The Importance of Act Three Scene One of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

The Importance of Act Three Scene One of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

In act 3, scene 1,Benvolio warns Mercutio that they are risking a

fight. When Tybalt arrives he is ready to fight, and challenges Romeo

as soon as he appears. Romeo has married Tybalt’s cousin so he

dismisses the challenge. Mercutio is outraged and challenges Tybalt.

As Romeo tries to stop them, Tybalt who runs away wounds Mercutio.

Mercutio dies, and when Tybalt returns, Romeo kills him and flees.

When the Prince appears and hears the reason for the murder, he

lightens the sentence of death to banishment. Romeo must leave Verona.

Romeo at the start of the play is eager and an immature boy, who

imagines he is in love with Rosaline. His talk is full of artificial

expressions of emotion and he seems to be in self-pity, but when he

meets Juliet, he falls in love with her. This is where there is a

theatrical effect on his character. He becomes more grown-up and even

attempts to make peace with Tybalt, which is Juliet’s argumentive

cousin. Even though his newfound tolerance and maturity, he remains

sudden. He has one fixed idea (marriage to Juliet), and within that,

he simply reacts to circumstances. He has mood swings from joyfulness

to gloom. Mercutio bursts into the scene with his lively humour, his

brilliantly imaginative language, contrasts with that of the maturing

Romeo and the levelheaded Benvolio. Mercutio lives life to the full;

he is humorous, fluent, loves to hear himself talk and does not suffer

fools happily. He seems not to take life or death seriously. He is

brutally horrible to Romeo and intervenes on his behalf against Tybalt

with fatal resu...

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...tion of a happy

future with Juliet and Romeo. He is lucky in that Prince Escalus is

compassionate and does not sentence him to death, but he does deports

him from Verona. Still Romeo sees this as an outcome worse than death,

because if he leaves Verona that means that it’s the end of his

relationship with adored wife Juliet. The context here is, the

certainty of the tragedy and the use of a chorus is relevant here, as

is using the verse as an expression of love. This can be also being

seen as a shared and educational comment in Elizabethan Society. He

realises that the outcome of his own life and that of others can be

determined by a single action: and that each of us has been done and

cannot be undone.

Finally, Act 3 scene 1 shows the point of no return for Romeo and

Juliet and the final tragedy rests upon this.