Love

The play names its love before it shows it, and names it as an ending: the Chorus promises a ‘death-marked love’ before we have met either lover. Then Verona talks about love in every voice but the lovers'. Romeo speaks of love to Benvolio in rhymed paradoxes about a woman who never appears: she has ‘forsworn to love’, and she is a Capulet, ‘My fair niece Rosaline’. Paris is praised to a girl who has not yet met him, and Juliet speaks seven lines in her first scene and promises only to ‘look to like’. Almost every love here is spoken about someone who is not there to answer, which is what the shared sonnet will break; yet every one of these languages comes back inside the lovers' own. If your extract is one of the 1.1 brawls (June 2017, November 2020), Romeo's love-talk comes later in the same scene: leave the extract by 'brawling love', which takes its adjective from the fight.

• A pair¹ of star-crossed^2,3 lovers take their life⁴

  Love enters the play already finished: it is announced as a death before a single lover has spoken. Every love scene after this is watched by an audience that knows the end.

  Key word: ‘lovers’

  Before they have names or ages, they are 'lovers': the Prologue names them by their love before it calls them their parents' 'children', and every hopeful scene after this is watched through that word.

  In the exam

  Use it to argue that the play asks you to judge the love knowing its cost, so every hopeful line in Acts 1 and 2 carries dramatic irony.

• Why then, O brawling love,¹ O loving hate,² / O anything of nothing first create!³

  This is the love the play measures Juliet's against: spoken to a friend, about a woman who never speaks, in the stock paradoxes of love poetry. Its scene says 'love' more often than any but the orchard, and nobody in it is loved back.

  In the exam

  Use it as the 'before' in any argument about change, and set it against the shared sonnet in 1.5.

• This precious book of love, this unbound¹ lover, / To beautify² him only lacks a cover.³

  Lady Capulet's love is a matter of matching: Paris is a fine book that only needs a wife to bind him. Love is judged from outside, as a good fit, and the question she puts to Juliet has only one right answer.

  In the exam

  On an attitudes question, set it beside the shared sonnet: the mother offers love as a well-bound book, while the daughter writes a poem with a stranger the same night.

• No less?¹ Nay, bigger.² Women grow³ by men.

  The Nurse's love is the body's: marriage means a husband and a pregnancy, said with a laugh. Set beside her mistress's book, the joke gives Juliet's house two adult languages of love, one of property and one of the body, and neither is about what Juliet might feel.

  In the exam

  On an attitudes question, set the Nurse's body-love beside Lady Capulet's book-love, then show Juliet answering both with a promise only to look.

• If love be rough with you, be rough with love.¹ / Prick love for pricking,² and you beat love down.

  Mercutio answers Romeo's sighs with a fighter's rule: if love hurts you, hurt it back. The street's code reaches even into love, and neither friend has yet met a woman who answers.

  In the exam

  On an attitudes question, place Mercutio beside Romeo: one fights love and one suffers it, and both are about to be overtaken by a love that is mutual.

At the feast Romeo sees Juliet and forgets Rosaline in half a line. His first speech about her is still five rhyming couplets, all eyes and light (‘she doth teach the torches to burn bright’). Then she answers. Their first fourteen lines to each other are a sonnet: Juliet takes her own quatrain, keeps two of his rhyme words and shares the couplet, and neither of them says the word 'love'. They begin a second sonnet, and the Nurse cuts it off after one quatrain. Only after the kisses do they learn whose children they are, and Juliet's first words on hearing his name put love and hate in one line. This is AQA's June 2019 extract (1.5.104 to 122): read the sonnet's form as the relationship, then go back to the Rosaline rhymes and forward to Romeo's unrhymed last speech.

• Did my heart love till now?¹ Forswear² it, sight, / For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.³

  The new love begins exactly as the old one did, sworn by the eyes and spoken to no one, so the play gives you the feeling and the doubt in the same couplet.

  In the exam

  Use it to open the fickle-or-changed debate: concede the speed, then test whether what follows the couplet is different in kind.

• If I profane¹ with my unworthiest hand / This holy shrine,² the gentle sin³ is this: / My lips, two blushing pilgrims,^4,5 ready stand / To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

  Romeo still speaks the language of worship, but now he speaks it to the woman instead of about her: the first love poem in the play that expects an answer.

