ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the private story outlined in the Prologue: "the passage of their death-marked love". Passage is an active word: it implies a journey, and that journey can be charted by Romeo and Juliet's use of language. It also focuses on the arrangement into verse and prose and how William Shakespeare uses poetry to create characterizations. There is a tendency in writing about this play to lump the title characters together, to talk about them as if they are the same people on the same journey. Shakespeare uses elementary playwriting tools to differentiate them right at the beginning. Romeo speaks almost nonstop in his first scene. Shakespeare introduces Juliet in a scene of some 105 lines and she speaks only seven of them. Romeo is defined in the context of a competitive world of male posturing and violence.
