Scan blank verse for iambic pentameter, recognize the Prologue as a sonnet that previews the whole plot, and map the play onto the five-act tragic structure.
Shakespeare's plays are written mostly in blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter, ten syllables per line alternating unstressed-STRESSED five times. It is close enough to natural English speech that skilled actors can make it sound conversational, but regular enough to feel elevated and deliberate. Romeo and Juliet opens with a Prologue that is, structurally, a sonnet -- the same fourteen-line, three-quatrain-plus-couplet form studied in Unit 3 -- and it does something audacious: it tells the audience the entire plot in advance, including that the two lovers will die.
Because the ending is announced before the play begins, the suspense of Romeo and Juliet was never meant to be "what happens" -- it is "how, exactly, does it happen, and can we watch it coming without being able to stop it." The five-act structure that follows maps onto the same skeleton studied with short stories in Week 1: exposition (Act 1), rising action (Act 2), climax (traditionally Act 3), falling action (Act 4), and catastrophe, the tragic version of resolution, in Act 5.
Mastery looks like: They can scan a line of blank verse for iambic pentameter and explain how the Prologue's sonnet form previews the plot and sets up the play's dramatic irony.
Common stumbles: Assuming Shakespeare's language is simply too hard to access rather than working through it with support; confusing blank verse (unrhymed but metered) with free verse (no fixed pattern at all).
See it visually
Interactive, spoken-aloud tools that show this idea in motion.