1. Romeo and Juliet
Themes
Love versus hate and the many forms love takes; its power to challenge
hate; the impetuosity of young love; the irrationality of hate and its
capacity to destroy love.
Some related scenes: genuineness
Act 1 Scene 1: The Capulets and Montagues fight in Verona's market-
place; Romeo tells Benvolio of his unrequited love for Rosaline.
Act 1 Scene 5: Forgetting Rosaline, Romeo falls in love with Juliet at first
sight.
Act 2 Scene 2: In Juliet's orchard the two lovers agree to marry.
Act 3 Scene 1: Tybalt fatally wounds Mercutio under the newly-wed
Romeo's arm.
Act 3 Scene 5: Romeo and Juliet prepare to part after their wedding
night.
Act 5 Scene 3: Romeo and Juliet commit suicide; the Prince asks the two
families to reconcile.
Parents and children and the struggle of young people to make their
own choices in the face of parents' vested interests.
Some related scenes:
The Prologue: The Chorus describes the parents' 'ancient grudge' which is
the catalyst for the death of their children.
Act 1 Scene 1: Lord Capulet approves Paris's request to ask Juliet to
marry him.
Act 3 Scene 5: Lord and Lady Capulet tell Juliet of their arrangements for
her to marry Paris.
Act 5 Scene 3: Romeo and Juliet commit suicide; the parents are faced
with the consequences of their ancient feud.
Chance versus choice - the inevitability and the fickleness of fate; the
mixture of chance and choice in determining outcomes.
Some related scenes:

2. The Prologue: The Chorus describes the lovers as 'star-crossed'.
Act 1 Scene 4: As he goes to the Capulets' ball, Romeo tells of a dream
he has had.
Act 3 Scene 3: Romeo happens upon the sword fight between Tybalt and
Mercutio; his intervention results in Mercutio's death for which he kills
Tybalt and calls himself 'fortune's fool'.
Act 5 Scene 1: Balthasar tells Romeo of Juliet's death and Friar Laurence
learns that Brother John has been unable to travel to Mantua to tell
Romeo that Juliet still lives.
Motifs
Light and dark, light representing the lovers as they see one another in
the darkness of their troubles; darkness also as the shroud of secrecy;
also light as lightning and therefore transitory and easily burnt out.
For example:
'But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and
Juliet is the sun'
Act 2 Scene 2
'The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars, / As daylight doth
a lamp'
Act 2 Scene 2
'It is too rash, too unadivsed, too sudden; / Too like the lightning, which
doth cease to be / Ere one can say 'It lightens''
Act 2 Scene 3
'Take him and cut him out in little stars, / And he will make the face of
heaven so fine/That all the world will be in love with night/And pay no
worship to the garish sun'
Act 3 Scene 2
'More light and light; more dark and dark our woes!'

3. Act 3 Scene 5
'For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes / This vault a feasting
presence full of light'
Act 5 Scene 3
'A glooming peace this morning with it brings. / The sun for sorrow will
not show his head'
Act 5 Scene 3
Celestial imagery, representing the power of fate; also heaven and
heavenly as descriptive of the lovers' view of one another.
For example:
'A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life'
The Prologue
'my mind misgives / Some consequence yet hanging in the stars'
Act 1 Scene 4
'so smile the heavens upon this holy act, / That after hours with sorrow
chide us not!'
Act 2 Scene 6
'Can heaven be so envious'
Act 3 Scene 2
'The heavens do lour upon you for some ill'
Act 4 Scene 5
'Is it even so? then I defy you, stars!'
Act 5 Scene 1
'See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate,/That heaven finds means to
kill your joys with love'
Act 5 Scene 3

4. Nature, representing beauty, value, youth and potential.
For example:
'fresh female buds shall you see this night'
Act 1 Scene 2
'Verona's summer hath not such a flower'
Act 1 Scene 3
'So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows'
Act 1 Scene 5
'This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath, / May prove a beauteous
flower when next we meet'
Act 2 Scene 2
'O mickle is the powerful grace that lies / In plants, herbs, stones, and
their true qualities. / For naught so vile that on the earth doth live / But
to the earth some special good doth give'
Act 2 Scene 2
'An eagle, madam, / Hath not so green, so quick, so far an eye / As Paris
hath
Act 3 Scene 6
'sweet flower, with flowers thy bridal bed I strew'
Act 5 Scene 3
Well-known Quotations
Here are some well-known quotes from Romeo and Juliet in the order in
which they appear in the play.
'A pair of star-crossed lovers take their lives' (Prologue)

