Rome and Juliet Essay Example for Free

Rome and Juliet Essay The prologue is the introduction, which gives an overview of the play. It tells us what happens at the end of the play, in this case in Romeo and Juliet it is told in the introduction, for example the lines, a pair of star-crossd lovers take their life, doth with their death bury their parents strife. These two lines say that Romeo and Juliet both deep in love with each other, die at the end of the play, the reason being that their parents hated each other. It also sets the scene of Fair Verona and it explains the contents of the play, Two households, and break to new mutiny. The prologue is said by the chorus. This means it is an idea of a group of people taken from ancient Greek tradition. The prologue does not introduce the audience to the characters in the play; it just talks briefly about the events within the play. It is self consciously dramatic. It emphasises its purpose in telling the story, Is now the two hours traffic of our stage. It directly tells the audience to pay attention, The which if you with patient ears attend, what here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend, and the play will develop from what the prologue has been revealing. In Franco Zefirellis production of Romeo and Juliet, the prologue is very brief and short. The film starts off with the details, the opening credits. The font to the credits is in white and in a quite gothic style of writing making it fit in with the traditional theme. While the details are slowly appearing on the screen, around the screen there is a thin border of orange geometric shapes on a yellow background. As the border is so bright and colourful, it is able to immediately catch the audiences eyes and therefore grabs their attention. The border suggests a very sixties styles. You would probably expect a more formal, dark edged kind of border. A soft and slow melody played on a harpsichord plays quietly in the background. The effect that Zefirelli tries to create here is to create a nice calm beginning to the play. In shot one, you can see the camera panning over the city of Fair Verona and slightly out of focus. The light is blue and hazy, gradually brightening up as the camera pans, suggesting that it is dawn. The colour of the light in the sky shining over the city, creates a dreamy and peaceful effect, and adds to the beauty of the city that is being shown. You could only just make out the tops of tall buildings and churches at first, but as it gradually gets lighter, the buildings and other features become more into focus. The rooftops of houses, church spires and a river are seen clearly. You are able to feel the quietness of the city in the early morning, which again gives the effect of the city being very calm and peaceful. The camera pans round the whole city, and then moves up towards the sun and stop with the sun being directly in the middle of the screen shot. The sun suggests the hot foreign climate of a hot foreign country, such as Italy. Shakespeares name appears when the camera has stop panning and focused on the sun. All of this equals one continuos shot. The panning is slow, and the brightening of the day is slow, creating a slow pace to the shot. It gives me the impression of a slow climax to the prologue, getting more and more intense as it goes along, and stopping at the sun gives me the impression that it represents the end, with an either tragic end or a very happy end. I think that it is trying to relate to the whole play itself, with the gradual climax with an intense ending. Throughout shot one, the speaker slowly recites the prologue in a poetic style. He speaks slowly going with the steady flow of the slow motion of the panning of the camera, so that it would not effect the backgrounds creation of peace. The speaker of the prologue is a man whose voice is gentle, soothing and rhythmic as he echoes the prologue. He still speaks when going into the second shot. Shot two is of a medieval courtyard. In front of the courtyard there is the city wall with battlements made of stone and brick, which gives the impression of the setting being in the medieval times. The camera stops moving and shows the shot of the courtyard while the speaker finishes reciting the prologue. As he completes his speech of the prologue, the camera moves slightly round to the left, which shows that where the camera is next to the city wall, it is also one of the ends of a busy marketplace. The suns golden bright morning light shines over the city wall and through the street of the marketplace, representing that it is the start of a new day. The sound of the hustle and bustle of a busy marketplace gradually builds up and the first act of the first scene begins there. This effect is to bring in the play with a more calm start and not rushing into the play with a different shot, bringing the audience into a slow and calm beginning. Zefirelli does not create any huge special effects. The title of the play, Romeo and Juliet appears as the speaker says the words star-crossed lovers. Zefirellis purpose of having the title and the words star-crossed lovers coming up at the same time, is to reinforce visually and aurally the main point of the play that it is a tragic story about the lovers Romeo and Juliet. Baz Luhrmanns version of the prologue is done in much more detail and is emphasised a huge amount more. Luhrmann tries