Romeo and Juliet

• 1. Introduction

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  Romeo and Juliet begins with a curse. Before a single scene has played out, a Chorus steps forward to tell the audience that two young lovers are already doomed. "A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life," the prologue announces, and then the play spends four to six days proving it. That compressed timeline is no accident. Shakespeare deliberately shrank the nine months of his source poem down to a matter of days, building a headlong rush toward catastrophe that audiences have never quite been able to look away from.

  The play was likely written sometime between 1591 and 1595, and it drew on stories that had been circulating in Italy for well over a century before Shakespeare put quill to paper. The names Romeo and Juliet, the feuding Montagues and Capulets, the secret marriage, the sleeping potion, the letter that never arrives: nearly all of it existed in prose and verse long before the Globe Theatre was built. What Shakespeare added was something harder to quantify. He gave the story its music, its philosophical weight, and its permanent place in the human imagination.

  Scholar Gary Taylor ranks it as the sixth most popular of Shakespeare's plays in his own lifetime. In the 19th century, measured by professional performances, it was the single most popular Shakespeare play of all. By the 20th century it had slipped to second, behind Hamlet. Yet in the centuries since it was first printed in 1597, no other Shakespeare play has generated more varied adaptations, across stage, film, ballet, opera, novel, manga, and popular music. The word "Romeo" entered the English language as a common noun meaning "male lover."

  What made this particular story of two teenagers in Verona so impossible to set aside? And why does a play full of avoidable accidents, mistimed messages, and characters who say "plague on both your houses" still feel like the inevitable working-out of fate? Those questions sit at the heart of every production ever mounted, and scholars still have not settled them.

• 2. The Story Behind the Story

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  Masuccio Salernitano published the earliest known version of the Romeo and Juliet tale in 1476, in the 33rd novel of his collection Il Novellino. He set it in Siena and insisted the events had occurred within his own lifetime. His version already contained the secret marriage, a colluding friar, a prominent citizen killed in a street fight, the hero's exile, the heroine's forced marriage to another man, a potion plot, and the crucial letter that goes astray. In Salernitano's telling, the hero is caught and beheaded, and the heroine dies of grief.

  Luigi da Porto transformed the tale between 1524 and 1531, moving it to Verona, naming the families Montecchi and Capuleti, and giving the lovers the names Giulietta and Romeo. Da Porto drew partly from his own life: he had been a soldier present at a ball on the 26th of February 1511, at a residence of the pro-Venice Savorgnan clan in Udine, where he fell in love with Lucina, a Savorgnan daughter, only to have the family feud frustrate their courtship. Years later, still half-paralysed from a battle wound, he wrote Giulietta e Romeo in Montorso Vicentino, from which he could see the castles of Verona. He dedicated the novella to Lucina Savorgnan herself.

  Da Porto also introduced the characters who would become Mercutio, Tybalt, Count Paris, and Juliet's nurse. He claimed his story was historically factual and placed it in the era of Bartolomeo della Scala, the same ruler whose Latinised name Shakespeare would use for Prince Escalus. Matteo Bandello expanded the story in 1554, and it was then translated into French by Pierre Boaistuau in 1559, and into English verse by Arthur Brooke in 1562 as The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet. William Painter retold it in prose in his 1567 collection Palace of Pleasure.

  Shakespeare worked directly from Brooke's poem, compressing the timeline from nine months to a few days and significantly expanding the roles of Mercutio and the Nurse. Even the names Montague and Capulet had appeared centuries earlier, in Dante's Divine Comedy, where they are invoked in canto six of Purgatorio as examples of families destroyed by political strife, though Dante's purpose was political satire aimed at Emperor Albert I of Germany, not romantic tragedy.

• 3. A Text Full of Trouble

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  The first printed edition of Romeo and Juliet appeared in early 1597, printed by John Danter. It is known as Q1, and scholars have long regarded it with deep suspicion. The 20th-century editor T. J. B. Spencer described it as "a detestable text, probably a reconstruction of the play from the imperfect memories of one or two of the actors." The prevailing theory, associated with scholar Alfred Pollard, holds that Q1 was a pirated copy assembled from actors' recollections, though that theory has faced challenges.

