essay on hatred in romeo and juliet

Love and Hate in Romeo and Juliet

By Chris Nayak Globe Education Learning Consultant

I love you! I hate you!

Have you ever said those words? Did you mean them? Have you had them said to you? How did that make you feel?

In Romeo and Juliet, the emotions of love and hate are the lifeblood of the play. Everything that happens seems to be caused by one, or both, of these two forces.  Shakespeare frequently puts them side by side: ‘Here’s much to do with love but more with hate’ , ‘my only love sprung from my only hate’ . Such juxtaposition of conflicting ideas is called antithesis, and Shakespeare loves using it. In every one of his plays, this clash of opposing ideas is what provides the dramatic spark to make the play come to life.

But in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare makes frequent use of a particular type of antithesis: the oxymoron. This is when two conflicting ideas are contained within a single phrase, maybe in just two words.  We use oxymorons in everyday speech:

‘Act naturally’, ‘organised chaos…’

Romeo uses many of them:

‘Cold fire, sick health…’

Later, Juliet joins in:

‘Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical…’

But this play has many more oxymorons that any other Shakespeare play. Why does he choose this literary technique for Ro meo and Juliet ?

For me, it’s the perfect way of capturing how you feel when you’re young. The extremes of new and worrying feelings and the fact that you can flip from one emotion to the opposite in a heartbeat.

How can you in one moment having  carefree and happing conversation with your parents, brother or sister or friend and then because of a look or a comment, you are filled with anger and hatred for people you know that you love/ Although it was a long time ago, this is exactly how I remember being as a teenager. And an oxymoron is just that – two extremes expressed in a second. Adults tend to qualify, quantify, and have more shades of grey. Perhaps they grow out of having feelings like this. But for some young people, this is how life is experienced.

Romeo shares this last viewpoint. When the Friar tells Romeo to see the positives in his banishment, Romeo attacks him, saying ‘thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel’ . And why doesn’t the Friar feel this way? Because he’s old, says Romeo. ‘wert thou as young as I…then mightst thou speak’ .

The type of love and hate that Shakespeare is depicting in this play belongs to young people, and oxymorons are the way to show it. Of course, some of the older characters feel their version of these emotions (Lord Capulet and Lord Montague join the brawl in the first scene), but Shakespeare’s focus is on the younger generation.

But are love and hate really opposites?

Even though Shakespeare sometimes places them in opposition, maybe they are not as different as we might think. In the play, there seem to be a lot of similarities between people when they are full of love, and when they are full of hate.

Romeo’s describes the hate he feels when Tybalt kills his friend Mercutio as a fire raging inside him. ‘Fire-eyed fury be my conduct now’ he says. The Prince is similar, ordering the families to ‘quench the fire of your pernicious rage’ .

But Romeo uses similar imagery when burning with passion for Juliet. ‘She doth teach the torches to burn bright’ , he says. ‘Juliet is the sun’ , a ‘bright angel’ . Juliet also expresses her love in the same way: Romeo is her ‘day in night’ .

The author Elie Wiesel once said that ‘the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference’ . Despite all the opposites and contrasts in this play, maybe Shakespeare thinks the same.

What do you think?

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Hatred In Shakespeare

Hatred is one of the most powerful emotions, and a great driver of action in drama. Unlike some of the other emotional forces, like love, hate isn’t something that suffuses Shakespeare’s dramas, although some themes, like jealousy, envy and ambition, which are allied to hatred, and often go hand in hand with it in the plays, are prominent in the play texts – present in every aspect. When the theme of hatred is at the centre of a Shakespeare play we see some very powerful drama, as hatred is a strong driving force in drama and serves to generate some strong action.

Let us take Othello as a play in which hatred is at the centre of the drama. The conflict of the plot is driven by hatred: hatred is fuelled by racism and jealousy and by the end of the drama we are left with the impression of just how destructive it is.

