Romeo and Juliet - Chapter 4

Study guide for 10th – 12th Grade

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Copywork

About This Passage

After Juliet is discovered apparently dead, Capulet names the ceremony's planned objects and sounds as signs of their reversal into mourning.

All things that we ordained festival Turn from their office to black funeral: Our instruments to melancholy bells, Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast; Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change; Ou...

Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.

Discussion Questions

Narration Prompt

Trace how Juliet's private plan is read publicly as consent and then as death, noting how speech, household action, and ritual change what the audience sees.

Discussion Questions

  1. How does Juliet's public language of repentance let Capulet recast her private resistance as consent and accelerate the wedding, and what does the scene suggest about who controls meaning once others accept it?
  2. When Juliet decides to act alone after accepting the vial, does Shakespeare present her solitude as self-possession, isolation, or both, and how does the staging keep that judgment unsettled?

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Vocabulary Builder

Item 1

A firm decision made after weighing danger. When Juliet asks Friar Lawrence to call her “resolution wise,” the word gives her desperate choice deliberate force rather than treating it as a passing emotion.

Item 2

Open agreement to a proposed act. In Friar Lawrence’s order to “give consent” to marry Paris, the word names the obedient appearance Juliet performs while keeping her plan hidden.

Item 3

A proposed answer to a serious problem. Friar Lawrence calls the vial a “remedy,” yet Juliet’s questions about poison and the vault show that this answer carries risk instead of certainty.

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Critical Thinking

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