to grab the attention of the audience with very fast moving screen shots and very lively music. The first shot that comes up on the screen is of a TV with a blank screen, and the distance between the camera and the TV is very far, making the TV look very small in the distance. The first sound is the fuzziness of a TV, and then on the screen of the TV, the opening credits are displayed on white tiles with a black background. The contrast between the colours gives a very sharp effect. This gives a very different first effect on the audience compared to Zefirellis opening shot. Luhrmanns first shot of the bold white tiles with a black background, gets the audiences attention straight away. After the credits, a female newsreader appears on the TV screen, and she reads aloud the prologue. She says the prologue like reading aloud a news report rather than in a poetic sonnet way. This makes the prologue subtle and it makes the audience think twice before realising that it is the prologue that she is saying. The subtle speaking of the prologue differs with Zefirellis make of the prologue being obvious to opening up the film. Beside the newsreader in the background, there is a small picture with some text underneath it. As the camera is in the far distance, it makes it hard to see what the picture and text are, which makes the audience wonder what it is. While the newsreader is saying the prologue, the camera subtly zooms in directly towards the screen, and the picture in the corner gradually comes into focus. The picture is of a broken ring with the text underneath it saying Star crossd lovers. The symbolism of the broken ring is that the lovers end up being torn away from each other. After the newsreader says the twelfth line of the prologue, the camera suddenly picks up speeds and zooms right into the TV screen, through a high street. At the same time the words, Fair Verona constantly flashes up in white with a black background. From the zooming, it has merged from one background into another. This sudden pick up of speed would as if wake up the audience and shocking them as the screen had suddenly gone from one shot to another. This is very unlike Zefirellis presentation of the prologue, as he keeps his prologue simple and calm all the way through, whereas Luhrmann uses the effect of zooming and flashing words up creating a dramatic scene. The reason of flashing the words, Fair Verona while the camera rushes down the high street, is to make the audience understand the comparison and realise exactly how fair Verona really is in his version of the film. It shows a decaying urban landscape contradicting fair Verona. The font style of the writing is bold like Arial, and is in block capitals, making it clear to the audience what it says. In Zefirellis, as the camera pans over the city, you can see that Verona is very pretty and fair, as the prologue says it is. As the camera reaches the end of the street, the camera is suddenly focused on the face of a statue, which was far in the distance from where the zooming into the street began. Very dramatic music starts to be played loudly, which produces a bigger effect on grabbing the audiences attention. The camera then pulls back to view the tops of two corporate buildings with the statue in the middle. The buildings have big signs on the top of them. They are the names of the two households, Capulet and Montague. They are in different colours, Capulet in red and Montague in blue. The differences in the colours emphasise the difference between the two. The effect of having the statue splitting the two buildings up is to make the point clear, that the two households need something or someone to keep them apart to avoid causing major trouble in the city, as they absolutely despise each other. The statue shown actually represents Jesus Christ. It is Jesus Christ who is trying to control the families and bringing some peace to the city. In Zefirellis version, the point that the two families cannot stand each other is not emphasised. As the prologue is said in the same tone and way all the way through and the pictures are just of how fair Verona is, does not give a definite and clear point that the two households are major enemies. Luhrmann makes it visual to the audience, the hate between the two families. The next part of the introduction to Luhrmanns production of Romeo and Juliet, is of a rapid chain of clips from one to the other including clips of police cars with VBPD on the side of them standing for Verona Beach Police Department. This is shown to tell the audience that this is Verona Beach and not fair Verona. The chain of clips also includes clips of helicopters, clips of the disaster from different viewpoints, some far up in the sky, some close up to casualties who were injured, and the damage done to the city by this one disaster brought up because of the hate between the Capulets and the Montagues. The disaster is emphasised in this rapid succession of clips, to stress how much damage can be caused by one incident done by the two families. It also makes the audience think and imagine if this one incident caused so much damage, the amount of damage that they probably had done to the city in the past and what would be done in the future. The prologue is said once again while another variety of images using other media of newspaper articles and magazine covers appear. This time, the prologue is