  Key word: ‘unworthiest’

  He lowers himself before he reaches for her, the posture of every worshipping lover in the love poetry he has learned. The difference is that this lady's hand is in his, and she is about to tell him he is wrong.

  In the exam

  Use the pilgrim conceit to show love made sacred at the first touch, and keep the 'sin' for what it is, a joke about a kiss between strangers.

• Good pilgrim,¹ you do wrong your hand too much,² / Which mannerly devotion shows in this; / For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, / And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.³

  Romeo's poem gets its answer in its own form: for the first time in the play, the woman a love poem is spoken to speaks back inside it, so the equality can be heard before anyone states it.

  In the exam

  On a relationship question, make this your evidence that the love is mutual from its first words: count who rhymes with whom.

• You kiss by th' book.¹

  The second sonnet ends after one quatrain, on her quip, when the Nurse calls Juliet away to her mother: the first time the household cuts across the love, it comes as a parent's summons.

  In the exam

  On a relationship question, use it to show who leads: whether the line is praise or a tease, minutes after meeting him Juliet has the last word on his kisses, so the wit is hers.

• My only love sprung¹ from my only hate!²

  This is the first time Juliet says 'love' in the play (in 1.3 she would only 'look to like', and the sonnet never names it), and she names it only once she knows it is forbidden. When the Nurse asks what she said, she calls it a rhyme learned from a dancing partner: the first love she names is already a secret.

  Key word: ‘only’

  'Only' answers the Nurse's line just before, 'The only son of your great enemy': each lover is their house's only heir, so this one love holds both houses' futures.

  In the exam

  Use it as the hinge of 1.5: the sonnet shows the love answered, and this line shows it trapped.

The Chorus returns to say what is new: this time the love is returned. Romeo, hidden below the window after Mercutio's mocking, speaks the language of worship: Juliet is the sun, a ‘bright angel’ overhead. Juliet, believing herself alone, argues instead: let him ‘refuse thy name’, since a name is ‘nor hand, nor foot’. Because he has overheard her, she cannot play the courtship game, so she drops it in two words, ‘farewell compliment’, and asks him outright whether he loves her. She stops him swearing three times, doubts the speed and is the first to name marriage: ‘Thy purpose marriage’. AQA has printed this scene twice (June 2022, 2.2.2 to 26, Romeo's speech; Specimen 3, 2.2.56 to 78): from Romeo's speech, ask whose love is distant and whose is near; from either, reach the end of the scene, where Juliet doubts the speed of the vows and then gives her love without measure.

• Now Romeo is beloved and loves again,¹ / Alike² bewitchèd³ by the charm of looks,⁴

  The Chorus, which named the love only as an ending, now describes it from inside, returned and endangered at once. From here love-talk is spoken to someone who answers, so it has to plan as well as praise.

  Key word: ‘beloved’

  'Beloved' is the passive: for the first time in the play Romeo is the one loved. Every Rosaline poem was his alone, and being loved back is exactly the defence he offers the Friar the next morning.

  In the exam

  On a Romeo question, use it as the play's own statement of what changed since Rosaline, then test the doubt in its second line against the orchard.

• But soft, what light¹ through yonder window² breaks?³ / It is the East, and Juliet is the sun.⁴

  Romeo's love is still worship from below, spoken unheard to someone who cannot answer: Rosaline's posture, now aimed at a woman who will.

  In the exam

  On a Romeo's-feelings question (June 2022), set its worship from below against the speech Juliet makes next, which argues instead of praising: two ways of loving in one scene.

• What's in a name?¹ That which we call a rose² / By any other word would smell as sweet.

  Juliet's first argument about love is an argument against the feud's labels: love is the thing itself, the name only a word. The rest of the play tests whether a name can really be thrown away.

  In the exam

  Use it to show the love defying the families' words from the start, then follow the name to 'Romeo, Romeo, Romeo!' in 4.3.

• It is too rash, too unadvised², too sudden,¹ / Too like the lightning,³ which doth cease⁴ to be

  Before any adult in Verona can doubt the speed, the lover herself does, in the scene that speaks of love more than any other. That is why it reads as caution within love rather than as the play's verdict against it.

