Romeo and Juliet, who feel mixed emotions, both recognize in their speeches that life is contradictory and confusing, and their use of oxymoron reflects this understanding.
In Act I, Scene 1, an emotional Romeo talks with his friend Benvolio after the street fight in which the houses of Capulet and Montague have engaged. When Romeo says, "Here's much to do with hate, but more with love" (1.1.170), he expresses his puzzlement with the fine line...
Romeo and Juliet, who feel mixed emotions, both recognize in their speeches that life is contradictory and confusing, and their use of oxymoron reflects this understanding.
In Act I, Scene 1, an emotional Romeo talks with his friend Benvolio after the street fight in which the houses of Capulet and Montague have engaged. When Romeo says, "Here's much to do with hate, but more with love" (1.1.170), he expresses his puzzlement with the fine line that exists between the two emotions, as well as the swiftness with which one emotion can transform into the other. Further, he also recognizes that emotions become entangled with one another and often are hard to distinguish, as he employs this oxymoron: "Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!" (1.1.175).
Similarly, after having excitedly anticipated her loving hours to come with her new husband, Juliet experiences exaggerated and conflicting feelings when she learns of Tybalt's death at the hands of Romeo. An emotional Juliet feels both deceived and betrayed while still in love with Romeo:
O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!
Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!— (3.2.74-76)
Like Romeo, Juliet, too, expresses her tangled emotions through the use of oxymorons as beautiful feelings and conflicting ideas become intermixed. However, although Juliet is focused only on one issue—the betrayal that she feels because her beloved Romeo has slain her cousin Tybalt—Romeo's contemplation of his lost love of Rosaline is interrupted as he notices Benvolio's wound. It is then that he speaks of the feud, until near the end of his speech as he resumes his contemplation of Rosaline. And, at this point, he bemoans the loss of her love: "This love feel I, that feel no love in this" (1.1.172). So, for Romeo, there is an even greater intermingling of emotions than there is for Juliet.
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