Iago’s hatred for Othello is irrational. No matter how many times we may see the play we can never get to the bottom of why he hates Othello. Certainly, in his comments to others, he refers to Othello’s ethnicity. Some of the images in his language are designed to provoke the maximum racist response in the listener. When Othello retires to his lodgings with his white bride, Desdemona, Othello wakes her father with the cry, “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe.”

But it is not Othello’s race that is causing this hatred. Iago does not himself know why he hates Othello. Confiding in the audience he at one point, early on in the play, tells us:

‘I hate the Moor, And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets He has done my office: I know not if ’t be true, But I, for mere suspicion in that kind, Will do as if for surety.’

The idea that Othello has slept with Iago’s wife, Emilia, is absurd. There is no suggestion of that anywhere and as one gets to know Emelia through the text, it’s clear that that isn’t a possibility. Iago dreams that suspicion up and then says he’s going to take it as a fact and act on it as such. It’s pure prejudice, based on nothing more than his irrational hatred.

At other junctures in the play there are more possible reasons for Iago’s hatred, such as the fact that he has been passed over for promotion. But the real reason never becomes clear. Clearly, he has no reason to hate Othello but he designs a plot to destroy him, a plot so vicious and heartless that its execution not only destroys Othello but causes maximum collateral damage – the death of Desdemona and the destruction of Cassio’s career.

Some critics have suggested that Iago is a sociopath, an unknown condition in Shakespeare’s time, although such personality defects must have existed and, of course, Shakespeare would have encountered people who had them. Certainly, Iago is merciless, without empathy, although he can put on a show of empathy. He uses people ruthlessly and manipulates everyone, without any feelings for those his machinations affect, including his wife. It seems that he does those things simply for the fun of it, driven by an irrational hatred for Othello. And, as this play shows, that hatred can destroy love.

Romeo and Juliet ’s  setting is the environment of hatred. Shakespeare’s exploration of the theme is different from that he employs in Othello . In Romeo and Juliet the hatred between the two Verona families that causes death and suffering – and affects the lives of so many young people – is often mentioned, but it doesn’t actually exist. It is an ancient hatred, a feud where not even the oldest family members can remember, or have even been told, the origins of the feud: it’s just a fact of Verona’s life that the Capulets and the Montagues ‘hate’ each other and it’s never questioned, even though the emotions of hatred are largely absent.

In the actual life of the families, the members of one do not hold anything personal against any members of the other family. When Tybald, a fiery champion of the feud, tells Capulet that young Romeo is gatecrashing Capulet’s party, Capulet threatens to beat him if he tries to do anything about it: in reality, he welcomes the attendance of the young Montague. He knows how hollow the hatred is and knows, too, that any action based on it will lead to the disruption of the harmony of his party.

As the play works its way through the theme we see the pity of the feud and we weep at its consequence, the tragic death of two of the families’ young people, and we are left pondering about the futility of hatred. (Read about more Romeo and Juliet themes .)

There is probably nothing about the human condition that Shakespeare didn’t write about. In the four centuries since Shakespeare the world has gone through enormous change, from the agricultural age of Shakespeare’s time, through the industrial revolution, into technology and now, a new digital technology. Even in a single lifetime one can see unbelievable change. And yet, human nature has not changed, it has merely adapted to the technological and social changes as they have occurred. And so, in a play like The Merchant of Venice we see the same kind of anti-Semitism that we recognise in our lives today. Elizabethan Londoners were not very familiar with Jews and knew only what the prejudices of the time told them. Shakespeare creates a real, living, breathing Jew and makes him centre-stage in the play.

In this play, Shakespeare illustrates the theme of hate most prominently through the prejudices of both Christians and Jews, and their behaviour towards one another. The play is centred around racial prejudice and the mistrust between Christians and Jews. Shylock is characterised as the scapegoat, just as the Jews have been throughout history. And in turn, Shylock’s prejudice and dislike for the Christians is largely based on their mistreatment of him.

It’s an interesting play in that the audience is seduced into identifying with the Christians and we have a triple love story that locks us into that story. But a seeming sub-plot shows a nasty anti-Semitic attitude from the lovers we are busy identifying with. Shakespeare is challenging us, asking, as Shylock does, is not a Jew the same in his humanity as everyone else? It is through this depiction of hatred that Shakespeare makes us reflect on ourselves and our responses.

