Romeo and Juliet: Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Love Against a Feud
The rivalry between two families, the Capulets and the Montagues, stands in the way of two young lovers. Romeo and Juliet, a universal tragedy in five acts written by William Shakespeare in the sixteenth century, is a love story set in Verona, and perhaps the most famous love story ever staged.
Author: William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Title: Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595)
Format: English paperback (Folger Shakespeare Library, Simon & Schuster), 336 pages, with notes
Scope: Tragedy in five acts
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0743477111 (ASIN 0743477111)
A Secret Marriage
Despite the feud between their families, the young couple decide to marry with the help of Friar Laurence. But the idyll does not last long. Things start to go wrong when Romeo’s friend Mercutio fights a duel with Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin. Seeing his friend die before his eyes, Romeo feels bound to take revenge, and afterwards he has to flee.
The Friar’s Plan
Juliet’s father presses ahead with an arranged marriage to Count Paris, and she turns to the friar again for a solution. Friar Laurence suggests that Juliet fake her own death to escape the wedding. The plan goes ahead, but the news that reaches Romeo is that his beloved is dead, so he decides to go to Verona to die beside her. The friar, learning that his letter never reached Romeo, hurries to Juliet’s tomb.
Paris arrives first; he and Romeo fight, and Paris is killed. Romeo sees Juliet and drinks the poison he has bought. The friar arrives just as Juliet wakes; seeing Romeo dead beside her, she understands what has happened and stabs herself. The tragic ending finally reconciles the two families, shaken by the disaster their rivalry has caused.
Two Households
The play opens with a sonnet that gives the ending away: "Two households, both alike in dignity, / In fair Verona, where we lay our scene" produce a pair of "star-cross’d lovers" who will die. Shakespeare’s audience knew the story; the suspense lies in how quickly everything happens. Romeo and Juliet meet, marry and die within a few days, and Juliet is not yet fourteen. Speed is the play’s atmosphere: love, quarrels and decisions all come too fast.
Mercutio, Tybalt and the Nurse
Some of the play’s best moments belong to the characters around the lovers. Mercutio, Romeo’s quick-witted friend, delivers the fantastical Queen Mab speech and, dying, curses "a plague o’ both your houses". Tybalt, Juliet’s hot-headed cousin, embodies the feud. The Nurse, bawdy and affectionate, provides comedy until she fails Juliet when it matters most. Their deaths and betrayals push the tragedy forward as much as the lovers’ choices.
Sources and Afterlife
Shakespeare took his plot mainly from Arthur Brooke’s long poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), itself based on Italian tales. What he added was language: the balcony scene, the dawn parting and the lovers’ shared sonnet at their first meeting. The play has been reimagined countless times, from Prokofiev’s ballet and the musical West Side Story to the films of Franco Zeffirelli (1968) and Baz Luhrmann (1996).
Reading This Edition
The Folger Shakespeare Library edition prints the text with explanatory notes on the facing page, which makes Elizabethan English much easier to follow. One famous line is worth knowing in advance: when Juliet asks "wherefore art thou Romeo?" she means "why are you Romeo", a Montague, not "where are you".
Why Read It Now
Everyone knows how it ends, and it still works, because Shakespeare makes the speed of young love and the stupidity of an old quarrel feel equally real. The Folger edition places notes and glosses opposite the text, which makes it one of the easiest ways to read the play in the original English.
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