Romeo and Juliet: The Sonnet Research Paper

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This signal or turn in the poem is called the volta.

The other type of sonnet is called the English sonnet. Many sonnets were written in the English language in the Italian style, which can seem confusing. For this reason, the English sonnet is also called the Shakespearian sonnet, as Shakespeare is the most famous writer to have used this form. The poems are in iambic pentameter, just like English-language Italian sonnets, and have fourteen lines, rhyme structure, and even a sort of volta, but that is where the similarity between the English ad Italian sonnets ends. The Shakespearian sonnet is arranged in three quatrains, each four lines long, and a closing couplet. The rhyme scheme usually stays consistent for each quatrain, but the rhymes themselves change, and the final two lines of the poem rhyme with each other which is known as an heroic couplet, resulting in a rhyme scheme that looks like this: abab cdcd efef gg. There is also a volta sometimes at the start of the third quatrain or in the first line of the couplet (the thirteenth or second-to-last line of the poem), which often flips the rest of the sonnet upside-down, figuratively speaking.

The sonnet that Romeo and Juliet share is Shakespearian, which might seem a little obvious. The way it is split up is very clever and funny, though. First, Romeo has a quatrain in which he takes and kisses Juliet's hand. He compares the rough touch of his hand to a kiss, and says his lips are "pilgrims" that will repent for the sin. This is a clever way for him to move in for the real thing (a kiss, that is). Juliet plays off of his words and acts hard to get, using the second quatrain of the sonnet to say that his hand wasn't so bad, because even saints have hands, and that pilgrims are supposed to kiss using only their palms (as they would be folded together in prayer).

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This is where Shakespeare really starts spicing it up by splitting the next quatrain between the two soon-to-be lovers. Romeo, playing off of Juliet's mention of saint's hands, asks if saints and pilgrims don't also have lips. Juliet responds that they use their lips for prayer, and Romeo uses this to suggest that lips should pray as hands do -- that is they should be pressed together. He then practically begs her for a kiss, saying "grant thou, lest faith turn to despair." The closing couplet is also split between the two; Juliet says "Saints do not move, though grant for prayer's sake," saying her lips (or herself), the "saint" of the two of them, won't move for the kiss, but that she will grant it. Romeo finishes the sonnet by signaling his eager acceptance of these terms: "Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take." Because he -- the "pilgrim" -- has prayed to her -- the "saint" -- his prayer is granted, but he has to be the one to do the action. This reveals certain mores about gender and sexual expression that are still with us today, but more than that it expresses the lust -- or love, if you like -- that Romeo feels for Juliet and that she is certainly caught up in......

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