Rough Draft 2/#25

Analysis of Lady Capulet in William Shakespeare's play, Romeo and Juliet

Love is an eternal topic that people always talk about. A tragic love story is even more impressive and enduring throughout centuries. As one of William Shakespeare’s most famous plays, the story of Romeo and Juliet, as well as their families, is an inevitable tragedy, which includes a series of intense turning points, therefore promoting the ultimate sad ending. To portray and reveal some of the characters’ personalities, our group chose Act 3 Scene 5 from the whole play, mainly focusing on the Capulet family: Juliet, Lord and Lady Capulet. In this scene, Juliet faces a huge trouble about the coming wedding and had an extreme conflict with her parents. In response, Lord and Lady Capulet show different attitudes towards Juliet by expressing various emotions and body languages. During the course of the final performance, I tried to show Lady Capulet’s complicated but intense personalities, further demonstrating the significance of this character who promotes Juliet’s change and tragic ending indirectly, and also showing Lady Capulet’s role as an indifferent, practical and quick-tempered catalyst that pushes Juliet to take the risk and die at the end of the play.

For my character, Lady Capulet, she is such a quick-tempered woman who is concerned with outward appearances. She is obsessed with money, reputation and social status. We can see this in her praise for Paris: “The gallant, young, and noble gentleman/ The County Paris, at Saint Peter’s Church” (3.5.113-114). And like her husband, Lord Capulet, ultimately she sees her daughter as more of a burden and a responsibility than a true loving member of Capulet’s family. This can be seen in our scene when Lady Capulet says “Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee” (3.5.204), showing that she thinks the wedding with Paris is more important than her daughter’s feeling. And this illustrates the practical feature of Lady Capulet. In this scene, Shakespeare attempts to portray Lady Capulet who has a weak relationship with her daughter, Juliet. Just think about why Juliet is closer to the Nurse but not to Lady Capulet, we realize that it is because Lady Capulet is not a great but a careless and indifferent mother who does not care about her daughter’s happiness. When Juliet needs her mother's support, Lady Capulet coldly ignores her daughter's begging. After Lord Capulet storms out, Juliet turns to her mother in order to soften her father's punishment. Juliet even begs her to delay the marriage, but the response from Lady Capulet is indifferent and helpless. The conversation between Lady Capulet and her daughter reveals her characteristic and the role she plays in the story: a determined and practical woman who sacrifices Juliet’s happiness to exchange for the reputation for the family.

In order to portray my character, Lady Capulet, I paid attention on some of the points, such as the blocking, emotional changes and body languages. When talking about how the stage is going to be set up, we chose to set Juliet's bed on the upper right corner, a door on the right stage and another one on the left stage because we originally decided to show Lord and Lady Capulet’s different features and then emphasize their own specialities of the roles. I did this in order to let Lord and Lady Capulet to go into the room separately. Especially for Lady Capulet, she needs to enter the room through the door which is the closest to Juliet's bed for it would be convenient to reach Juliet and talk to her. For example, it’s easier for her to show up saying “Ho, daughter, are you up?” (3.5.64) without taking many steps to get to Juliet. When Lord Capulet comes in, he needs to appear from the other door, foreshadowing that Lord Capulet is much farther away from Juliet in their relationship. Overall, the balcony is set on the down stage because we need Juliet to speak her monologue such as “O Fortune, Fortune, all men call thee fickle” (3.5.60) when facing the balcony and thus show her facial expressions. However, after rehearsing and receiving feedbacks from the class, we found it distracting if we set two doors in the opposite directions for it would probably make the audience confused because they might not understand what the doors were used for. As a result, we cut the extra door, and left one door on the left stage, letting Lady and Lord Capulet enter or exit in the same direction. By doing this, we could still show the relationship between Lord and Lady Capulet, meaning that they stand on the same side about the wedding.

Our group then started thinking about the costume for our characters. For my character, Lady Capulet, she needs to be in red and with some shiny jewelries and a necklace to show her richness and high social status. The jewelries and diamonds can also imply her obsession on outward appearance. In addition, in order to show a contrast among Juliet and her parents, the more luxury Lady Capulet wears, and the more simple and pure Juliet wears, the more distinct differences can be shown to the audience. Their personalities are like the costume they have. Juliet, without consideration, is naive and a little childish in the scene. Lady Capulet is like her costume, meaning that she is fond of power and status, which can be seen when Lady Capulet describes Paris as a “gallant, young and noble gentleman” to praise him and discriminates Romeo.