5. 'Here's much to do with hate, but more with love' (Romeo, Act 1 Scene 1)
'But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart: My will to her consent is but a
part' (Lord Capulet, Act 1 Scene 1)
'I'll look to like, if looking liking move' (Juliet, Act 1 Scene 3)
'Is she a Capulet? O, dear account! My life is my foe's debt' (Romeo, Act 1
Scene 4)
'My only love sprung from my only hate' (Juliet, Act 1 Scene 4)
'But soft, what light through yonder window breaks' (Romeo, Act 2 Scene
1)
'O, Romeo, Romeo wherefore art thou Romeo?' (Juliet, Act 2 Scene 1)
'That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet'
(Juliet, Act 2 Scene 1)
'Parting is such sweet sorrow' (Juliet, Act 2 Scene 1)
'For this alliance may so happy prove, To turn your households' rancour to
true love' (Friar Lawrence, Act 2 Scene 2)
'These violent delights have violent ends' (Friar Lawrence, Act 2 Scene 5)
'A plague o' both your houses' (Mercutio, Act 3 Scene 1)
'Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill' (Prince, Act 3 Scene 1)
'Get these to Church o' Thursday, or never after look me in the face' (Lord
Capulet, Act 3 Scene 5)
'Romeo, Romeo, Romeo! Here's drink: I drink to thee' (Juliet, Act 4 Scene
3)
'O true apothecary. Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die' (Romeo,
Act 5 Scene 3)
'O happy dagger. This is thy sheath: there rust and let me die' (Juliet, Act
5 Scene 3)
'For never was a story of more woe, Than this is Juliet and her Romeo'
(Prince, Act 5 Scene 3)
Did you know?
The first words of Romeo and Julietare in the form of a sonnet. This
prologue reveals the ending to the audience before the play has
properly begun.

6. The play can be considered as a companion piece to that staged by the
Mechanicals at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Here the young
lovers take their lives in earnest, but in A Midsummer Night's
Dream the story of Pyramus and Thisbe becomes comic entertainment
for three sets of newly-weds.
90% of the play is in verse, with only 10% in prose. It contains some
of Shakespeare's most beautiful poetry, including the sonnet Romeo
and Juliet share when they first meet.
Although a story of passionate first love, the play is also full of puns.
Even in death, Mercutio manages to joke: 'ask for me tomorrow and
you will find me a grave man'.
Juliet is only 13 at the time she meets and marries Romeo, but we
never learn exactly how old he is.
Like King Lear, the play was adapted by Nahum Tate, changing the
story to give it a happy ending.
In 1748, the famous David Garrick staged a version which did not
include any mention of Romeo's love for Rosaline, because Garrick felt
this made the tragic hero appear too fickle.
In March 1662, Mary Saunderson became almost certainly the first
woman to play Juliet on the professional stage. Until the Restoration of
the Monarchy in 1660, women were not allowed to perform in public.
Romeo and Juliet, alongside Hamlet, is probably Shakespeare's most
performed play and has also been adapted in many forms.
The musical West Side Story is probably the most famous adaptation,
while BazLehrmann's Romeo+ Juliet brought Shakespeare's play to the
MTV generation.
Key Moments
Every director will choose their own key moments in Romeo and Juliet
depending on how they are interpreting the play.
Here we've listed some important moments in the order in which they
appear in the play.
The scene is set (Act 1 Scene 1)
Montague and Capulet servants clash in the street, the Prince threatens
dire punishment if another such brawl should take place, and Romeo tells
his friend, Benvolio, of his obsession with Rosaline.

