Soliloquy: A soliloquy is a dramatic speech delivered by a lone character to the audience. Usually the soliloquy serves as a reflection of the character's interior state. Thus, the character who delivers a soliloquy is processing thoughts and emotions so that the audience can observe their inner thoughts and feelings. Often, soliloquies represent moments of dramatic irony—there are several scenes in Romeo and Juliet in which we know something the speech-giver does not know. For example, Juliet stands on her balcony professing her love for Romeo unaware that he crouches below in the bushes.
Wordplay: Though it is a tragedy, Romeo and Juliet contains an abundance of delightful puns. The opening four lines of the play offer up a rare quadruple pun, as “coals” turns to “collier,” then “choler” and finally “collars.” This linguistic playfulness accounts for much of the play’s unique appeal. Episodes of dense wordplay arise in the jovial teasing between Romeo and Mercutio, as well as in Romeo’s tentative courtship of Juliet.
Blank Verse: As in many of Shakespeare’s plays, the dialogue in Romeo and Juliet alternates between prose and verse. Often, this stylistic distinction parallels class distinctions. While characters of the lower classes tend to speak in short passages of prose, the aristocratic characters tend to speak in formally structured passages of verse, usually blank verse. Blank verse refers to unrhymed iambic pentameter, which constitutes the linguistic fabric of most Shakespearean drama.
"From forth the fatal loins of these two foes(5) A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life; Whose misadventur'd piteous overthrows Doth, with their death, bury their parents’ strife. The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love, And the continuance of their parents’ rage,(10) Which, but their children's end, naught could remove, Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage; The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend. " See in text (The Prologue)
Notice that this play begins with a sonnet that unveils the entire plot of the story. The use of the sonnet here draws our attention to the form, or construction, of the words Shakespeare uses. This literary device coupled with the choice to begin the story with a spoiler suggests that the purpose of this play is not the plot but the way in which the plot is constructed. This prologue asks the audience to pay attention to form.