  In the exam

  Use it to answer the fickle reading: the sceptic's doubt about speed is one the lover has already voiced.

• My bounty is as boundless¹ as the sea,² / My love as deep. The more I give³ to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite.⁴

  Juliet answers her own doubt with generosity, not caution: a love as deep as the sea that grows as it is given. Fear and excess sit fifteen lines apart in one speaker.

  Key word: ‘infinite’

  'Infinite' refuses any measure at all, and the adults keep measuring her feelings: the Friar will tell Romeo to 'love moderately' (2.6), and Paris will say she weeps 'Immoderately' (4.1). Juliet has already put her love beyond their arithmetic.

  In the exam

  On a relationship question, use it to show Juliet out-giving Romeo: he asks for an 'exchange' of vows, and she answers with a love that cannot be counted.

Next morning the love meets the world, and each voice answers it in its own language: sermon, mockery or errand. The Friar hears that Rosaline is forgotten and doubts the whole thing, then agrees to marry them, hoping the match will ‘turn your households' rancor to pure love’; Romeo's defence is that this love is returned, ‘love for love’, as Rosaline's never was. Mercutio mocks the old Petrarchan Romeo as ‘already dead’ of love, and the Nurse runs the errands. Juliet waits for news alone, wishing that ‘Love's heralds should be thoughts’: AQA's June 2024 extract, set on her difficulties, so from it reach the love's speed and its cost. The man who warns against haste is the one who hurries the wedding, and Shakespeare keeps the wedding itself offstage: the first thing the marriage produces is a fight, and the next time the lovers speak to each other it is to part.

• Young men's¹ love then lies² / Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.³

  The play's sceptic is its priest: the man who will marry the lovers diagnoses young men's love as eyesight. The verdict fits Romeo and Rosaline; whether it fits Romeo and Juliet is the question the play leaves open.

  In the exam

  Use it as the counter-argument in a relationship essay, then answer it with Romeo's own reply that Juliet gives 'love for love'.

• These¹ violent² delights have violent ends³

  Love's danger is named by the man about to hurry it into a wedding, and his next image for how such joys end is a kiss: fire and powder that 'as they kiss, consume'. The love's own act is already its picture of destruction.

  In the exam

  Use it to show the play voicing a judgement against the speed, then ask whether the ending bears it out: Romeo dies 'with a kiss'.

• They are but beggars that can count their worth,¹ / But my true love is grown to such excess² / I cannot sum up sum³ of half my wealth.⁴

  The lover who called the vows 'too rash' in the orchard arrives at her wedding speaking of love's 'excess': her doubt has not been answered, only overtaken by the wedding.

  In the exam

  Use it for the double judgement in a single scene: the play states the Friar's moderation and makes you feel Juliet's excess.

The same afternoon as the wedding, love walks into the street. Romeo, now Tybalt's kinsman by a marriage nobody on stage knows of, answers 'villain' with ‘the reason that I have to love thee’ and calls him ‘good Capulet’. Nobody can understand why: Mercutio draws, is fatally wounded under Romeo's arm, and Romeo rereads his peace as softness and kills Tybalt. After nine scenes in which it is central, love dips here. Then Shakespeare places Juliet's wedding song straight after the killings: alone and not knowing, she calls night and Romeo together. When the news comes, her oxymorons split him in two, and within twenty-five lines she chooses him over her cousin, aloud. In 3.3 Romeo, hearing 'banishèd', finds ‘no world without Verona walls’. AQA has printed 3.2 three times (Specimen 2, the wedding song; November 2021, the oxymorons; June 2023, the ‘banishèd’ speech, which opens on her choice of husband over cousin): whichever you get, place it straight after 3.1.

• Thy beauty hath made me effeminate¹ / And in my temper² softened valor's steel.³

  At the play's exact midpoint Romeo rereads the love as weakness, in the street's word for it. The love made him a peacemaker; the code renames that peace as softness, and he chooses the code.

  In the exam

  Use it to show love losing to honour at the hinge, 'effeminate' being Romeo's word and not the play's, then set it against Juliet's 'Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?' in the next scene, where love wins the same contest.

• Come,¹ night. Come, Romeo. Come, thou day in night,² / For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night / Whiter than new snow³ upon a raven's back.⁴

  Night is Juliet's ally because it hides: a secret marriage can only be lived where Verona cannot see it.