7. The lovers meet for the first time (Act 1 Scene 4)
Romeo is persuaded to attend a masked party at the Capulet household.
Not knowing who she is, he falls in love with Juliet the moment he sees
her, and she, equally ignorant that he is a Montague, falls just as
instantly for him.
Romeo risks death to meet his loveJuliet again (Act 2 Scene 1)
When everyone has left the party, Romeo creeps into the Capulet garden
and sees Juliet on her balcony. They reveal their mutual love and Romeo
leaves, promising to arrange a secret marriage and let Juliet's messenger,
her old Nurse, have the details the following morning.
The wedding is held in secret (Act 2 Scene 5)
Juliet tells her parents she is going to make her confession to Friar
Laurence, meets Romeo there and, despite some personal misgivings, the
friar marries them immediately.
Romeo angrily kills Juliet's cousin, Tybalt (Act 3 Scene 1)
Romeo meets Tybalt in the street, and is challenged by him to a duel.
Romeo refuses to fight and his friend Mercutio is so disgusted by this
'cowardice' that the takes up the challenge instead. As Romeo tries to
break up the fight, Tybalt manages to killkillsMercutio and, enraged,
Romeo then kills Tybalt. The Prince arrives and, on hearing the full story,
banishes Romeo rather than have him executed.
The unhappy couple are parted (Act 3 Scene 5)
Arranged by the Friar and the Nurse, Romeo and Juliet have spent their
wedding night together. They are immediately parted though, as Romeo
must leave for banishment in Mantua or die if he is found in Verona.
Believing her grief to be for the death of her cousin, Juliet's father tries to
cheer Juliet by arranging her immediate marriage to Paris. He threatens
to disown her when she asks for the marriage to be at least postponed,
and she runs to the Friar for advice and help.

8. The Friar suggests a dangerous solution to the problem (Act 4 Scene 1)
Juliet arrives at the Friar's to be met by Paris, who is busy discussing their
wedding plans. She is so desperate that she threatens suicide, and the
Friar instead suggests that she takes a potion that will make her appear
to be dead. He promises to send a message to Romeo, asking him to
return secretly and be with Juliet when she wakes, once her 'body' has
been taken to the family crypt.
Juliet is found 'dead' (Act 4 Scene 4)
The Nurse discovers Juliet 's 'body' dead' when she goes to wake her for
her marriage Paris. Friar Laurence is called, counsels the family to accept
their grief, and arranges for Juliet to be 'buried' immediately.
Romeo learns of the tragedy and plans his own suicide (Act 5 Scene 1)
Romeo's servant, Balthasar, reaches Mantua before the Friar's messenger
and tells Romeo that Juliet is dead. Romeo buys poison and leaves for
Verona, planning to die alongside Juliet's body.
The tragic conclusion (Act 5 Scene 3)
Trying to break into the Capulet crypt, Romeo is disturbed by Paris and
they fight. Romeo kills Paris and reaches Juliet's body. He drinks the
poison, kisses his wife for the last time, and dies. Having learned that
Romeo never received his message, the Friar comes to the crypt to be
with Juliet when she wakes. He finds Paris's body and reaches Juliet just
as she revives. He cannot persuade her to leave her dead husband, and
runs away in fear. Juliet realises what has happened, takes Romeo's knife
and stabs herself to death with it. The watchmen discover the gruesome
sight and call the Prince, to whom the Friar confesses everything. Having
heard the full story, the Montagues and Capulets are reconciled. Peace
has been achieved, but the price has been the lives of two innocent young
lovers.
Article: Love and Hatred

9. Psychologist Dorothy Rowe examines how our strongest emotions are
intertwined.
This article first appeared in the show programme for the RSC's 2008
production of Romeo and Juliet.
Love and hatred are not opposites but two sides of the one coin. The coin
is attachment. We are attached to those we love and those we hate. The
opposite of attachment, and thus the opposite of love and hatred, is
indifference. We want nothing, neither approval or disapproval, from
those to whom we are indifferent. However, we cannot be indifferent to
those we love or those we hate because they can fulfil our greatest need
or inspire our greatest fear.
The people we love are those who can affirm that we are the person we
know ourselves to be, and do so. The people we hate are those who can
disconfirm the person we know ourselves to be, and are prepared to do
disconfirmed can override our love, often with tragic circumstances.
Our greatest need is to become and be the person that we know
ourselves to be. When we are young like Romeo and Juliet, our heart
often feels that it will burst with our longing to be the person we know
ourselves to be, and to have all the people who matter to us - those we
love and those we hate - recognise the extraordinary individual that we
are. Alas, at that age we do not know how to be ourselves. We have not
gained the confidence we need both to be ourselves and to face the
hazards and uncertainties of life. The person we know ourselves to be is
our most important possession.
In extreme situations we will choose to let our body die, either in an act
of heroism or suicide, in order to die in the truth of who we are rather
than live the lie of who we are not. Juliet chose not to live the lie of being
Paris's wife; Romeo knew he could not continue as the empty vessel he
was. He needed to be filled by Juliet's courage and her love which was
'boundless as the sea'.
Knowing yourself to be a person is both a wonderful and a terrible thing.
Wonderful because we not only live but know ourselves to be alive:
terrible because our 'I' is no more than a structure of ideas which are the
guesses our brain has constructed about who we are, what the world is,
what our past was, our present is, and our future will be. When our
guesses are being proved to be right, we feel confident and secure, but
when our guesses have been shown to be wrong we begin to feel that 'I'
is falling apart, and we are terrified.
When we were children, our explanations to ourselves about what was
going on, and our predictions about what was going to happen, were
often wrong and we gave vent to our terror as we fell apart in what adults