  Q2, printed in 1599 by Thomas Creede and published by Cuthbert Burby, is about 800 lines longer than Q1. Its title page describes it as "Newly corrected, augmented and amended." Scholars believe Q2 was based on Shakespeare's own working draft, his so-called foul papers, because the text shows signs of unresolved authorial decisions: variable tags for characters and speech beginnings that look like abandoned false starts. Every subsequent printing traces back to Q2, including the First Folio of 1623.

  Q2 was reprinted in 1609 as Q3, in 1622 as Q4, and in 1637 as Q5. The First Folio text was based primarily on Q3, with possible corrections drawn from a theatrical prompt book or from Q1 itself. Later Folio editions appeared in 1632, 1664, and 1685. The first modern edition, incorporating multiple quartos and folios, was Nicholas Rowe's 1709 version. Alexander Pope followed in 1723, beginning a tradition of importing stage directions from Q1 to fill gaps in Q2.

  One detail in the text has helped scholars pin down the play's approximate date. Juliet's Nurse mentions an earthquake that she says occurred eleven years earlier. This may refer to the Dover Straits earthquake of 1580, which would date that line to 1591. But the play's stylistic affinities with A Midsummer Night's Dream and other works conventionally placed in 1594-95 suggest the full play was completed sometime in that window, with 1596 as the latest possible date given the 1597 printing.

• 4. Language as Character

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  Friar Laurence speaks in sermon and sententiae forms, the rhetorical modes of a moralist. The Nurse uses a loose blank verse that sits close to colloquial speech. Romeo begins the play attempting the Petrarchan sonnet form when he describes his hopeless infatuation with Rosaline, a form that was already becoming archaic in Shakespeare's day and that Lady Capulet also uses to describe Count Paris as a potential husband. Each of these assignments is deliberate: Shakespeare matched the poetic form to the character's social position and emotional state.

  When Romeo and Juliet meet for the first time, they compose a shared sonnet between them, shifting to a more contemporary form built around the metaphors of pilgrims and saints. Scholar Molly Mahood has identified at least 175 puns and wordplays in the text, many of them sexual in nature. On their first meeting, Romeo uses metaphor as a kind of social safe-conduct, testing Juliet's feelings in a way that allowed either party to retreat without losing face, following the advice of Baldassare Castiglione, whose works on courtly behaviour had been translated into English.

  Juliet breaks from convention at the balcony scene by asking Romeo directly, "Dost thou love me?" rather than letting him continue his poetic declarations. This bluntness is her means of searching for genuine feeling rather than rhetorical ornament, and it aligns with a broader pattern in her speech: she uses monosyllabic words with Romeo and formal language with Paris. Romeo, for his part, grows more adept at the sonnet form across the course of the play. The play opens with a 14-line prologue in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet spoken by a Chorus, and a second prologue appears before Act II.

  All told, no fewer than 103 references to time appear in the text, a figure that reflects the play's obsession with counting the hours. Shakespeare's day, plays were performed at noon or in the afternoon in daylight, forcing the playwright to create the illusion of night through words alone. References to stars, the moon, and specific days of the week were not decoration: they were the machinery by which an afternoon audience could believe it was watching events unfold after dark.

• 5. Fate, Chance, and Character

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  Scholars have never settled whether Romeo and Juliet is a play about fate or a play about a series of catastrophically bad decisions. The lovers are described from the opening prologue as "star-cross'd", a phrase that invokes the Elizabethan belief that stars controlled the fates of humanity as they moved across the sky. Romeo speaks of a foreboding he feels in the stars' movements early in the play; when he learns of Juliet's death, he explicitly defies their course.

  John W. Draper points to the Elizabethan doctrine of the four humours as a way of understanding the characters: Tybalt, for example, maps closely onto the choleric type, driven by hot-blooded anger. Reading the characters through this framework reduces the amount of the plot that looks like accident and reframes it as predictable consequence of fixed temperament. Ruth Nevo, on the other hand, considers the play a lesser tragedy of happenstance rather than of character, noting that the degree to which chance is emphasised in the narrative makes it feel like an emotional melodrama rather than a Shakespearean tragedy in the classical sense.

