In the first scene of Shakespeare’s tragic tale Romeo and Juliet, Juliet falls in love …show more content…
After avenging the death of his best friend, Romeo, now a criminal of Verona’s law, is sentenced by Prince Escalus, to exile. This causes Juliet to be overcome with grief; furthermore, she begins to act erratic, threatening to kill herself if she cannot be with Romeo. To remedy the situation, Friar Lawrence gives her a potion that would make her seem dead, so that Romeo could retrieve her without harm. However, after a fatal miscommunication, Romeo arrives and finds the ‘deceased’ Juliet to be dead and gone. In grief, he acts impulsively, as with his tragic flaw, and takes his life. After waking up, Juliet sees her lover is dead. Full of grief, she kisses him, trying to get the poison from his lips, to no avail. As a result, she completes her loss of innocence, seeing that life wasn’t worth living without her true love. In a final, brutal act, she says to herself, “Yes noise? Then I’ll be brief. O happy dagger,/ This is thy sheath. There rust, and let me die”(V.iii.174-175). After uttering these last words, she takes her life. This final, impulsive, grim choice demonstrates that she loses her innocence. When she was a young girl, she loved life, and wished not to be married. Yet after meeting Romeo, she loses her innocence, becoming a wife and inevitably a suicidal widow, She sees that life isn’t worth living without her beloved, and she decides to chose death. In this last, brutal act, she shows that she loses her innocence as she takes her own life, as her character changes, as she begins to see that life isn’t what it