10. called 'temper tantrums' and 'bad dreams'. In deliberately
misunderstanding what a child is experiencing, adults try to hide from
themselves their own fear of falling apart. They do not recognise that
much of what they do is, at least in part, a defence against the fear of
being annihilated as a person. This fear is far worse than the fear of
death. We can tell ourselves that, when we die, the most important part
of ourselves will continue on as a soul, or a spirit, or in our children, or in
our work, or in the memories of those who knew us, but, when we are
annihilated as a person, it will be that we disappear like a wisp of smoke
in the wind, never to have existed.
Every moment of our life, we are monitoring how safe we are as a person.
The measures of our degree of safety or danger are our emotions, that is,
our interpretations of how safe we are as a person in our present
situation. When we are content, or happy, or joyful, or ecstatic we feel
safe in ourselves because the world is what we want it to be, and when
we are in love we are in the glorious safety where we can be truly and
completely ourselves. Anxiety warns us of the first hint of danger, while
fear tells us that we are in danger. Our pride tries to rescue us from
danger with anger which says, 'How dare this happen to me!' We measure
the kind of danger we are in in many ways - hate, envy, jealousy, guilt,
shame, and despair. We can be ruthless in trying to preserve our sense of
being a person.
Tybalt tries to preserve himself by using his anger and his swordsmanship
to inspire fear in other men, even to the extreme of killing Mercutio and
thus bringing about his own death. As much as Capulet loves his daughter
Juliet, he is prepared to use her or to destroy her in order to pursue 'an
ancient grudge' between his family and that of Montague. He sees a
victory over Montague as the measure of his value as a person.
Accordingly, he wants to give Juliet in marriage to Paris, a kinsman of
Escalus, Prince of Verona. When she refuses, he tells her she can: 'hang,
beg, starve, die in the streets, / For, by my soul, I'll ne'er acknowledge
thee.' Lady Capulet, whose identity depends on that of her husband, sees
her daughter as a threat, and rejects her, saying: 'Talk not to me, for I'll
not speak a word: / Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee.'
The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is not just that of the 'star-cross'd lovers'
but of the two old men who failed to realise that their hatred and pride
tied them to one another as securely as Juliet and Romeo were tied by
their love.
Written by Dorothy Rowe, psychologist and author of What should I
believe?(Routledge) and Why we lie (HarperCollins)
Article: Sweet Sorrow

11. This article first appeared in the show programme for the RSC's 2008
production of Romeo and Juliet.
Half way through rehearsals for the RSC's 2008 production of Romeo and
Juliet, director Neil Bartlett pauses for thought.
Why is Romeo and Juliet still such good box office? And why (perhaps a
more interesting question) is this particular play, with its foul-mouthed,
testosterone-drenched young men, its vivid portrayal of a sexually-
charged teenage heroine and her wayward, immature, impulsive and
finally murderous lover, considered the ideal introduction to the glories of
Shakespeare for impressionable young school students?
No matter how much audiences and producers want to see the story
through the rose-tinted glasses of sentiment, the fact remains that it's a
pretty brutal piece. Half way through rehearsals as I am as I write this, I
think the clues to the answers may lie not just in the iconic story itself,
but in the way it is told.
Consider the way it begins. The first scene is a masterpiece of
scenography - in barely 50 lines, a potentially murderous street brawl
escalates from a few moronic insults into a freeze-frame portrayal of an
entire city trapped in a vicious circle of patriarchal pride, aggression and
facesaving. So far, so good - a full-company crowd scene never goes
amiss at the top of the show, there's not too much blank verse, and
there's some sexy knife-work - no chance of anyone getting bored so far,
and if the choreography is noisy enough, hopefully they won't notice that
the insults are in fact all pretty impenetrable late sixteenth century
doubles entendres.
But the real impact (the real brilliance) of the opening comes from the
fact that this famously hot-tempered and fast-paced play doesn't actually
start with this crowd scene at all. It starts with something much cooler,
much more singular - and more challenging. The actors stand in front of
the audience and, in the words of the famous prologue, do exactly what
you're never supposed to do in the theatre: tell everyone how the story
ends. As soon as those famous lines are over ('Two households, both alike
in dignity…') the telling of the story is set up to work in a very particular
way. Having heard the words of the prologue means that all the time
we're getting carried away by the heat of the story-telling, by the Italian
setting, by the poetry, we can't avoid the fact that we, the audience,
already know what the characters don't, namely that the way they're
behaving is going to lead, step by deliberate or accidental step, to the
mutilation and violent deaths of the two young people whose beautiful
faces and bodies are splashed across the poster as the main attraction of
the evening.
Imagine for a moment what watching the play would be like if
we didn't know they were going to die; it would be entirely different.