  The case for chance rests heavily on the chain of near-misses at the end: the plague that prevents Friar John from delivering the crucial letter to Romeo; Romeo's servant Balthasar reaching him first with false news of Juliet's death; Paris arriving at the tomb at the same moment as Romeo; Friar Laurence arriving moments too late after Juliet awakens. Charles Gildon and Lord Kames, writing in the 18th century, argued that this reliance on accident rather than character flaw violated the classical rules of tragedy. Samuel Johnson disagreed and considered the play one of Shakespeare's most pleasing works.

  Mercutio's death sharpens this question. Before Act III, the play operates largely as a comedy, complete with punning wordplay between Benvolio and Mercutio just before Tybalt's arrival. After Mercutio dies from a wound inflicted when Romeo tries to stop the fight, the play shifts abruptly and never recovers its earlier lightness. John Dryden, writing about a decade after Samuel Pepys dismissed the play in 1662 as "the worst that I ever heard in my life," praised Shakespeare's handling of Mercutio specifically, claiming Shakespeare had said he was "forc'd to kill him in the third Act, to prevent being killed by him."

• 6. Four Centuries of Adaptation

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  All theatres in England were closed by the Puritan government on the 6th of September 1642. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Sir William Davenant staged a new adaptation in 1662 in which Mary Saunderson played Juliet, making her probably the first woman to perform the role professionally. A rival version by James Howard turned the play into a tragicomedy in which both lovers survive. Thomas Otway's 1679 adaptation, The History and Fall of Caius Marius, relocated the action to ancient Rome, renamed the lovers Marius and Lavinia, and added a key innovation: Juliet wakes from her potion before Romeo dies. This closing scene was so influential that it was still being used in adaptations up to 1748.

  David Garrick's 1748 adaptation ran for nearly a century. It transferred all language describing Rosaline to Juliet, removing the suggestion that Romeo was fickle. In 1750, a theatrical event known as the "Battle of the Romeos" saw Spranger Barry and Susannah Maria Arne at Covent Garden competing directly against Garrick and George Anne Bellamy at Drury Lane on the same evenings. Charlotte Cushman finally broke Garrick's hold on the play in 1845 in the United States, performing Romeo opposite her sister Susan as Juliet and running for eighty-four performances. The Times wrote of her: "For a long time Romeo has been a convention. Miss Cushman's Romeo is a creative, a living, breathing, animated, ardent human being." Queen Victoria noted in her journal that "no-one would ever have imagined she was a woman."

  Edwin Booth, brother to John Wilkes Booth, opened Romeo and Juliet at his own Booth's Theatre on the 3rd of February 1869, earning over $60,000 in a run of over six weeks, described as one of the most elaborate productions ever seen in America. The 1935 production at the New Theatre featured John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier as Romeo and Mercutio, with Peggy Ashcroft as Juliet, the two men exchanging roles six weeks into the run. Olivier later described the contrast between himself and Gielgud: "John, all spiritual, all spirituality, all beauty, all abstract things; and myself as all earth, blood, humanity."

  In film, Georges Méliès made the first screen version in the silent era, though that film is now lost. Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 film, cast with teenagers Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey who had virtually no prior acting experience, was in its time the highest-grossing Shakespeare film ever made. Baz Luhrmann's 1996 Romeo + Juliet then claimed that record in its own time. The Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler Broadway production of Fall 2024 achieved the youngest ticket-buying audience in Broadway history and received the first Tony nomination for Best Revival of a Play that the production had ever received in the award's history. Prokofiev's ballet score, originally commissioned by the Kirov Ballet and rejected twice, has since attained what observers have called an immense reputation; Kenneth MacMillan choreographed a version in 1965 and John Cranko in 1962. West Side Story, which updated the story to mid-20th-century New York City with rival ethnic gangs, debuted on Broadway in 1957 with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and was filmed twice, in 1961 and in 2021.