said by a character whom is actually in the play, referring to how the prologue is traditionally said by the chorus. The character who speaks the prologue is Friar Lawrence, and he says it in a poetic way, and this time the rhythm of a sonnet is emphasised. A man with a soft, gentle and low voice speaks the prologue like it is in Zefirellis production. This is one similarity that the two productions have. As he speaks, some words of the prologue is emphasised by magazine headlines appearing, using the effect of spinning one on top of the other. The headlines include New Mutiny and Civil Blood Makes Civil Hands Unclean. These headlines are to tell the audience and remind them the symbolism and reasoning behind each word in the prologue. There is also a faint background of burning flames when these headlines appearing as if showing the damage done. The images however, some are of like modern day newspapers and magazines. The camera slowly pans through a rack of different covers, and the headline of each newspaper and magazine are all referring to the feud caused between the two households, emphasising that they produce big issues in the city. Other images in this group of images include police taking charge of the situation in a live kind of view, showing how fast the police and other services had to respond to reduce the risk of more damage happening. The police and fire departments had to work into the night with the clearing up of the situation. This is known as the images are taken from broad daylight into the dark night. These images give the audience a visual understanding of how bad it is of the two households hating each other, which can cause so many innocent people in the city to be harmed. As the speaking of the prologue comes to an end, with the two lines A pair of star crossd lovers, take their life with the lines shown in white writing on a black background. This effect by now would be recognised by the audience by now as it had been used before to state the words Fair Verona. This effect of repeating jogs the audiences memories reminding them again and again the importance of the lines in the prologue. As the prologue stops being spoken, the same dramatic music becomes loud again. Each of the main characters are shown one by one with a pause on each with the text describing who each of the characters are and how they are either related to Romeo or Juliet or what the purpose of the character is in the film. This presentation of the character echoes the style of how it was done in famous program called Dallas. In Zefirellis version, the characters were not introduced and the film got right into the first scene once the prologue was spoken. A shot of Romeo looking through the narrow gap of a door appears, and then the camera immediately changes its angle to show what he see, which is a church aisle with blue neon crosses and candles. The angles that these two shots were taken were both through a narrow opening of the door. The first shot was taken from the inside of the church looking at Romeo, the man standing outside the door, and the second shot was taken from the outside of the door looking into the church. It emphasises what Romeo had seen, which the audience can assume is Juliet lying on the alter at the end of the aisle, Romeo thinking that she had really died. It also symbolises with that it was the conclusion and the end, viewing Romeo and the crosses, show that they were linked together and producing the idea of death. There was one more series of fast moving clips and a rush of lines as a final wind up to the prologue. There are a variety of different clips of things that happen from the beginning of the play to the end. The repeating of the clips again and again produce permanent images into the minds of the audience. The prologue ends with the words take their life and move onto the first act. The words take their life are stated to tell the audience that the story line would conclude with something relevant to it. I think that it is a new technique Luhrmann has used. He uses the technique of grabbing the attention of the audience and makes them concentrate. The prologue being reinforced by being presented for the third time, does not makes the audience get bored and tire of the clips being seen and seen again, but make them more excited about the film. I think that both Zefirelli and Luhrmann were trying to represent Romeo and Juliet in a different way, with different techniques. The prologue was of course interpreted differently. Zefirelli presented the prologue in his production in a gentle and calm way all the way through giving the audience a good idea of the peace and beauty of Verona. Luhrmann of course presented the prologue in a different way, almost a complete contrast to what Zefirelli did. He changed Fair Verona into urban sprawled Verona. I think that the presentations of the prologue were both appropriate for their interpretations because Zefirelli wanted to keep his production of Romeo and Juliet original and alike Shakespeare. Luhrmann wanted to interpret the play into something slightly more modern and unlike Shakespeares original version. In Luhrmanns production he emphasised the complications between the two households and the alterations he had made to the film, like how he set his production in an urban city and called it Verona Beach instead of setting it in the original city of Verona in Italy.