12. We're set up to get involved in the story not just for the pleasures of
its what, but for the challenges of its howand its why.
I think there's another clue to the enduring appeal of the play buried in
those opening lines. The two households (pace West Side Story and all
the other versions that have situated the Capulets and the Montagues on
opposite sides of various cultural or racial tracks) are enemies, but they
are precisely not different; the two households are both alike in dignity.
Their children's problem is not that they are trapped in a divided world,
but that they're growing up in one of stifling uniformity. Verona is a city
with very rigid definitions of how young men and women should behave -
boys must first obey and then turn into their violent fathers, and girls
must do as they're told.
Anyone who has ever felt as a teenager that the world is conspiring
against them to limit their choices (ie: more or less everyone) can identify
with the first appearances of the hero or heroine (with either gleeful
immediacy or rueful hindsight, depending on what age they are when
they see the play).
Romeo, an only son, has stopped talking to his father and is desperately
trying to shrug off the crushing weight of his family's expectations by
staying out all night, refusing to get involved in the hypermasculine
posturing of the vendetta and instead pouring all his energy into lurid
poetic fantasies about an inappropriate girlfriend.
Juliet, an only daughter, is so busy getting ready for a party that she does
not at first realise that her mother is grooming her to receive some very
bad news, namely that a month short of her fourteenth birthday her
parents are ready to hand her over to the richer, older man they have
decided she should marry.
This is the tragedy of two children who, in extremis, instinctively glimpse
in each other a possible escape route from otherwise dead-end lives. This
may seem a harsh perspective from which to view a play that goes on to
flower into some of the most immediate and effective evocations of desire
in the language (current favourite sexy line: 'Spread thy close curtain,
love-performing night…'), but the life of the play lies as much in its
ruthless and swift-as-an-oncoming-truck depiction of a dysfunctional
culture as it does in its famous love scenes.
If these 400- and-something year-old pages of blank verse still have
something to tell us (and the box office figures rather indicate that they
do) then it is not that love makes the world go round, or that parting is
such sweet sorrow, or that standing sighing on a balcony in a nightie is
the meaning of romance, or that playing with knives is sexy, but rather
that the patriarchy works by stifling young lives and, if necessary, by
taking them, and that the fight to escape from its clutches is sometimes a
fight to the death. Now that is a story worth telling to an audience of
schoolchildren…

13. Written by author and director Neil Bartlett. Neil directed Romeo and
Juliet for the RSC's 2008 production in the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-
upon-Avon which then continued on a major British tour.
Article: Opposites
The earth, that's nature's mother, is her tomb.
What is her burying, grave that is her womb...
Within the infant rind of this small flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power.
(Friar Lawrence, Act 2 Scene 3)
Day and night, the earth as both womb and tomb, herbs and flowers that
are simultaneously poisonous and medicinal, virtue and vice, God's grace
and our own desires:
'such opposèd kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs.'
Give Shakespeare an idea and he is equally interested in its opposite.
Opposition is indeed the key to Romeo and Juliet: the lovers are doomed
because they are from the two opposed houses of Capulet and Montague.
In a violent world, violent delights have violent ends. Youthful passions
boil over not only into poetry and embraces, but also into insult and
sword-fight.
Friar Laurence's soliloquy cuts to the quick of the play's double vision. It
is structured around the rhetorical figure of oxymoron, the paradox
whereby opposites are held together. Versions of the figure recur
throughout the play, from Romeo's 'heavy lightness, serious vanity' to the
duet of nightingale and lark in the great scene of lovers parting at dawn.
At the beginning of the play, Romeo is in love with Rosaline. Or rather, he
is in love with the idea of being in love. We never actually see Rosaline:
she exists solely as the idealised love-object of Romeo. She is nothing
more than a literary type, the beautiful but unavailable mistress of the
sonnet tradition that goes back to the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch.
The Petrarchan lover thrives on artifice and paradox. The fire in his heart
is dependent on his lady's icy maidenhood
'Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
Still-waking sleep that is not what it is!'
As the Friar recognies, this is mere 'doting', not true loving. And so long
as Mercutio is around, the bubble of poetic language keeps on being
pricked - is it not just a matter of rhyming 'love' with 'dove'? Romeo still
poeticises on seeing Juliet, though he speaks in more richly textured
imagery:
'It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
As a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear.'

