Romeo and Juliet: Similes 6 key examples

Here, Mercutio personifies both dreams and the wind, simultaneously comparing the two: dreams are "the children of an idle brain," reflecting fantasies even more "inconstant" and changeable than the wind, "who woos / Even now the frozen bosom of the north," then turns around to "the dew-dropping south." This elaborate series of images and comparisons reflects Mercutio's skepticism about the idea of reading too much into dreams, which he views as both mercurial and disconnected from real life. Mercutio's language may seem overdone, but his long-windedness implies that he takes his own ideas seriously.

Later, in Act 2, Scene 1, Mercutio again uses personification to mock foolish lovers:

If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.
Now will he sit under a medlar tree
And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
As maids call medlars when they laugh alone.

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Here, as in other moments in the play, Mercutio pokes holes in the notion of romantic love as something pure, valiant, and desirable. Instead, he likens romantic love to a misguided "blind" man who lusts after women but has no success with them sexually—comparing women to "fruit" (specifically the "medlar," fruit said to resemble genitalia) to make a risqué, objectifying joke through metaphor. 

Similarly, in Act 2, Scene 4, Mercutio employs a simile to joke about Romeo's belief in romantic love before launching into a series of pointed allusions: 

Without his roe, like a dried herring. O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified! Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in. Laura to his lady was a kitchen wench (marry, she had a better love to berhyme her), Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a gypsy, Helen and Hero hildings and harlots, Thisbe a gray eye or so, but not to the purpose.—Signior Romeo, bonjour. There’s a French salutation to your French slop. You gave us the counterfeit fairly last night.

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By comparing Romeo to a "dried herring" "without his roe," Mercutio both criticizes Romeo's lovesick appearance—he looks as thin as a herring without its eggs—and implies that he seems weak and effeminate. Romantic love, Mercutio suggests, is just passion expressed for its own sake, without any subsequent action. Instead, Romeo should be sexually adventurous and not just emotional. 

Mercutio then doubles down on this critique of Romeo and romantic love by alluding to the poet Petrarch and his frequent object of desire, Laura, as well as other famously beautiful and desirable women throughout history, including Cleopatra and Dido. These women, Mercutio argues, were only remembered as beautiful because the men who wrote about them were unquestioningly obsessed with them and had idealized them—just as Romeo has idealized Rosaline. 

Mercutio's volubility and ease with various literary devices make him an impressive speaker and a challenging verbal opponent. Though Mercutio's brashness and pride leads to his own death halfway through the play, his wordplay is never bested. 

To Romeo, fretting about his unrequited love for Rosaline, love is like a "thorn" that "pricks." His experiences with Rosaline have made him understand that love, though potentially a "tender thing," can also cause severe harm if it goes unrequited, unaddressed, or mutates into resentment. 

But Mercutio, who is far more cynical than Romeo, responds with a bit of inventive wordplay to console his friend. Instead of an object like a thorn, he likens love to a "rough," cruel individual—an implied metaphor whose terms are not precisely spelled out—and urges Romeo to "be rough with love" himself. In other words, Mercutio wants Romeo to refrain from taking his obsession with Rosaline too seriously, and he also encourages him to be more sexually adventurous (another meaning of "rough"). 

That Romeo employs simile to examine love while Mercutio employs an implied metaphor indicates key differences in their temperaments and personalities, as well as the way they tend to use language in the play. Romeo is more guileless and literal than Mercutio; as a result, he often resorts to similes, which are a simpler form of comparison than metaphors. On the other hand, Mercutio is sly and cunning, adept at creating puns and innuendo—making his wordplay far more advanced than Romeo's, and lending him linguistic power. 

Here, Mercutio personifies both dreams and the wind, simultaneously comparing the two: dreams are "the children of an idle brain," reflecting fantasies even more "inconstant" and changeable than the wind, "who woos / Even now the frozen bosom of the north," then turns around to "the dew-dropping south." This elaborate series of images and comparisons reflects Mercutio's skepticism about the idea of reading too much into dreams, which he views as both mercurial and disconnected from real life. Mercutio's language may seem overdone, but his long-windedness implies that he takes his own ideas seriously.