The Mirror of Time and Memory. :: Essays Papers

The Mirror of Time and Memory. Live in the house-and the house will stand. I will call up any century, Go into it and build myself a house†¦ With shoulder blades like timber props I help up every day that made the past, With a surveyor’s chain I measure time And traveled through as if across the Urals. I only need my immortality For my blood to go on flowing from age to age. I would readily pay with my life For a safe place with constant warmth Were it not that life’s flying needle leads me on Through the world like a thread. Arseniy Tarkovsky The films of Andrey Arsen’evitch Tarkovsky fall into the separate genre of cinematic creations: they are more than drama or psychological thriller, more than philosophical cinema. Although Tarkovsky’s work has been deeply influenced with such prominent film directors as Kurosawa, Bunuel or Antonioni, the poetry of his father, Arseniy Tarkovsky, Boris Pasternak and many other Russian poets and writers, his films manage to form something completely unique to the mind of their director, convey a diaphanous psychological message. His cinematography is a celebration, a theatre of â€Å"imprinted time,† trapped with the skillful techniques of the plot-creating and camera usage of the director. As if in the ‘Zone’ of his Staler the art of Andrey Tarkovsky freezes the moment, the gasp of time, enclosed into almost sculpture-like solid creation that opens up to the viewer its nostalgic breeze. The time exists, it crystallizes in form of faerie, elfish ara besque figures and characters and yet it evaporates filling the space with a sense of solitude and sorrow for the past. Tarkovsky’s film Zerkalo or otherwise known as Mirror is a story of the human life; it is not quite a celebration of it; but rather a depiction of the web of the human senses. It is an autobiographic tribute to his abandoned by her husband during the war years mother, filled with the feelings of grief and amusement with her zealous self-sacrifice for the sake of her children. The narrator, or perhaps Tarkovsky himself, is trying to appease his guilty with indifference and scorn conscience with the memories of his childhood and attempts to relive or even incarnate the experiences of his past. The problems of the past are reflected and repeated in the present. Remembering Proust, Tarkovsky describes the effect of finishing Mirror:† Childhood memories which for years had given me no peace suddenly vanished, as if they had melted away, and at last I stopped dreaming about the house where I had lived so many years before .

Analysis of Fire and Ice by Robert Forst Essay

This article tries to analyze the unique features in structure, words, phonology, syntax and rhetoric in the poem of 40-Love by British poet Roger McGough in order to have a deeper understanding of the content and form of a poem. Keywords: McGough, 40-Love, Love, Style 1. Introduction It is well known that in a variety of literary genres, the form of poetry has been stressed most. Efforts have been exerted on the skillful combination of rhythm and structure to create numerous great works all over the world. Modern American poet E. E. Cummings (1884-1962) is a good case in point. He is famous for odd style, novel and unique form in the poetic world. His â€Å"l (a† has been regarded as the â€Å"the most elegant and beautiful structure of the literature created by Cummings†. (Kennedy, 1980). Therefore, his poems are renowned as â€Å"poem picture† or â€Å"visual poetry†, or the concrete poetry that we are quite familiar with. The features of it is that vivid visual images of words coming from irregular syllables, letters, punctuation, syntax, format and print strengthen the internal imagination of poetry, deepen the artistic conception, convey and enrich the connotation. (Abrams, 2005). Coincidentally, besides E. E. Cummings, contemporary British poet Roger McGough (1937- ) is another master in writing concrete poems. His 40-Love can be considered as one of the greatest concrete poems. McGough is the second of the three in Liverpool Group. The other two are Henry Adrian Henri and Patan Brian Patten. McGough, born in 1937, 5 years younger than Henry, is always in naughty mentality. His poems are full of secular fun and display more profound life from the perspective of a child. This article, from the viewpoint of stylistics, analyzes the features of structure, words, phonology, syntax