Shakespeare Themes by Play

Hamlet themes , Macbeth themes , Romeo and Juliet themes

Shakespeare Themes by Topic

Ambition, Appearance & Reality , Betrayal , Conflict , Corruption , Death , Deception , Good & Evil , Hatred , Order & Disorder , Revenge , Suffering , Transformation

Hate – one of the most powerful themes in Shakespeare’s plays

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Romeo and Juliet

William shakespeare, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

“These violent delights have violent ends,” says Friar Laurence in an attempt to warn Romeo , early on in the play, of the dangers of falling in love too hard or too fast. In the world of Romeo and Juliet , love is not pretty or idealized—it is chaotic and dangerous. Throughout the play, love is connected through word and action with violence, and Romeo and Juliet ’s deepest mutual expression of love occurs when the “star-crossed lovers take their life.” By connecting love with pain and ultimately with suicide, Shakespeare suggests that there is an inherent sense of violence in many of the physical and emotional facets of expressing love—a chaotic and complex emotion very different from the serene, idealized sweetness it’s so often portrayed as being.

There are countless instances throughout Romeo and Juliet in which love and violence are connected. After their marriage, Juliet imagines in detail the passion she and Romeo will share on their wedding night, and invokes the Elizabethan characterization of orgasm as a small death or “petite mort”—she looks forward to the moment she will “die” and see Romeo’s face reflected in the stars above her. When Romeo overhears Juliet say that she wishes he were not a Montague so that they could be together, he declares that his name is “hateful” and offers to write it down on a piece of paper just so he can rip it up and obliterate it—and, along with it, his very identity, and sense of self as part of the Montague family. When Juliet finds out that her parents, ignorant of her secret marriage to Romeo, have arranged for her to marry Paris , she goes to Friar Laurence’s chambers with a knife, threatening to kill herself if he is unable to come up with a plan that will allow her to escape her second marriage. All of these examples represent just a fraction of the instances in which language and action conspire to render love as a “violent delight” whose “violent ends” result in danger, injury, and even death. Feeling oneself in the throes of love, Shakespeare suggests, is tumultuous and destabilizing enough—but the real violence of love, he argues, emerges in the many ways of expressing love.

Emotional and verbal expressions of love are the ones most frequently deployed throughout the play. Romeo and Juliet wax poetic about their great love for each other—and the misery they feel as a result of that love—over and over again, and at great lengths. Often, one of their friends or servants must cut them off mid-speech—otherwise, Shakespeare seems to suggest, Romeo and Juliet would spend hours trying to wrestle their feelings into words. Though Romeo and Juliet say lovely things about one another, to be sure, their speeches about each other, or about love more broadly, are almost always tinged with violence, which illustrates their chaotic passion for each other and their desire to mow down anything that stands in its way. When Romeo, for instance, spots Juliet at her window in the famous “balcony scene” in Act 2, Scene 2, he wills her to come closer by whispering, “Arise, fair sun ”—a beautiful metaphor of his love and desire for Juliet—and quickly follows his entreaty with the dangerous language “and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief.” Juliet’s “sun”-like radiance makes Romeo want her to “kill” the moon (or Rosaline ,) his former love and her rival in beauty and glory, so that Juliet can reign supreme over his heart. Later on in the play, when the arrival of dawn brings an end to Romeo and Juliet’s first night together as man and wife, Juliet invokes the symbol of a lark’s song—traditionally a symbol of love and sweetness—as a violent, ill-meaning presence which seeks to pull Romeo and Juliet apart, “arm from arm,” and “hunt” Romeo out of Juliet’s chambers. Romeo calls love a “rough” thing which “pricks” him like a thorn; Juliet says that if she could love and possess Romeo in the way she wants to, as if he were her pet bird, she would “kill [him] with much cherishing.” The way the two young lovers at the heart of the play speak about love shows an enormously violent undercurrent to their emotions—as they attempt to name their feelings and express themselves, they resort to violence-tinged speech to convey the enormity of their emotions.