There are a lot of emotion changes throughout the scene as well. For Lady Capulet, the main emotions she has are happiness, anger, anxiety and indifference. And there is a clear flow of emotional changes within lines. In the original scene, there should not have an emotion like anxiety because Lady Capulet is such an indifferent woman who does not really care about her daughter’s feelings. But in our version, since I added extra lines from the Nurse’s to Lady Capulet’s, a more complicated person can be shown due to the different and various moods. Basically, as Lady Capulet enters, she says “Ho, daughter, are you up?” (3.5.65) happily because she visits Juliet in order to tell her about the wedding. She then becomes angry as soon as she finds out Juliet does not want to obey what she thinks. As I mentioned above, the emotion that Lady Capulet does not have in the original play is anxiety. When she says “God in heaven bless her!” (3.5.169) to Lord Capulet, it shows that she is caring about her daughter while witnessing Juliet is being scolded by Lord Capulet. This is also a contrast, for I have completely portrayed Lady Capulet as a practical woman in the previous section of the scene; but at this point, I let her express her concern for Juliet. As the story goes on, however, I then let Lady Capulet become the “normal” Lady Capulet as we thought. When Juliet comes to her to beg for her compassion again, Lady Capulet says “Talk not to me, for I’ll not speak a word. Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee” (3.5.203-204) to Juliet and then exits. This again shows her practical and indifferent features, connecting to how I performed my character previously. It’s obvious that emotions help strengthen a character a lot.

For myself, I think the most important section of portraying a character is body language. During the performance, I did focus a lot on my movements and gestures. As I entered, I either held Juliet’s hands or patted her back gently to try to comfort her. Then I immediately stood up as Juliet mentioned Romeo that Lady Capulet hates a lot, waved my arms, and even pointed to the ground angrily. This series of actions also showed a change of emotions from being calm to angry. As I said, Lady Capulet is a quick-tempered woman, I then became happy again, turned back to the bed where Juliet sat, held her hands and touched her face, saying “Find thou the means, and I’ll find such a man/ But now I’ll tell thee joyful tidings, girl” (3.5.103-104) with a happy and energetic voice. What Lady Capulet thinks is that Juliet must be crying for her cousin’s death, so the wedding will be surprising for sure. When Juliet refuses to marry Paris, however, Lady Capulet then turns angry again because she feels like her thought has been disobeyed, which she can not understand at all. Then I stood up, turned around to Lord Capulet and asked for assistance after he came into Juliet’s room. I stood out again when witnessing Lord Capulet was going to punish Juliet, and tried to separate Juliet and Lord Capulet to prevent a more serious argument, screaming: “Fie, fie, what, are you mad?” (3.5.158). And I even kneeled down to the ground and held Juliet tight to criticize that Lord Capulet was being way too mean. After Lord Capulet left and Juliet asked for Lady Capulet’s help, I became indifferent again. These changes of emotions and actions helped demonstrate Lady Capulet’s quick-tempered characteristic. In order to show her radical and practical features, I stood up and walked away when talking about killing Romeo, saying “I’ll send to one in Mantua/Where that same banish’d runagate doth live” (3.5.88-89) to express her anger and praising Paris as “gallant, young and noble gentleman” (3.5.113) to show her admiration for him. This part is definitely necessary for being a core part of the performance.

Overall, I thought the progress our group made was satisfying enough. We cooperated well in memorizing those lines and giving reactions. As for me, I did well in memorizing all the lines with ancient languages. In the video, I found that I expressed the emotion changes through the intonation and my body languages. There were some obvious changes of emotions within Lady Capulet's lines. I either changed my intonation or changed my actions to show her different moods. However, what seemed unnatural was that my some of my movements were a little confusing. I was not sure where I should go or how I should stand on the stage, especially when Juliet was talking to Lord Capulet and there was no lines from Lady Capulet during their conversations. I felt uncomfortable when there was a camera in front of me and my brain was almost blank. Also, I think I could be more confident when I was acting. I could show more facial expressions to help express Lady Capulet's emotions. Body language was not the only thing that can help show a character's emotion. What's more essential for establishing a character's personalities is more likely to relate to the facial expressions from the role I acted. There is a huge space for me to practice my facial expressions--to be more confident on stage and express emotions naturally to the audience.