Hello and welcome to "Read it and (Don't) Weep," the podcast that will help you breeze through your high school literature classes. Are you tired of struggling to understand the themes and characters in classic works of literature? Well, I’ve got you covered! I am your host, Jackey Taggart, and I taught high school English for almost 20 years. 

Join me each episode as I dive into the world of high school literature and break down the essential elements of each work. From Shakespeare to Steinbeck, I'll cover it all. My goal is to give you valuable insights and analysis on some of the most popular high school literary texts, as well as tips and tricks for acing your tests and essays.  Let’s start reading!

Welcome back!  In this episode, we are moving into  Act 2 of Romeo and Juliet.  If you have not yet read Act 1, it would be a good idea to get caught up with your reading and listen to my other episodes before continuing.

Act 2 Prologue

Alright, let’s get started with Act 2. Act 1 was a lot of exposition where we got to know almost all of the characters. There's another really important character that we'll meet in Act 2, but we learned about Romeo and Juliet, we know that their families are feuding, and now they've fallen in love, which is the complication. Now in Act 2, we are going to get into a lot more action as well as more complications that are going to come up in their relationship.

If you want to look at the action of the play as a timeline, the Capulets' party was on a Sunday, so Act 2 opens either really late Sunday night or very early Monday morning. 

Act 2 begins with another Prologue, which is very similar to the Prologue at  the beginning of Act 1. They are both sonnets, 14 lines of iambic pentameter, same rhyme scheme, so you can look at the quatrains, break them down, and that's how you can figure out what is being said in the prologue. This is very important information because it gives the audience information that we wouldn't necessarily have without the chorus telling us.  We have already reviewed two sonnets in Act 1, so I am not going to break this one down by quatrain or couplet. You can do this on your own so you can practice. 

To begin, read the first five lines of the Prologue:

“Now old desire doth in his death-bed lie, / And young affection gapes to be his heir; / That fair for which love groaned for and would die, / With tender Juliet matched is now not fair./ Now Romeo is beloved and loves again,”

In the first two lines, Romeo’s love for Rosaline is personified as old and dying, while his love for Juliet is young and just waiting to take the place of the dying lover.    In case you are not familiar with the term, personification is giving human actions or qualities to inanimate objects or emotions.  So, Romeo’s love is the emotion being personified in these lines. 

Essentially, Romeo is no longer in love with Rosaline, and he's head over heels in love with Juliet. Now, feel free to disagree with me, but this is one of the key reasons I dislike Romeo.  Not even 12 hours ago, he was sad and depressed because Rosaline didn’t love him, and he was never going to be able to live without her. But faster than lightning can strike, he is head over heels in love with Juliet and doesn’t even give Rosaline another thought. He really needs to get a grip on his emotions!

Back to the Prologue.  Romeo now needs to figure out how to ask his foe, Lord Capulet, for his daughter's hand in marriage because he wants to marry her immediately. The best part is that Juliet loves him back. So, this forbidden love sets the stage for the remainder of the action in the play. 

As the Prologue ends,  the young couple is determined to meet again, which is going to change their destiny. I know I keep coming back to this, but the Prologue at the beginning of Act Two reinforces the concept of “star-crossed lovers,” which is very important.  If something is written in the stars, it means that it was meant to be – fate, destiny, and nothing or no one can keep it from happening.   If the stars are crossed, then it is the opposite.  The lovers are doomed from the start. Their stars are misaligned, and their love was not meant to be.   Anytime we talk about star-crossed, we are talking about ill-fated, and their destiny is not meant to be together. Something is going to go wrong, which we know about from the first prologue, and they are going to die.

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Act 2, Scene 1

So that is the Prologue in a nutshell. Now, let’s move into Act 2, Scene 1. It's a very short scene, but it's important because it sets up some of the action that will take place later in the act. 

 It starts off with Romeo deciding he just can't leave the party; he can't leave Juliet; he needs to go back and see her. So, he hops over the orchard wall and ditches Mercutio and Benvolio.

Now, Mercutio and Benvolio start calling for Romeo; they are looking for him.  They are calling his name, and he's not answering. He can hear them, but he is choosing not to answer. Mercutio, at this point, is completely annoyed with Romeo. He starts mocking Romeo for being a lovesick fool for Rosaline, mocking his behavior, and making fun of him, which is kind of ironic. It's important to remember that Mercutio still thinks that Romeo is in love with Rosaline. The irony is that we, the audience, knows that Romeo  is no longer in love with Rosaline; he has totally and completely forgotten about her, "Rosaline who?" and is in love with Juliet, but his friends don't know that yet; they have no idea. This is referred to as dramatic irony, when the audience knows something that the characters on stage do not.  We will come back to this later in the play and discuss it in more detail. 

So Benvolio, being a good friend, says to Mercutio, "Hey, you need to knock it off because you are being really rude and really ignorant. If Romeo could hear you right now, he wouldn't be very happy with you." Mercutio, who isn't about to be told what to do, says, "Oh yeah, love is blind? Well, if love is blind, how are you going to hit a target you can’t see." 

Benvolio and Mercutio finally decide Romeo doesn't want to be around them, so they leave, which brings Act 2, scene 1 to a close.  

Before ending, reflect on Mercutio’s comments.  Do you agree with him that if love is blind, you will miss the target?  Why or why not?  What do you think he means? Jot your ideas down in your reading journal so you can refer back to them later in the play. 

Thanks for listening to this episode of Read it and (Don’t) Weep. Be sure to subscribe to the show so you will be notified when new episodes are released. If you liked today’s show, please leave a review so others can discover my show.  If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, drop me an email at readitanddontweep@gmail.com, or reach out to me on social media. I would love to hear from you. The links are in the show notes.  

Thank you for listening.  I am Jackey Taggart and remember to Read It and Don’t Weep. 

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