At their first meeting Shakespeare presents Romeo and Juliet as pure. He uses an extended metaphor throughout to achieve this, using religious figures, and describes Romeo as a 'holy palmer' and Juliet as a 'saint'. The use of this religious vocabulary makes them seem as if God had destined them to meet and just as how the prologue said they were 'star-crossed' that they could not do anything to prevent it. During the Elizabethan era, religion was a essential to their everyday lives and could indicate that the couple's religion was each other, that they were each so important to the other that they started to worship them. Shakespeare creates this aura of purity for the audience as the refrence to saints and pilgrims would have related to the