and rhetoric in the poem of â€Å"40-Love† in order to gain a eeper understanding of this poem. 2. Stylistic Analysis Greek poet Simonides once said, â€Å"Poetry is the picture with sound while the pictures are the silent poems. † (Zhu, 2005). That is to say, the content of a poem must be combined with its form to achieve its perfection, namely, the combination of form and spirit, what we often cheris h. Here we will try to find how Mcgough do it in his â€Å"40-Love†. The poem tells that a middle-aged couple is playing tennis. Then they go home. But the net is still between them. It reflects the gap between middle-aged couples. I will quote the poem here to help to explain my opinion. 40-Love (Peng, 2000) middle couple tenwhen game and go the 118 aged playing nis the ends they home net Asian Social Science will be tween 2. 1 Structure still be – them June, 2009 As a whole, the poem has a total of 20 words. But the two words â€Å"tennis† and â€Å"between† are separated by hyphens to be symmetric in structure. The words in the poem are set in two sequences, like two sides of the couple. The middle blank or empty is like a net to separate the two. There are only two words in each line to symbolize the bouts of the ball. The title of 40-love, the top of the net, is right on the top of the poem, signifying the scoreboard. This poem looks like a tennis court with a net being used to separate the words. It is like a tennis game. This side serves and the other side hits back. Many bouts form the poem. The invisible net is like the barrier between the middle-aged couple. Even if they finish the tennis game, they still have the net, which still exists invisibly. However, it is this net that they can depend on to handle their marriage and have the responsibilities not to break the rules. There is a net in tennis and there are rules to obey. With the net, there are more difficulty and more interests. So, accordingly, more training and attention is a must. Imagining that, when playing tennis with no net or rules, people would feel difficult to last their games for longer period. In addition, only the letter of â€Å"L† of â€Å"Love† in the title is capitalized and the rest is de-capitalized, which shows that, to some extent, the couple has not been in the pursuit of the perfect details again, because love between the middle-aged couple has faded away. Furthermore, there is no punctuation in the whole poem, indicating that life of marriage is closed and uninteresting. Since there is no end, gap appears. 2. 2 Words The poet pays special attention to the words in the poem. First of all, the title â€Å"40-Love† one of interests embodied in the poem. The figure of 40 stands for the age of middle-aged people. And 40-Love is a scoring term in tennis. Tennis scoring is love, 15, 30 and 45 in sequence. Love here means zero. Three goals scores 40. No goals, no score. Thus, the title is of pun with two meanings. One refers to be 40-year-old love and the other is 3:0. Whether 40-year-old love is vain or not depends on attitudes of the two parties. Let come to two words of â€Å"middle† and â€Å"aged† in the first line. â€Å"Middle-aged† means people are in their midlife. The poet deliberately separates it to achieve the reunification of form and others. It also symbolizes that middle-aged husband and wife can not be integrated again. The two important words of â€Å"tennis† and â€Å"between† are placed in two vertical columns to get a metaphorical meaning that there is an invisible net in the emotional world of the man and the woman. They are not intimate any longer. Game† in the fifth line can be referred as either play game or sport. The scoring in tennis competition is more complex. Tennis game has games and sets. In a game, those who win 15, 30 and 45 will get one point. And the player who gets 6 points will win one set. In the poem, the couple does not finish even one game and go home since they hav e a deep estrangement. â€Å"Still† in the ninth line shows that the middle-aged husband and wife have ineffable anguish and can not get rid of their unpleasantness and gain relaxed though they make concessions as far as possible. 