play.

Though she's submissive, she is very strong in her devotion. Before she meets Romeo, she has no qualms about who her family intends for her to marry. I know that that's a pretty minor example of her devotion, but when she says that she agrees to marry Paris toward the end of the play, her parents never doubt her word, so we can assume that she has been very trustworthy most of her life. When she decieves her family, it is only because her devotion is now to her husband, which in Elizabeathan times, was a very important aspect of hierarchy and structure.

So, was she extreme and rash in loving Romeo? Personally, I would have to say "no". If you think about it, she really the only major character (other than the priest) who is not guilty of prejudice. She listens to her heart rather than a family grudge, albeit at the wrong time, but because she does so, she becomes the centerpeice and "moral example" of why all this fighting is utterly ridiculous. I would have to say that all the other characters are more caught up in their emotions than she is.

I don't mean to step on your wording simon, but would an "obsessed child" use reason? When she finds out that Romeo, has killed Tybalt, she chids him at first, but then realizes her first duty as a wife and that Tybalt would have killed Romeo. She looks at the situation from many angles, which is much more than anyone else has done. She does the same thing, before drinking the sleeping draught. So, her opinions do infact change, and only after she as examined which would be the best.

Finally, even in the way she dies, she proves to be strong. Admit it, it would be much easier to drink poison than to stab yourself.

To sum up, I would say that Juliette is one of my favorites because she shows (unlike Ophelia or Desdemona) that being submissive does not neccessarily mean being weak. An attribute which I think that too many people today lack.

[Shea]

:( Does no one have an opinion on the view I gave of Juliette?

[Shea]

:blush: just realized that I keep spelling her name wrong. I've been misspelling a lot since I've been studing French. Sorry.

[giosue_c]

Ok, I am way too late to really get in on this discussion... since it is already a year old, but I just wanted to throw my 2 cents in with shea's side of the argument. I recently saw the play performed at the University of Kansas theatre. The story of Romeo and Juliet is so well known and often imitated, that it has earned a stereotype. When people think of Romeo and Juliet, they think of a balcony scene, and a young couple who kill themselves for love. We have a tendency to overlook the details of the play and its characters for the stereotype.

For me, anyone who would claim juliet to be a flat boring character hasn't really seen or read the play. They have just skimmed it and are seeing only the stereotype which is but a shadow of the actual character.

[Scheherazade]

I agree with you Nemerov, to me Juiliette seemed an obsessed child, one who doesn't really know what she is getting into. She was caught up in her emotions like all 14 year old girls are and they think the current heart throb will last forever and nothing else matters, .

when we consider Juliet as a 14 year old, we need to keep reminding ourselves that she is very different from today's cheerleader wannabe, mall hopping teenager. In those days girls of 14 got married and started families adn that was considered normal. So her love for Romeo is not a heart ache to be forgotten by the time next heart throb walks in. She is showing a lot of character and daring by refusing to follow her family's marriage arrangements and marrying Romeo instead, knowing the consequences pretty well. I think that proves us that she has a strong will and personality. Also, despite all the tragic events happening we never see her losing her cool, sobbing or mopping about. She is always taking actions;so much so, she does not hesitate to kill herself when she realises that her actions led to Romeo's suicide.

Thanks for reviving this thread! :D

[Shea]

Hey thanks guys! It's good to know that I'm not alone in this opinion!

Scheherazade, here's even some textual evidence to support your argument about the young women of that time. From Act 1, Scene 3:

LADY CAPULET
Well, think of marriage now; younger than you,
Here in Verona, ladies of esteem,
Are made already mothers: by my count,
I was your mother much upon these years
That you are now a maid.

[rachel]

I think fair Juliette lived a hundred years in her tiny lifetime. considering the dynamics of the time, her father and his overbearingly strong personality and pondering the fact that for a girl back then to spurn her father's commands was a fearful thing.
She put her very life on the line by even talking to Romeo. I do think that sometimes, just sometimes a man and woman, in this case very young can honestly and truly click and fall in love and find they have the very same universe and all it's glittering beauty in common. Juliette loved her own family, cousins and can you imagine going against the tide like that? It was not like today when a girl is silly and empty headed and she falls for a guy because she likes how he wears his jeans. If she tires of him which might happen by lunchtime the following school day she can dismiss him and move on to the next guy. And it is not just the girls's fault. we live in a society today that in some ways makes kids grow up way to fast but without equipping them for anything in the real world.
i greatly admire Juliette. she can still make me reach for the tissue.