14. When the lovers meet at the Capulet ball, they weave a verbal dance that
answers to the motions of their bodies and hands: their initial dialogue is
wrapped into the form of a sonnet. But over the next few scenes their
language evolves into something more fluid and more natural. You can
hear Shakespeare growing as a poet even as you see the love between
Juliet and Romeo growing from infatuation at first sight to the conviction
that each has found the other's soul-mate.
Love is a chemistry that begins from a physiological transformation -
Romeo is 'bewitched by the charm of looks' - but it becomes a discovery
of the very core of human being:
'Can I go forward when my heart is here?
Turn back, dull earth, and find thy centre out.'
What haunts the lover is the suspicion that it might all be a dream.
Mercutio spins a tale of how love is but the mischief of Queen Mab,
midwife of illusion. Romeo blesses the night, but then acknowledges his
fear that:
'Being in night, all this is but a dream,
Too flattering-sweet to be substantial.'
Juliet has to deal with another fear. For a girl in Shakespeare's time,
chastity was a priceless commodity. To lose her virtue without the
prospect of marriage would be to lose herself. In the speech that begins
'Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face', Juliet reveals quite
remarkable self-understanding. She is acutely aware that in love the
stakes for a woman are far higher than those for a man. Here
Shakespeare's poetic language becomes the vehicle of both argument and
emotion. The artifice of rhyme is replaced by blank verse that moves with
the suppleness of thought itself.
In the original production, the lines would have been spoken by a young
male actor of perhaps around the same 13 years as the character of
Juliet. By highlighting extreme youthfulness (in the source, Juliet is 16),
Shakespeare makes a bold implicit claim for his poetic drama. Both actor
and character are speaking with maturity far beyond their years: such,
the dramatist implies, is the metamorphic potency of the mingled fire and
powder of love and art.
Though younger than Romeo, Juliet is more knowing. She senses the
danger in his talk of idolatry. In the soaring love-duet that is their final
scene together before Romeo's exile, she wills the song to be that of the
nightingale rather than the lark because she knows that the break of day
will mean the end of their night of love and the dawn of a harsh reality in
which she will be reduced to the status of a bargaining chip in the
negotiations between Verona's powerful families.

15. According to the social code of the time, it is the duty of the young to
obey the old. Marriage is a matter not of love, but of the consolidation
and perpetuation of wealth and status. Arthur Brooke, author of
the TragicallHistorye of Romeus and Juliet which Shakespeare had before
him as he wrote, told his readers that the moral of the story was that
young lovers who submit to erotic desire, neglecting the authority and
advice of parents and listening instead to drunken gossips and
superstitious friars, will come to a deservedly sticky end.
Shakespeare's play, by contrast, glories in the energy of youth. It does
not seek to advance a moral, but offers instead the tragic paradox that
the heat in the blood that animates the star-crossed lovers is the same
ardour that leads young men to scrap in the street and to kill out of
loyalty to their friends.
The kinship of love and revenge, the perpetual war between the
generations: Shakespeare will return to this territory in later plays such
as Hamlet and King Lear. The final scene takes place in an ancestral
tomb, but those who lie dead are the flower of a city's youth - Mercutio,
Tybalt, Paris, Juliet and her Romeo.
Written by Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance
Literature at the University of Warwick.
Photo by Ellie Kurttz shows Friar Lawrence (David Fielder) speaking to the
gathered families at the tragic conclusion of the play in the RSC's 2006
production of Romeo and Juliet © RSC