Physical expressions of love throughout the play also carry violent connotations. From Romeo and Juliet’s first kiss, described by each of them as a “sin” and a “trespass,” to their last, in which Juliet seeks to kill herself by sucking remnants of poison from the dead Romeo’s lips, the way Romeo and Juliet conceive of the physical and sexual aspects of love are inextricable from how they conceive of violence. Juliet looks forward to “dying” in Romeo’s arms—again, one Elizabethan meaning of the phrase “to die” is to orgasm—while Romeo, just after drinking a vial of poison so lethal a few drops could kill 20 men, chooses to kiss Juliet as his dying act. The violence associated with these acts of sensuality and physical touch furthers Shakespeare’s argument that attempts to adequately express the chaotic, overwhelming, and confusing feelings of intense passion often lead to a commingling with violence.

Violent expressions of love are at the heart of Romeo and Juliet . In presenting and interrogating them, Shakespeare shows his audiences—in the Elizabethan area, the present day, and the centuries in-between—that love is not pleasant, reserved, cordial, or sweet. Rather, it is a violent and all-consuming force. As lovers especially those facing obstacles and uncertainties like the ones Romeo and Juliet encounter, struggle to express their love, there may be eruptions of violence both between the lovers themselves and within the communities of which they’re a part.

Love and Violence ThemeTracker

Love and Violence Quotes in Romeo and Juliet

Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes, A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life; Whose misadventured piteous overthrows, Doth with their death bury their parents' strife. The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love, And the continuance of their parents' rage, Which, but their children's end, nought could remove, Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage; The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate! O any thing, of nothing first created; O heavy lightness! serious vanity! Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!

Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear, Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear. So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows. The measure done, I'll watch her place of stand, And, touching hers, make blessèd my rude hand. Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.

You kiss by th’ book.

My only love sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late!

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!

O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name; Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I'll no longer be a Capulet.

'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 word would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title: — Romeo, doff thy name; And for thy name, which is no part of thee, Take all myself.

I take thee at thy word: Call me but love, and I'll be new baptis'd; Henceforth I never will be Romeo.

O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon, That monthly changes in her circled orb, Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

Good-night, good-night! Parting is such sweet sorrow That I shall say good-night till it be morrow.

Romeo, the hate I bear thee can afford No better term than this: thou art a villain.

Romeo: Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much. Mercutio: No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve: ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man.

O, I am fortune's fool!

Come, gentle night, — come, loving black brow'd night, Give me my Romeo; and when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of Heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night, And pay no worship to the garish sun.

Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day. It was the nightingale, and not the lark, That pierc'd the fearful hollow of thine ear; Nightly she sings on yond pomegranate tree. Believe me love, it was the nightingale.

Is there no pity sitting in the clouds That sees into the bottom of my grief? O sweet my mother, cast me not away! Delay this marriage for a month, a week, Or if you do not, make the bridal bed In that dim monument where Tybalt lies.

Or bid me go into a new-made grave, And hide me with a dead man in his shroud - Things that, to hear them told, have made me tremble - And I will do it without fear or doubt, To live an unstain'd wife to my sweet love.

Then I defy you, stars!

O true apothecary! Thy drugs are quick. — Thus with a kiss I die.

Yea, noise, then I'll be brief; O, happy dagger! This is thy sheath; there rest, and let me die.

For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

Mr Salles Teaches English

How does Shakespeare present the theme of conflict in ‘Romeo and Juliet’?

In ‘Romeo and Juliet’, the theme of conflict’s pervasive and intoxicating nature first emerges in the prologue. 

Shakespeare's use of a fourteen-line sonnet in the prologue hints at the conflict to come in "Romeo and Juliet." Through violent language, he reveals the deep-rooted feud between the Montagues and Capulets, setting the stage for their bitter r…

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Romeo and Juliet — The Depth of Love and Hatred in Romeo and Juliet

The Depth of Love and Hatred in Romeo and Juliet

• Categories: Falling in Love Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare

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Published: Jun 5, 2019

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