2. Phonology Words in the poem are basically monosyllabic. They are mechanical and boring to read and easy to suggest that the life of the couple is dull and lack of amenities. From the perspective of phonology, the short vowel such as /i/, is used for many times in the poem to leave the pressing impression to the readers to realize the urgent emotional crisis of the middle-aged couple. But there is slowness in the urgency. The diphthong /ei/ and / u/ are employed to slow down the speech rate and demonstrate that the middle-aged people have become calm and unhurried when dealing with things. Especially, the long vowel / i: / in â€Å"tween† in the last line leaves enough time for the middle-aged couple in crisis to think over the issue. In addition, there are rhymes in the poem, such as, middle and couple, ten and when, game and they, go and home, will and still. Rhymes here give the readers boredom, and symbolize the dull life of the middle-aged couple. Moreover, the alliterations of be and be-, tween and them, make the two words close and imply that the middle-aged husband and wife still have the ties that can not be cut off although there is a gap between them. 2. Syntax For the convenience of analysis, I rearrange the order of the whole poem: middle aged couple playing ten-nis when the game ends and they go home the net will still be be-tween them. First of all, from the angle of tense, the plain and flat present tense, used from the beginning to the right end of the poem, indicates the dull or prosaic marriage life of the middle-aged couple. Nevertheless, â⠂¬Å"playing† is used unconventionally. If â€Å"plays† is used here, readers will know that the couple play tennis often rather than occasionally. There will be not much gap between them. Playing† indicates that there is absence of regular communication between the husband and wife. It stresses that it is just at this moment that they are playing tennis. In sentence structure, there is a time adverb â€Å"when† to combine the sentence. As usual, however, there is no conjunction of â€Å"and† between the main clause and the subordinate clause. Thus â€Å"and† is added here to deliberately create a loose state, suggesting that there is no close contact between the husband and wife. And there should be an adversative conjunction of â€Å"but† in front of the next sentence â€Å"the net will still be be-tween them†. As we 119 Vol. 5, No. 6 Asian Social Science all know, an adversative conjunction word usually give people an unexpected, rising and falling impression. The word â€Å"but† is omitted here to inevitably imply that life of the middle-aged couple is no longer full of ups and downs, great happiness or sadness. 2. 5 figure of speech Poets often use figure of speech because, as Emily Dickinson once said, the mission of a poet is to â€Å"speak the truth, but to put it in an implicit way† in order to seize the readers’ interest and stimulate their imagination. In the poem of â€Å"40-love†, the poet employs the figure of speech, e. g. metaphor. On the one hand, in form, the blank along the net is like a net to suggest the gap between the middle-aged couple. On the other hand, everyday life is like playing games. Everybody hit the ball to the others. Such routine game results in no passion at last. Moreover, in my opinion, the writing technique of understatement is employed in this poem. The tone of the whole poem is calm, without any fluctuating. However, it is the deliberate understatement that discloses the theme of the poem incisively and vividly. . Conclusion This poem written by McGouph with unique style has rich connotation in its unique form. In this poem with perfect combination of the spirit and form, the emotional gap of the middle-aged couple can be discerned and expressed by the stylistic techniques in the structure, words, phonology, syntax and figure of speech. In Mending Wall, a poem written by American poet Robert Fr ost, the neighbor is intransigence and stubborn. Even at the last line of the poem, he still murmurs that â€Å"good fences make good neighbors† (GU, 2005). Every couple, therefore, especially the middle-aged couples, should pull the fence between them down, believing â€Å"good communication makes good couples†. References Abrams, M H. (2005). A Glossary of Literary Terms. Beijing: Foreign language Teaching and Reasearch Press. Gu, Zhengkun. (2005). Treasury of Appreciating English Poems, Volume of Poetry. Kennedy, Richard S. (1980). Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of EE Cummings. New York: Liveright. Peng, Yu. (2000). Two Concrete Poems. College English. Zhu, Guangqian. (2005). Poetics. Shanghai Century Publishing Group. 120

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