Context — Romeo and Juliet — AQA GCSE English Literature 8702
AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The Elizabethan context of Romeo and Juliet: Shakespeare's source, Arthur Brooke's poem, and the tragedy of 'star-cross'd lovers',
marriage, fathers and daughters in Elizabethan England, honour, duelling and the feud, Petrarch and the sonnet, and fate and the stars.
How to use this context in an answer about the play rather than as background.
Tragedy and the tragic hero, and how the Prologue tells the audience the ending before the play begins.
Shakespeare's source, Arthur Brooke's poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), and how Shakespeare compresses its nine months into a few days.
Petrarch and the sonnet: Romeo's love for Rosaline as a fashionable pose, and the lovers' shared sonnet.
Fathers, daughters and marriage in Elizabethan England, and Juliet's age.
Honour, the duel and the feud, the Prince's law, and Elizabethan belief in fate and the stars.