Later, in Act 2, Scene 1, Mercutio again uses personification to mock foolish lovers:

If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.
Now will he sit under a medlar tree
And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
As maids call medlars when they laugh alone.

Cite this Quote

Here, as in other moments in the play, Mercutio pokes holes in the notion of romantic love as something pure, valiant, and desirable. Instead, he likens romantic love to a misguided "blind" man who lusts after women but has no success with them sexually—comparing women to "fruit" (specifically the "medlar," fruit said to resemble genitalia) to make a risqué, objectifying joke through metaphor. 

Similarly, in Act 2, Scene 4, Mercutio employs a simile to joke about Romeo's belief in romantic love before launching into a series of pointed allusions: 

Without his roe, like a dried herring. O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified! Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in. Laura to his lady was a kitchen wench (marry, she had a better love to berhyme her), Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a gypsy, Helen and Hero hildings and harlots, Thisbe a gray eye or so, but not to the purpose.—Signior Romeo, bonjour. There’s a French salutation to your French slop. You gave us the counterfeit fairly last night.

Cite this Quote

By comparing Romeo to a "dried herring" "without his roe," Mercutio both criticizes Romeo's lovesick appearance—he looks as thin as a herring without its eggs—and implies that he seems weak and effeminate. Romantic love, Mercutio suggests, is just passion expressed for its own sake, without any subsequent action. Instead, Romeo should be sexually adventurous and not just emotional. 

Mercutio then doubles down on this critique of Romeo and romantic love by alluding to the poet Petrarch and his frequent object of desire, Laura, as well as other famously beautiful and desirable women throughout history, including Cleopatra and Dido. These women, Mercutio argues, were only remembered as beautiful because the men who wrote about them were unquestioningly obsessed with them and had idealized them—just as Romeo has idealized Rosaline. 

Mercutio's volubility and ease with various literary devices make him an impressive speaker and a challenging verbal opponent. Though Mercutio's brashness and pride leads to his own death halfway through the play, his wordplay is never bested. 

Juliet demurs when Romeo asks her to demonstrate her love for him, since she is playing the stereotypically coy role that young women of the era were expected to uphold while being courted. Instead, she uses a simile in which she likens their "contract," or their professions of love for each other, to "the lightning"—a transient apparition that will quickly "cease to be." Interestingly enough, Romeo and Juliet's love actually will remain transient and temporary: a series of disastrous events and unhappy coincidences over the next few days will ultimately lead to their deaths. Juliet doesn't know this yet, though. Instead, she doubles down on her coy performance by using a metaphor that describes her ideal version of love. Their love should be a "bud," she says, which will develop slowly to become "beauteous flower"—a metaphor that runs contrary to the "rash," "unadvised," or "sudden" idea of jumping headlong into the relationship. 

Juliet's use of metaphor and simile to describe love underscores the difficulty she faces in precisely articulating her feelings for Romeo. As a woman in oppressive Verona, she is expected to serve as an object of male affections, but not to explicitly voice her own desires. Thus, when describing love, she must resort to cagier, indirect language. Later in the play, though, Juliet will clearly and explicitly express sexual desire for Romeo—demonstrating that she has learned to defy patriarchal tradition. 

Juliet, like Romeo, is consumed by her own sudden passion. Though both of the young lovers will experience flashes of foresight and wariness about the dangerous relationship into which they have plunged, they are often too excited to rationally consider the potential consequences of their romance. Thus, Juliet's hyperbolic simile, which likens her infatuation with Romeo—as well as their mutual love—to the "deep," "boundless" sea, clearly demonstrates her excited state of mind. It's clear that she thinks their love is larger than life, too big to be ignored—an important detail, considering that they end up making such huge sacrifices in the name of their relationship. Previously in the scene, she has acted more coy about sharing her feelings with Romeo, as young women of the era were expected to behave in the company of men. But with Romeo's encouragement, she gives herself over to effusive language and cements their love with a dramatic, vivid image: that of the "infinite" sea. 

Here, Mercutio personifies both dreams and the wind, simultaneously comparing the two: dreams are "the children of an idle brain," reflecting fantasies even more "inconstant" and changeable than the wind, "who woos / Even now the frozen bosom of the north," then turns around to "the dew-dropping south." This elaborate series of images and comparisons reflects Mercutio's skepticism about the idea of reading too much into dreams, which he views as both mercurial and disconnected from real life. Mercutio's language may seem overdone, but his long-windedness implies that he takes his own ideas seriously.

