Romeo and Juliet NOTES

NOTES:
Dramatic Foil – A foil is a secondary character who contrasts with a major character as a way to bring out personality traits.
In Romeo and Juliet, the Nurse, the Frair, Benvolio, Mercutio are all dramatic foils.

Act A major division in the action of a play. The ends of acts are typically indicated by lowering the curtain or turning up the houselights. Playwrights frequently employ acts to accommodate changes in time, setting, characters onstage, or mood. In many full-length plays, acts are further divided into scenes, which often mark a point in the action when the location changes or when a new character enters.
Scene In drama, a scene is a subdivision of an act. In modern plays, scenes usually consist of units of action in which there are no changes in the setting or breaks in the continuity of time. According to traditional conventions, a scene changes when the location of the action shifts or when a new character enters.
Drama Derived from the Greek word dram, meaning "to do" or "to perform," the term drama may refer to a single play, a group of plays ("Jacobean drama"), or to all plays ("world drama"). Drama is designed for performance in a theater; actors take on the roles of characters, perform indicated actions, and speak the dialogue written in the script. Play is a general term for a work of dramatic literature, and a playwright is a writer who makes plays

FIVE ELEMENTS OF TRAGEDY:
1) Play must have a tragic hero
2) The hero must be fated to fall
3) The hero must have dramatic foils
4) The hero must have internal and external conflicts
5) The play raised some question about the nature of existence

ELEMENTS OF A TRAGIC HERO:
1) The tragic hero is a man of noble stature. Usually he is of noble birth
2) The tragic hero is good, though not perfect, and his fall results from his committing what Aristoltle calls “an act of injustice” either through ignorance or from a conviction that some greater good will be served. This act is, never-the-less, a criminal one ad the good hero is responsible for it even if he is totally unaware. Translated: the hero is usually virtuous in many ways, loyal to friends and family, has high moral standards, but some flaw in personality and it is this flaw that causes his downfall.
3) The hero’s misfortunate is not wholly deserved and the punishment far exceeds the crime. The audience leaves saddened by the sense of waste of human potential.
4) Though the hero may be defeated, he has dared greatly, and he gains understanding from his defeat and must become an example for others.
(Simplified: 1) Noble birth and of noble character; 2) Virtuous and loyal; 3) Has a tragic flaw; 4) Tragic flaw causes downfall; 5) The audience learns something through the characters failing).

Vocabulary List # 2

1. Rosemary:
2. Sallow:
3. Waverer:
4. Perverse:
5. Cunning:
6. Procure:
7. Lamentable:
8. Kinsmen:
9. Unwieldy:
10. Variable:

Elements of a Sonnet

Notes from today:

Elements of a Sonnet
1) 14 lines
2) 10 syllables per line (iambic pentameter- unstress stress)
3) Rhyme Scheme: abab cdcd efef gg
4) 3 Quatrains and a Couplet (this refers to idea, examples and conclusion)

18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments, love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come,
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

130
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun,
Coral is far more red, than her lips red,
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun:
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head:
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks,
And in some perfumes is there more delight,
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know,
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet by heaven I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.

THREE THINGS THE PROLOGUE DOES

1) Gives you the setting
2) Introduces the characters and outlines the plot
3) Ask the audience to pay attention



Oxymoron:

Two words with opposite meanig put together to describe something

Examples: bawling love, loving hate, cold fire, sick health

Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeare: Tragedy, Comedy and Metaphor

“The poem, the song, the picture is only water drawn from the well of people
and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink—
and in drinking, understand themselves.”
--Lorca


This unit will give students a chance to look at Shakespeare from a personal and cultural perspective. The class will break of the structure of the play Romeo and Juliet and discuss how metaphor and symbol, plot and theme work in conjunction with the development of characters and ideas. Ultimately, students will need to answer what “Romeo and Juliet” represents to our culture and what it personally means to them. Students will need to reflect on personal experience and apply it to the play.

OBJECTIVES: At the end of this unit students will be able to

Knowledge:

1) List the five elements of tragedy
2) List the five elements of a tragic hero
3) Define theme, plot, setting, foreshadow, oxymoron, soliloquy, personification, dramatic foil, metaphor, symbol, simile
4) Give the four elements of a sonnet and a brief description of traditional sonnet themes
5) Describe how sonnets are used in Romeo and Juliet
6) Define various vocabulary words from the play
7) List three things the prologue of the play does

Comprehension:

8) Identify a metaphor within a line of poetry
9) Identify the rhyme scheme of a English sonnet and break a sonnet into quatrains and couplets
10) Give a brief description of all the characters and their roles in the play
11) Given a line of dialogue identify the speaker
12) Outline the plot and break in up into exposition, inciting event, rising action, climax, falling action and catastrophe (or resolution)
13) Summarize each scene into a headline

Application

14) Demonstrate an understanding of a scene in a drawing
15) Demonstrate a relation of characters to contemporary times through a simulation called “TOO HOT FOR SHAKESPEARE: ROMEO AND JULIET LIVE ON THE JERRY SPRINGER SHOW”
16) Demonstrate an understanding of characters and acting techniques by writing out a script (including the lines, subtext, emotion or tone, and blocking) and acting out the scene from memory
17) Demonstrate an understanding of the play by writing journal entries and in-class writing assignments including a Dear Abbey Letter, interviews with citizens of Verona, Wedding Vows between Romeo and Juliet, personal responses, in-class presentations on characters.


Analysis

18) Write a persuasion paper on Romeo and Juliet.
19) In an essay compare and contrast a Shakespeare Comedy to a Shakespeare Tragedy.
20) In an essay discuss with evidence from the text who is responsible for the deaths of “the star-crossed” lovers


Synthesis

21) Write a sonnet


STUDENTS WILL BE ASSESSED IN THE FOLLOWING WAYS:

1) Class participation (this includes worksheets, homework)
2) Oral presentations and drawings
3) Individual writing (both critical and creative)
4) Character acting
5) Quizzes and Unit Final
6) Unit Project (if time permits)

ACTIVITIES TO BE INCLUDED (but not limited to)

1) short lectures
2) note guides for movies, reading and lectures
3) in-class reading/ some homework reading
4) in-class writing
5) role-plays/ simulations
6) dramatic acting of scenes and/or poems
7) drawings
8) listening to CDs related to Shakespeare
9) Projects

Romeo and Juliet

Consider the following social offenses. Rank each in order of seriousness with 1 being the most serious.

Planning to trick someone
Lying to parents
Killing someone for revenge
Advising someone to marry for money
Two families having a feud
Killing someone by mistake while fighting
Cursing
Killing someone in self-defense
Suicide
Crashing a party
Marrying against parents' wishes
Giving the finger
Picking a fight


After you get done go here and read "Romeo and Juliet in a minute"

New Vocabulary Words

Convoluted
Perpetual
Beatific
Torrent
Invigorate
Perfunctory
Insidious
Skepticism
Suffused

Fahrenheit 451

English 9 GROUP WORK

For each section of the novel do the following:

1) Overall summary of what happened
2) Pick out and explain two symbols – what they mean how the relate the overall theme(s) of the novel
3) What is the meaning of the title of your section
4) Write a monologue from the following characters point of view:
Either A) Beatty or B) Mrs. Bowles
5) If you had to direct a movie who would you cast as the characters?
6) Find pictures that represent the following: A) The characters
B) The mechanical hound
C) The Firehouse
D) The Act of Burning Books
E) The Parlor Walls


7) Find a song that fits this section.

8) Pick a scene and act it out.