How to Teach Act 2 of Romeo and Juliet: Activities, Questions, and a Quiz Your Students Won’t Hate

Act 2 of Romeo and Juliet contains what is arguably the most iconic scene in English literature.

And yet, simply telling students that this moment matters doesn’t actually make them care about what they’re reading.

This is also the point in the unit when students should be gaining confidence and independence with the text. 

And yet, shaking your beloved underlined copy of the book at them and saying, “you should get this by now!” isn’t exactly a winning strategy.

The balcony scene, Friar Lawrence’s speeches, the jokes and double entendres, the secret marriage—Act 2 is full of moments that will ideally get students feeling curious, opinionated, and a bit uncomfortable.

But without the right structure, it can also be the point where students check out, give up, and decide that maybe they just aren’t smart enough to read Shakespeare after all.

I’ve taught this story of the mean streets of Verona for years, and I’ve learned—mostly through trial and error—what actually helps students stay engaged and start thinking for themselves.

The trick is not to simplify things, but to teach a unit on Act 2 with just enough challenge, support, and really bad love poetrythat students don’t shut down before the play has a chance to work on them.

Here are my top 7 tips for teaching Act 2 in a way that actually works in a real classroom.

1. Get your classes pondering the big questions of Act 2 before they try to figure out Shakespeare’s views on them.  One of the easiest ways to get students noticing the big ideas in the play is to get them thinking about their own views on those ideas before they start reading.  I love a great bellringer freewrite for this reason (and also because I may or may not have forgotten to take attendance almost every day before I implemented this routine).  Having students write for a few minutes at the beginning of class on questions like “Do most teenagers do what their parents want—or the exact opposite?” Or “Write about a time when you had too much of a good thing” Or “Do the ends justify the means?” means we start class with a bit of calm and quiet, and also that students are already primed to think about the essential questions of the act before even opening their books. 

2. Make sure that students are continuing to grapple with the text independently. When we read Act 1, I put practices and routines in place that take pressure off both me and my students while still challenging them to work through the language on their own. I do this by first listening to professional actors read the scene while we follow along, and then giving students concrete questions focused on specific lines in the text—without just telling them the answers.

This is a big reason why I have them work on close reading questions in partners and small groups—so I can walk around the room, point to specific words and phrases when needed, and continually reassure them that what they think the lines mean is, in fact, what they mean. I continue this routine as we move into Act 2, with the portions we read getting longer as students gain confidence and need less constant reassurance.

3. Help students both appreciate and critically analyze one of the most famous scenes in English literature.  The balcony scene is iconic with good reason.  It’s bittersweet, it’s sincere, there is so much lovely imagery.  But also, it’s two teens who don’t know each other —one of whom was equally in love with someone else moments before.  It’s also full of some of the most cliched’ love poetry ever, with Romeo comparing Juliet to the sun, moon, andthe stars.  

My favorite way to get students to see how his lines are unoriginal—even 400 years ago—is to have them compare them to compliments from the 17th century.  Honestly, this is the kind of lesson that really teaches itself—and when students realize that Romeo’s game is about as good as someone asking “Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?” they start to see that metaphors aren’t just something to identify, but glimpses into the minds of the characters, and that teenage boys have loved stock phrases for a very long time.

4. Challenge your classes to go beyond identifying figurative language to truly analyzing its function in the text.  In my experience, students are great at pointing out metaphors and similes, but they can’t (or won’t) move beyond simply identifying them.  So I give them questions that get them thinking about not just definitions, but what we as readers or audience members of the play learn from the figurative language.  

For example, as he listens to his friends make fun of him, Romeo says, “He jests at scars that never felt a wound.” When I ask students to think about what this figure of speech suggests about the way that Romeo views love, they realize that while Romeo’s metaphor here somewhat follows the typical idea of falling in love as being struck by Cupid’s arrow, it also portrays falling in love as a painful experience that leaves lasting scars.  

Getting students to analyze the unintended messages of pop songs about love or, my personal favorite, to participate in a class-wide Best Bad Love Poem competition are other fun ways to get them analyzing love metaphors on a deeper level—and understanding just how hard it is to find a good way to talk about this most human emotion. 

5. Have your classes move slowly through the Friar’s long speech. I know that this sounds contradictory—and your first urge might be to summarize and move on—but in my experience, students can relate to a lot of the Friar’s ideas and statements in this speech.  Slowing down to paraphrase key phrases really helps students think through the essential questions he’s bringing up here.  

This is another time when starting off with a freewrite prompt like “Write about a time when you had too much of a good thing” really primes students to notice and make sense of the deeper meaning of the character’s statements. Then, when the Friar says, “Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, / And vice sometime by action dignified,” I have students slow all the way down and work through it almost word by word: What is “virtue”? What is “vice”? What does it mean to “misapply” something?They paraphrase in their own words, and then we move on to a bigger discussion about how his ideas relate to human nature in general.

6. Make sure your students understand just how risky the Nurse and the Friar are being in these scenes. I think it’s easy for teens to write off the Capulets and the Montagues as selfish, uncaring parents who don’t’ have their children’s best interests in mind (and they wouldn’t be wrong about that).  But as is unfortunately often the case, the cooler parent alternatives (here, the Nurse and the Friar) often have good intentions but make potentially very harmful decisions.  In Juliet’s case, a secret marriage could quite literally ruin her life, and yet the Nurse seems to encourage it, and the Friar agrees to officiate based on the weak hope that it will end a feud that has been going on so long that no one even remembers how it started.  

I want to make sure that students are really questioning these choices—and an opportunity to get teens thinking about the potential consequences of risky choices is always time well spent in my opinion. So after they’ve done the hard work to grapple with the big ideas and the challenging language of these scenes, we dedicate some time to really discussing whether the Nurse and the Friar help Juliet and Romeo, or whether they do more harm than good.

7. Give students a quiz on Act 2 that give them the chance to showcase all the hard work they’ve done.  They’ve written the freewrites, they’ve worked through the close reading questions, they’ve analyzed the metaphors, they’ve paraphrased the dense language, and they’ve discussed the big ideas.  Please tell me you’re not about to give them a quiz that asks whether Romeo compares Juliet to A) the sun, B) the moon, C) the stars, or D) an angel when he first sees her.  

Instead, give a Romeo and Juliet Act 2 quiz that has those same quotes that students worked so hard to understand and short essays on those ideas that they were challenged to discuss and write about will really give them a chance to both show what they have learned and extend the experience. So for a quiz on Act 2, after asking students to unpack Juliet and Romeo’s love metaphors and compare them to typical pick-up lines from the time, I would give them a short essay prompt like “What point does Shakespeare make about love poetry by telling the story of Romeo and Juliet?”  The other essay prompt I give them for Act 2 is on the role of the non-parents on Juliet and Romeo’s lives.

Teaching Shakespeare isn’t easy, but when you get the teens in your classroom easily writing a short essay on the pros and cons of having a non-parent adult in the life of a teen and citing as their evidence specific details from one of the greatest plays ever written, well, that hard work feels pretty worth it.

If these are the kinds of lessons you want to teach, but you don’t want to build all of this from scratch, you can take a look at my full unit on Act 2 here.  

And if you don’t take anything else from this post, I really hope you give the bad love poetry contest a try!