This Owl Eyes Dialogue Analysis activity for Romeo and Juliet gives students an opportunity to practice examining and analyzing passages from one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. This worksheet focuses on the essential role of diction (word choice) in creating mood and subtext in each scene, developing characters, and establishing events in the plot. The main components of this activity include the following:

• A contextualized summary of the selected passages
• A selection of excerpts for examination
• A table with scaffolded question progression
• A step-by-step guide to activity procedure
• A complete answer key

In completing this activity worksheet, students will be able to analyze passages of dialogue to identify the speaker’s character traits, conflicts, and motivations as well as determine how diction creates mood.

Skills: character analysis, drawing inferences from text, interpreting diction for connotative meaning

About This Document

Shakespeare’s tragic story of star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet, continues to captivate audiences and remains his most popular play. Falling in love at first sight, Romeo and Juliet are doomed from the beginning, as their families—the Montagues and the Capulets, respectively—despise each other in a continuing blood feud in Verona, Italy, the play’s setting. Through a series of cruel ironies, each of the lovers ultimately commits suicide. The play is noted for the lyrical beauty of Romeo’s and Juliet’s professions of love and for the tragic conclusion of their secret marriage. The dialogue in act III, scene V, which takes place in Juliet’s bedchamber the morning after they have secretly married, illuminates the depth of Romeo and Juliet’s love and the implacable forces aligned against them.