Shakespeare · Tragedies

Romeo and Juliet

c. 1594–96

Tragedy — from Arthur Brooke's poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet

In Verona two great houses are at feud. The son of one and the thirteen-year-old daughter of the other meet at a masked ball, marry in secret the next day and are dead within four. A street brawl kills Mercutio and then Tybalt, banishment separates the lovers, a friar's sleeping potion is mistaken for death, and a letter goes astray. The play's prologue is a sonnet, the lovers' first exchange is another, and its story has given rise to more operas, ballets, musicals and films than any other in the canon.

How to spot them

▸Verona; two households, both alike in dignity, in an ancient grudge
▸A masked ball, a secret marriage, and a friar with a potion
▸A prologue spoken in the form of a sonnet
▸The heroine is thirteen; the whole action takes about four days
▸The famous scene below a window — though the word 'balcony' never appears in the text

Scenes, characters & lines

'Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene'

The opening of the prologue, a sonnet spoken by the Chorus

'But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east'

The orchard scene beneath the window

'What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet'

The trouble is that the boy belongs to the enemy house

'A plague o' both your houses!'

Mercutio's dying curse, after he is stabbed under his friend's arm

Mercutio's speech on Queen Mab, the fairies' midwife, no bigger than an agate-stone

A flight of fantasy that ends in bitterness

A friar's potion that counterfeits death for forty-two hours

Friar Laurence's plan, undone when his letter never reaches Mantua

'For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo'

The Prince's closing couplet

'These violent delights have violent ends'

Friar Laurence's warning before the secret wedding

Key ideas

It is the first Shakespeare tragedy to make private love, rather than public power, the tragic subject
Shakespeare compresses Brooke's leisurely nine months into four frantic days, so haste itself becomes a cause of the catastrophe

Quick-fire facts

•The feuding families are the Montagues and the Capulets
•The immediate source is Arthur Brooke's 3,000-line poem of 1562, itself derived from Matteo Bandello via Pierre Boaistuau
•Juliet is thirteen — her father says 'she hath not seen the change of fourteen years'
•The prologue is a Shakespearean sonnet, and the lovers' first fourteen lines of dialogue at the ball form another
•Mercutio and Tybalt both die in Act 3 Scene 1, the hinge of the play
•The word 'balcony' appears nowhere in Shakespeare; the balcony is a later theatrical tradition, and the one in Verona was added to a medieval house in the twentieth century
•Musical settings include Gounod's opera Roméo et Juliette (1867), Tchaikovsky's fantasy-overture (1869, revised 1880), Prokofiev's ballet (1935) and Bernstein's West Side Story (1957)
•Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 film and Baz Luhrmann's 1996 Romeo + Juliet are the best-known screen versions
•The 1597 first quarto is a memorially reconstructed 'bad quarto'; the 1599 second quarto is the basis of modern texts

Drill it — 10 cards

1 / 10new card

Sources

Folger Shakespeare Library — Romeo and Juliet
René Weis (ed.) — Romeo and Juliet (The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series)