  In the exam

  From the Specimen 2 extract, argue that the love now belongs to the dark: set her call for night against the torches of 1.5 and the daylight that parts the lovers in 3.5.

• O, I have bought¹ the mansion² of a love / But not possessed it, and, though I am sold,³ / Not yet enjoyed.⁴

  Her impatience comes minutes after the audience has watched Tybalt die and heard Romeo banished, so 'Not yet' is sincere and ominous at once: we hear desire from a bride who does not know what her wedding day has done.

  Key word: ‘possessed’

  'Possessed' holds a buyer's sense (she owns the house but has not moved in) and a lover's. Romeo reaches for the word in Mantua, after their one night: 'love itself possessed' (5.1) must be sweeter, he thinks, than any dream of it. The possession Juliet waits for here is granted once, and the false news of her death arrives moments after he names it.

  In the exam

  On an attitudes question (Specimen 2), use it to show Juliet's love as desire as well as devotion, spoken in her world's market words.

• Beautiful tyrant,¹ fiend angelical!²

  The love is tested for the first time by knowledge rather than distance: until now Juliet has loved Romeo without knowing what he could do.

  In the exam

  On a Juliet's-feelings question, read it as the love under strain rather than a verdict on Romeo, then follow it twenty-five lines to her choice of him.

• Shall I speak ill¹ of him that is my husband?²

  Here the love stops being something Juliet feels and becomes something she keeps: a husband's name to defend, in front of the woman who raised her.

  In the exam

  On a feelings question (June 2023), use it as the turn from emotion to decision, and follow that decision to 4.1 and 5.3.

While the lovers spend their only night together, Capulet promises Paris his daughter's love without asking her. At dawn the play's governing image turns over: in the orchard light meant love, and now daylight means Romeo's death, so Juliet renames the lark a nightingale to keep him. When Romeo accepts her fiction and the death it brings, she gives it up herself and sends him away: each now puts the other's life first. This dawn song is the last time the lovers speak to each other, and the only time they talk as husband and wife. They part on a shared couplet, ‘More light and light, more dark and dark our woes’, and Juliet sees him below ‘As one dead in the bottom of a tomb’. Then every adult in the house fails her, the Nurse last of all. The dawn song (3.5.1 to 36) has never been printed; AQA's two 3.5 extracts (June 2018, June 2025) come after Romeo has gone, so from either, reach back to the dawn.

• Sir Paris, I will make a desperate¹ tender² / Of my child's love. I think she will be ruled / In all respects by me.³ Nay, more, I doubt it not.⁴

  On the night the lovers spend together, the father offers 'my child's love': his love for Juliet is real, and it speaks for her.

  Key word: ‘child's’

  The possessive gives the love to Juliet in the same breath as he gives it away, and he names her a child in the sentence that offers her as a wife. He calls the love hers and treats it as his; it is already a wife's.

  In the exam

  For 'attitudes towards love' in the plural, use it as a parent's love that speaks for the child, and set it against 1.2, where he told Paris to win her heart.

• It was the nightingale,¹ and not the lark, / That pierced² the fearful hollow of thine ear.

  They spend the dawn arguing with the clock. The girl who found the love 'too sudden' in the orchard now wants time itself to stop for it.

  In the exam

  On a relationship question, use the dawn song to show the love at its most tender and most threatened at once, just before the house comes in.

• I have more care to stay than will to go.¹ / Come death and welcome.² Juliet wills it so.

  Romeo, the realist a moment before, takes her fiction and the death it brings as a gift to her: on this morning his love is a readiness to die for her wish, not only for her.

  In the exam

  On a Romeo's-feelings or relationship question, show each lover choosing the other's wish over their own life.

• I think it best¹ you married with the County.²

  The advice comes from love of Juliet, not of Paris: the Nurse wants her safe, and to her love follows the husband who is present, while to Juliet it follows the vow.

  In the exam

  On a Nurse question, trace her view from 'Women grow by men' (1.3) to this line: it never changes, which is exactly why it fails Juliet now.

