Juliet, Jemima

It is J, Day 10 of the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. Today, I am honored to have my partner on Team Damyanti, Jemima Pett. a writer from England who is blogging from A to Z for the Challenge.

Jemima writes the Princelings of the East fantasy series for 12 year olds and up, and is currently working on a scifi book that has emerged from the Flash Fiction she blogs on Fridays. Please follow Jemima’s haikus and other posts at her blog http://jemimapett.com. She’s running a Giveaway on her blog all through the A to Z Challenge to celebrate the release of her latest book, Bravo Victor.

Follow Jemima on Twitter @jemima_pett and like her Facebook page http://facebook.com/princelings. She is on Goodreads, Google+ and Pinterest as Jemima Pett.

Welcome, Jemima! So happy to have you here today!

A Haiku for Juliet

by Jemima Pett

Ten days into the challenge and I expect you’ve met some haikus already. A verse form with 5 syllables, 7 syllables, then 5 again, it’s very strict. I expect a pure haiku should be more poetic, but many bloggers use them for anything. I do topical ones on Tuesdays. I know two bloggers who start each book review with a haiku, either the review itself or as a summary then their review in narrative. Here’s my offering for today’s J – Juliet.

Juli’s pa says “No!
Romeo’s a Montague!”
It all ends in tears.

Juliet, of course, is a Capulet; she sees Romeo, falls in love and the two of them have to fight off the prejudice against each other’s families. Prejudice was obviously rife in Shakespeare’s day. Class wars and xenophobia, mainly, but the theme has been used evermore – scholars may advise me it was in use before. In Shakespeare’s time it was common to have girls of good families betrothed as young as six.

What I didn’t realise until I read Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies recently, that betrothal was as good as marriage, even if they lived in their own family homes still. There is a long passage where Thomas Cromwell has to ensure that Anne Boleyn was never married to her suitor even though they were betrothed when she was eight. When actresses play Juliet as a twelve year-old, maybe we are being naive, yet the issue is more about the girl’s choice, a young girl falling in love for the first time – with the wrong boy.

My favourite Romeo and Juliet interpretation is West Side Story. Young love. Sigh! Does it always end it tears?

♥

Thank you Jemima!

Let’s visit my dear friends and TeamDamyanti mates today!

Csenge Zalka – The Multicolored Diary

Anna Tan – Deeply Shallow

Mary Wallace – Homeless Chronicles in Tampa