When Romeo initially sees Juliet, he compares her immediately to the brilliant light of the torches and tapers that illuminate Capulet's great hall: " O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!" (1.4.46). Juliet is the light that frees him from the darkness of his perpetual melancholia. In the famous balcony scene Romeo associates Juliet with sunlight, "It is the east and Juliet is the sun!" (2.2.3), daylight, "The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars/As daylight doth a lamp" (2.2.20-1), and the light emanating from angels, "O speak again bright angel" (2.2.26). In turn, Juliet compares their new-found love to lightening (2.2.120), primarily to stress the speed at which their romance is moving, but also to suggest that, as the lightening is a glorious break in the blackness of the night sky, so too is their love a flash of wondrous luminance in an otherwise dark world.

Juliet also equates Romeo and the bond that they share with radiant light. In a common play on words, she begs Romeo to "not impute this yielding to light love/Which the dark night hath so discovered" (2.2.105-6), again comparing their mutual feelings of love to bright and comforting light

"Which ten times faster glides than the sun's beams/Driving back shadows over lowering hills" (2.5.4-5). Here, the heralds of love that will bring comforting news about her darling are compared to the magical and reassuring rays of sun that drive away unwanted shadows.

Dark

Romeo. It was the lark, the herald of the morn,

No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaks

Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.

Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day

Stands tiptoe on the misty mountaintops.

I must be gone and live, or stay and die. (3.5.6-11)

From this point on, darkness becomes the central motif. Romeo exclaims: "More light and light: more dark and dark our woes!" (3.5.36). And, as Peter Quennell writes, "...the beauty and brevity of love itself -- that 'brief light', doomed to quick extinction, celebrated in Catullus' famous lyric -- are set off by the 'perpetual darkness' of ancient Capulets' sepulchral vault" (Shakespeare: A Biography,150). The final indication that darkness has triumphed over light comes from The Prince: "A glooming peace this morning with it brings/The sun for sorrow will not show his head" (5.3.304-5). There are several other examples one could cite, and, despite Shakespeare's masterful poetic styling, many critics argue that these continual references to light are overkill, illustrative of Shakespeare at his most immature stage of writing

Fate

Romeo later cries that he is "fortune's fool" (3.1.141), and Juliet exclaims that she has an "ill-divining soul" (3.5.52). Moreover, their predictions extend into their dreams, as Romeo says "I dreamt my lady came and found me dead" (5.1.6). So in keeping with tradition set down by the likes of Seneca

and Boethius, Fate controls Shakespeare's doomed lovers. And "[t]he intent of this emphasis is clear. The tale will end with the death of two ravishingly attractive young folk; and the dramatist must exonerate himself from all complicity in their murder, lest he be found guilty of pandering to a liking for a human shambles. He disowns responsibility and throws it on Destiny, Fate." (Charlton, Shakespearean Tragedy, 52). This reliance on the motif of Fate in the play is the most representative of Shakespeare's dramatic deficiency. It is not the lovers' flaws that lead them to ruin; the tragedy does not spring from their own weaknesses. As a result, there is little growth of character and no profound analysis of the complexity of human nature. Thus, despite the lyrical beauty of the play and the endearing qualities of Romeo and his Juliet, (which have secured its place as one of the great dramas), it fails to rise to the level of Shakespeare's other tragedies that explore the inner failings of humankind.