Romeo is absent for all of Act 4, and love sinks to its lowest point in the play: kept by Juliet alone, in secret, against everyone in her house. The only man who courts her in this act is Paris, who greets her as ‘my lady and my wife’; she answers him in double meanings, ‘it is not mine own’, and tells the Friar she will face anything to live an ‘unstained wife to my sweet love’. In 4.3, alone with the vial, she imagines every way the plan could fail, and drinks. The rest of the act prepares her wedding to Paris around a girl who seems to be dead, and Paris laments ‘love in death’ without knowing what he names. No AQA extract has come from Act 4: bring it to every love answer as the place where the love is kept rather than spoken.

• God joined my heart¹ and Romeo's, thou our hands²

  The sacred language of the first sonnet comes back as a binding vow, held when it costs most and spoken to the priest who made the marriage. The love is now a marriage she keeps alone.

  In the exam

  Use it to argue that the second half tests the love and finds loyalty, and that the test falls on Juliet.

• Romeo, Romeo, Romeo!¹ Here's drink.² I drink to thee.³

  4.3 does not use the word 'love' once: the love is carried by a name and a toast. It is the love at its most solitary and its most resolved.

  In the exam

  On a Juliet's-feelings question, use it to show the love in Act 4 as action rather than words: she weighs every fear, and drinks.

Romeo's love returns in Mantua as a happy dream, then as a decision in a single line when the wrong news reaches him first. In the tomb two loves meet. Paris strews flowers on her bridal bed and dies asking to lie beside her; Romeo finds the vault ‘full of light’, calls her ‘my wife’ for the only time in the play, and dies with a kiss, in unrhymed verse. The lovers never speak to each other here: he dies before she wakes. She refuses the Friar, takes Romeo's dagger and dies in less than two lines. Then the families honour the love with two golden statues, and the Prince gives the lovers back their names, Juliet's first. No AQA extract has come from 5.3, but the mark schemes send answers here, so bring the tomb into every love answer.

• Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee¹ tonight.² / Let's see for means.³

  Romeo's love has lost its rhymes and paradoxes and kept its speed. In 1.1 he talked about a woman to his friend; alone in Mantua, he talks straight to his wife, by name, though she cannot hear him.

  In the exam

  On a Romeo question, set it against 'O brawling love' (1.1) to show how far his language has changed, and how little his haste has.

• Sweet flower,¹ with flowers thy bridal bed² I strew / (O woe, thy canopy is dust and stones!) / Which with sweet water nightly I will dew, / Or, wanting that, with tears distilled by moans. / The obsequies that I for thee will keep / Nightly shall be to strew thy grave and weep.³

  Paris's grief is a ritual with a timetable ('Nightly'), the slow love the Friar preached, and within minutes Romeo arrives with no patience at all.

  In the exam

  Use Paris as the foil: set his rhymed sestet against Romeo's unrhymed last speech to show what the lovers' love has left behind.

• Here's to my love.¹ O true apothecary,² / Thy drugs are quick.³ Thus with a kiss I die.⁴

  After a speech crowded with conceits (Death as an 'amorous' rival keeping her as 'his paramour', his body a 'seasick weary bark' run onto the rocks), Romeo ends in short, plain sentences. His love and his death are named in two lines, and devotion and haste become one gesture.

  In the exam

  On a Romeo's-feelings question, weigh devotion against haste in this one act, and say which the play makes you feel more.

• Thy lips are warm!¹

  The lovers' last exchange is a kiss given to a body, by each in turn: he kissed her believing her dead; she kisses him hoping to find poison on his lips, and finds them warm.

  In the exam

  Use it to show the relationship ending without a single word between them, the one thing the shared sonnet had.

• O, happy¹ dagger,² / This is thy sheath.³ There rust,⁴ and let me die.⁵

  Juliet's love ends as she kept it through Act 4, alone and by her own decision: with the Friar gone and the Watch approaching, the last choice in the love story is hers.

  In the exam

  End a feelings or relationship essay on Juliet's last choice, then set the private union she wanted against the public story the Prince makes of it, 'never was a story of more woe'.

• For never was a story of more woe¹ / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.²

  The love ends as Verona's story, told by a Prince who never saw the lovers alive together. Its last form is a pair of names, the thing Juliet once argued did not matter.

  In the exam

  End a 'how far' answer here: weigh whether a love remembered as a story and a statue has beaten Verona or been absorbed by it.