My favourite monologue in this play is the one by Romeo at the start of Scene 1 in Act 5.
"If I may trust the flattering truth of sleep,
My dreams presage some joyful news at hand.
My bosom’s lord sits lightly in his throne,
And all this day an unaccustomed spirit
Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts.
I dreamt my lady came and found me dead—
Strange dream, that gives a dead man leave to think—
And breathed such life with kisses in my lips
That I revived and was an emperor.
Ah me! How sweet is love itself possessed
When but love’s shadows are so rich in joy!"
Romeo speaks these words just before hearing from Balthasar that
Juliet is dead. Although Juliet is not really dead here, the dream Romeo has
the night before symbolizes the impending doom of this couple. It is as though
fate is already telling him that his end is near.
While Romeo finds the dream strange, he does not find it
depressing or shocking. In fact, there is something about it that gives him
joy. He sees Juliet in his dream, and she kisses him and brings him back to
life. Romeo sees the dream as something beautiful because for Juliet to kiss
him back to life, she would have to be right next to him. The thought of them
being together once again makes him happy, even if he had to first die for it
to happen. This part of the dream is also very symbolic. It shows that only
Juliet, and no one else, has to power to bring Romeo back to life.
In his dream, Romeo sees himself rising from the dead as an
emperor. I feel that this part of the dream particularly shows how Romeo
perceives Juliet's love for him - that it is so potent that it can even bring
him back from the dead and invest upon him a stature of power and authority
like that of a king or emperor. If seeing Juliet in a dream can make Romeo so
exquisitely happy, one wonders what ecstasy he would be experiencing when she
is present in the flesh.
The dream, on the whole, is very significant. Dreams in
Shakespeare’s plays are usually prophetic in nature. They foretell something
that is to happen, often something ominous. In the play, Romeo drinks poison
and dies, after finding Juliet lying in the tomb, thinking she is dead. And, Romeo
does not come back to life in the real world. But in the dream that he has,
Death loses its hold on him with Juliet breathing back life into him with a
kiss. It would have been most impossible for Romeo and Juliet to live together
happily in Verona given the long-standing strife between their two families. It
is in their deaths that both the Capulets and Montagues come to their senses
and make peace with each other. Death here can be seen as something ‘good’ in
that the lovers' souls are reunited (no one can separate them now) and both their
families finally live amicably. This is why the dream evokes a sense of
positivity, cheerfulness to Romeo as his subconscious mind knows that his and
Juliet’s love is far too to be taken away from them. If life does not
unite them, then Death will.
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