Plot and characters

The Chorus delivers a prologue telling the plot of the star-crossed lovers in outline. Encouraged by Tybalt, the Capulet servants provoke a fight with their Montague counterparts; Benvolio attempts to stop the disturbance, but Escales the Prince threatens dire punishments if the feud is not stopped. Montague and Lady Montague are concerned about their son Romeo, who is sick with unrequited love for Rosaline. Capulet tells Paris that if his daughter Juliet will accept it, he can marry her. Romeo and Benvolio discover the Capulets’ guest list for a feast from the servant Peter, and decide to attend, uninvited. Juliet’s mother, Lady Capulet, and the garrulous Nurse, tell her of Paris’ suit. Romeo has foreboding dreams, but Mercutio ridicules him. Trouble at the feast is averted when Capulet tells Tybalt not to challenge Romeo. Romeo and Juliet meet, belatedly learning each other’s identity, and fall in love. Romeo goes back to the Capulet house to see Juliet, and they exchange love vows when she appears on her balcony: Romeo is to arrange their marriage. Friar Lawrence agrees to it in the hope it will reunite the families. Romeo sends a message to Juliet via the Nurse. Tybalt challenges Romeo to a fight, but Mercutio becomes involved in a fracas and is killed by Tybalt. Romeo kills Tybalt in fury, then flees. The Prince sentences him to immediate banishment. Juliet hears of events from the Nurse, who finds Romeo in despair with Friar Lawrence; the pair are married. Capulet agrees with his wife that Juliet and Paris will be married. Romeo and Juliet spend the night together; after he has left, the Capulets put pressure on Juliet to accept Paris’ suit. The Nurse urges her to agree, but she goes instead to Friar Lawrence, who gives her a sleeping drug which will make her appear dead. As the household prepares for the wedding she takes the drug, and is found ‘dead’. News reaches Romeo, exiled in Mantua: he buys poison from an apothecary and returns to Verona, where Friar Lawrence discovers his letter explaining the plan has not reached the young man. Romeo kills Paris at the Capulet tomb, lies next to Juliet and takes his poison. He dies. Juliet awakes, and kills herself with his dagger. The Prince suggests these deaths are all punishment for the feud, and Montague and Capulet shake hands, agreeing to build a monument to their dead children.

Context and composition

The play shares certain stylistic features with Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, particularly their formal linguistic devices – and probably dates from the same period, 1595 or 1596. Its proximity to the comedies which dominate Shakespeare’s early writing career is also visible in its plot and early tone. It was first printed in 1597, and then in a fuller version in 1599. It seems to have been immediately popular in print and in an unexpected variety of contexts: it was quoted in an Oxford sermon in 1620, and the copy of the First Folio held in the university’s library was worn through on only one page – the play’s balcony scene.

The story of the star-crossed lovers was well known in myth and story. The most direct source for the play is Arthur Brooke’s long narrative poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), which is itself a translation from the French from the Italian. Shakespeare compresses the action and does away with Brooke’s moralising preface, which sets up the story as a cautionary tale for young people not to follow ‘dishonest desire’ nor to trust to gossips and Catholic friars rather than respecting their own parents. The play’s perspective is shifted away from the parents towards the lovers (but cannot go so far as to reward them for their determined autonomy). The play follows the outline of Brooke’s poem closely, but the character of Mercutio is Shakespeare’s own invention.

Performances

Themes and interpretation

Romeo and Juliet is a play so apparently familiar that it hardly needs much gloss. Feud, balcony, bedroom, tomb: the progress of events is so well known as to be clichéd, even when transplanted to religious, ethnic or national conflicts of the modern era. And that sense that for modern readers or viewers the play is always already known seems to have been true from the start, as the Prologue gives it all away in the first minute: ‘a pair of star-crossed lovers take their life’ (Prologue, 6).

In fact the play can be seen as self-conscious about this inscribed inevitability. On the one hand, Romeo and Juliet could not have ended otherwise: the feud means their love is ‘death-marked’ (Prologue, 9) from the start, portents and omens such as Romeo’s dream anticipate the doomed outcome, and the story pre-exists the play in numerous forms. On the other hand, this tragic inevitability is set against its more flexible, unpredictable comedic opposite. Romeo and Juliet begins like a comedy: young people separated by unthinking parents, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Winter’s Tale, and it is striking that it is written in a period when Shakespeare’s main dramatic output was comedies. It begins with conflict – the fight between the Capulet and Montague servants – and might have been expected to resolve into harmony (voicing a contemporary commonplace about genre, the playwright Thomas Heywood wrote that ‘comedies begin in trouble and end in peace; tragedies begin in calms and end in tempest’). And things go wrong because of terrible coincidence: the Friar’s letter to Romeo cannot be delivered because of plague restrictions; Juliet awakes only seconds after – and in many productions just as – Romeo dies. The play misses being a comedy by a whisker. The death of Mercutio, itself an unintended fumble, may be an early indication of just how intransigent this liebestod (love-death) plot is: Shakespeare’s decidedly comic addition to his source material cannot withstand its relentless movement towards self-destruct.

This momentum contributes to the play’s careful structure and symmetry. The dual focus suggested by its title is emphasised in the Prologue’s ‘Two households, both alike in dignity’ (Prologue, 1). From this opening rhyming sonnet, Shakespeare incorporates a diversity of language, from the weird inventiveness of Mercutio’s Queen Mab reverie, ‘begot of nothing but vain fantasy’ (1.4.98), to the inspired bawdy of the Nurse’s rambling prose, and the formal sonnet the young lovers complete as their first exchange (1.5.92–105); the menacing prose exchanges of encounters between the two families are emphasised by their juxtaposition with the lyric intensity of love poetry; Tybalt’s vaunting tragic idiom is matched by Mercutio’s punning. Language is also a theme in a play concerned with the fatal consequences of names. Juliet’s ‘what’s in a name?’ (2.2.43) marks her naivety: names are all-important in the play, which turns, fatally, on their inescapability. The language of Romeo and Juliet includes both formal verse and colloquial prose, and thus marks a development of the rhetorical artifice of Shakespeare’s early plays and points towards the muscular lyricism and emotional immediacy of the mature playwright. Images of light and of fire suggest the ‘violent delights’ (2.6.9) that, quite literally, burn themselves out.

Most often in Shakespeare we do not know the age of the characters: it is not important. In Romeo and Juliet much is made of Juliet’s age: 13. This is not because early marriage was more common in the sixteenth century: Shakespeare’s audiences would have expected couples typically to be in their mid twenties at the time of marriage. Rather, it brings out the youthful naivety of the protagonists. At times Juliet’s speeches give her the maturity of a much older woman, and at others she is a child, whose measure for excitement is the impatience of having ‘new robes / And may not wear them’ (3.2.30–1). Romeo’s erstwhile love Rosaline, never seen in the play, seems to exist solely to point up his adolescent fickleness: he may feel deeply, but not necessarily for long. Friar Lawrence’s counsel ‘love moderately’ (2.6.14) is ignored by this helter-skelter play, in which Capulet’s changing schedule for Juliet’s marriage to Paris is an index of the way time seems to speed up during its course. Romeo and Juliet gives us two very young protagonists whose immature passions are fanned by a pointless feud which keeps them apart, and whose entire courtship and marriage can be measured in hours. It is not their appearance in this play but subsequent literary and popular culture which has, like the statues promised by their grieving families, lifted them into icons of romantic love.