Later, in Act 2, Scene 1, Mercutio again uses personification to mock foolish lovers:

If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.
Now will he sit under a medlar tree
And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
As maids call medlars when they laugh alone.

Cite this Quote

Here, as in other moments in the play, Mercutio pokes holes in the notion of romantic love as something pure, valiant, and desirable. Instead, he likens romantic love to a misguided "blind" man who lusts after women but has no success with them sexually—comparing women to "fruit" (specifically the "medlar," fruit said to resemble genitalia) to make a risqué, objectifying joke through metaphor. 

Similarly, in Act 2, Scene 4, Mercutio employs a simile to joke about Romeo's belief in romantic love before launching into a series of pointed allusions: 

Without his roe, like a dried herring. O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified! Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in. Laura to his lady was a kitchen wench (marry, she had a better love to berhyme her), Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a gypsy, Helen and Hero hildings and harlots, Thisbe a gray eye or so, but not to the purpose.—Signior Romeo, bonjour. There’s a French salutation to your French slop. You gave us the counterfeit fairly last night.

Cite this Quote

By comparing Romeo to a "dried herring" "without his roe," Mercutio both criticizes Romeo's lovesick appearance—he looks as thin as a herring without its eggs—and implies that he seems weak and effeminate. Romantic love, Mercutio suggests, is just passion expressed for its own sake, without any subsequent action. Instead, Romeo should be sexually adventurous and not just emotional. 

Mercutio then doubles down on this critique of Romeo and romantic love by alluding to the poet Petrarch and his frequent object of desire, Laura, as well as other famously beautiful and desirable women throughout history, including Cleopatra and Dido. These women, Mercutio argues, were only remembered as beautiful because the men who wrote about them were unquestioningly obsessed with them and had idealized them—just as Romeo has idealized Rosaline. 

Mercutio's volubility and ease with various literary devices make him an impressive speaker and a challenging verbal opponent. Though Mercutio's brashness and pride leads to his own death halfway through the play, his wordplay is never bested. 

The Nurse is concerned that the young lovers' relationship could lead to further discord in Verona, though she also recognizes that Juliet loves Romeo. Since she cares for Juliet—more, it seems, than Juliet's own mother—she wishes happiness for her. Therefore, the Nurse grudgingly admits that Romeo, though a "simple choice" for Juliet, is attractive and "as gentle as a lamb." This simile affirms a characterization of Romeo that recurs throughout the play. Romeo often appears far more tender and romantic than his bawdy, brash kinsmen, Mercutio and Benvolio, which sets him apart from them.

The Nurse's simile also draws attention to a fundamental conflict in the play. By exaggerating Romeo's gentleness, the Nurse touches on his unwillingness to indulge the combat and aggression that seemingly everyone around him in Verona engages in. In the end, "lamb"-like Romeo must choose between his men and the world of romantic coupledom, and when he chooses the latter, he is made to answer for it by death. 

Earlier in the play, after Juliet's apparent "death," Lady Capulet fell into exaggerated hysterics and seemed to mourn her daughter chiefly because of the elevated social status that Juliet's marriage to Paris could have brought the Capulet family. Here, though, she appears far more somber and reserved, comparing the "sight of death" before her to a "bell" that foretells her own death—a "sepulcher" is a tomb, so she's saying that seeing death in front of her like this feels like a warning, as if a bell is announcing that she has limited time before making her way into a tomb herself.

By presenting this appropriately morbid simile, Lady Capulet expresses true humility and grief. Romeo and Juliet's deaths have real meaning for Lady Capulet and have shown her the error of her ways. Rather than fixating on vapid pursuits like gaining social status, she must now grapple with the consequences of her own actions and the bleak reality of death. This sharp, precise image is an omen of death that crystallizes Lady Capulet's regrets about her own hubris, demonstrating that she has learned from her errors. It also underlines the tension between adult authority and youthful rebellion in the play. As Shakespeare continually shows, adults can be tyrannical, and are not automatically morally superior because of their age or apparent wisdom.