Exercise 1 Understanding Romeo and Juliet's First Meeting
1)Examine the sonnet from Act I Sc. 5 of Romeo and Juliet presented below and try to determine the rhyming pattern. To do this read the last word of every line.
2)Then count the number of syllables per line.
3) Read a line out loud and say where you think the stress falls; is it on the first or second syllable?
4) The text is divided into 4 colored parts (the colors are arbitrary). The class should be divided into groups. Each group is responsible for paraphrasing one of the four sections of the sonnet. This should take around 20-30 minutes. Once the paraphrase is completed students should present it to the class.
5) Once you have heard all the paraprhases from your classmates in your groups consider what metaphors are used.
6) How are these conflicting metaphors reconciled?
Act I Scene 5
ROMEO [To JULIET] If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
JULIET Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
ROMEO Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
JULIET Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
ROMEO O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
JULIET Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.
ROMEO Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.
Watch this scene from Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 film version of Romeo and Juliet using Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1yIn5UNS1k
Exercise 2: The Picasso Effect and the Sonnet
The variable surface of the walls of a cave can act as bas-relief for cave paintings See the image of horses from the Chauvet caves in France discovered in 1994. The image is older than 30, 000 years: http://www.donsmaps.com/images/horse.jpg
One could wonder what possible underlying natural structure was used to construct this sonnet. See if you can identify it.
Answers to come...
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Romeo and Juliet Class Project - Instructions
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© All Copyright, 2007, Ray Genet
1 comment:
To extend my previous comment, I want to describe a pattern which matches with the sonnet. The pattern is a line which represents the beats of hearts of Romeo and Juliet.
The horizontal axis is the time and the vertical axis is the intensity of the heart's beat. The line is composed of pulses. Between each pulse, the intensity remains null. A pulse is when the line increases to a peak, decreases to hit the opposite level and slips back to the null level.
In the first part, which matches with the first and the second quatrains of the sonnet, the rhythm remains stable that is to say the interval between each pulse is the same. The height of each peak remains stable.
In the second part, which matches with the third quatrain, there is an acceleration of the rhythm and peaks grow.
In the third part, which is the couplet, the rhythm remains stable during a short time interval because Juliet says that she expects the kiss. However, the rhythm grows to reach a peak with the kiss.
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