romeo and juliet essay body

Romeo And Juliet Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on romeo and juliet.

Romeo and Juliet is the most famous love tragedy written by William Shakespeare. This is a story of love and fate. Furthermore, the basis of this tragic love story is the Old Italian tale translated into English in the sixteenth century. The story is about two young star-crossed lovers whose death results in reconcile between their feuding families. Moreover, Romeo and Juliet is among the most frequently performed plays by Shakespeare .

Lessons of Love from Romeo and Juliet

First of all, Romeo and Juliet teach us that love is blind. Romeo and Juliet belonged to two influential families. Furthermore, these two families were engaged in a big feud among themselves. However, against all odds, Romeo and Juliet find each other and fall in love. Most noteworthy, they are blind to the fact that they are from rival families. They strive to be together in spite of the threat of hate between their families.

Another important lesson is that love brings out the best in us. Most noteworthy, Romeo and Juliet were very different characters by the end of the story than in the beginning. Romeo was suffering from depression before he met Juliet. Furthermore, Juliet was an innocent timid girl. Juliet was forced into marriage against her will by her parents. After falling in love, the personalities of these characters changed in positive ways. Romeo becomes a deeply passionate lover and Juliet becomes a confident woman.

Life without love is certainly not worth living. Later in the story, Romeo learns that his beloved Juliet is dead. At this moment Romeo felt a heart-shattering moment. Romeo then gets extremely sad and drinks poison. However, Juliet was alive and wakes up to see Romeo dead. Juliet then immediately decides to kill herself due to this massive heartbreak. Hence, both lovers believed that life without love is not worth living.

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Legacy of Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. Furthermore, the play was very popular even in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Scholar Gary Taylor believes it as the sixth most popular of Shakespeare’s plays. Moreover, Sir William Davenant of the Duke’s Company staged Romeo and Juliet in 1662. The earliest production of Romeo and Juliet was in North America on 23 March 1730.

There were professional performances of Romeo and Juliet in the mid-19th century. In 19th century America, probably the most elaborate productions of Romeo and Juliet took place. The first professional performance of the play in Japan seems to be George Crichton Miln’s company’s production in 1890. In the 20th century, Romeo and Juliet became the second most popular play behind Hamlet.

There have been at least 24 operas based on Romeo and Juliet. The best-known ballet version of this play is Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Most noteworthy, Romeo and Juliet have a huge impact on literature. Romeo and Juliet made romance as a worthy topic for tragedy. Before Romeo and Juliet, romantic tragedy was certainly unthinkable.

Romeo and Juliet are probably the most popular romantic fictional characters. They have been an inspiration for lovers around the world for centuries. Most noteworthy, the story depicts the struggle of the couple against a patriarchal society. People will always consider Romeo and Juliet as archetypal young lovers.

Q1 State any one lesson of love from Romeo and Juliet?

A1 One lesson of love from Romeo and Juliet is that love brings out the best in us.

Q2 What makes Romeo and Juliet unique in literature?

A2 Romeo and Juliet made romance as a worthy topic for tragedy. This is what makes it unique.

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Romeo and Juliet

William shakespeare, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Romeo and Juliet: Introduction

Romeo and juliet: plot summary, romeo and juliet: detailed summary & analysis, romeo and juliet: themes, romeo and juliet: quotes, romeo and juliet: characters, romeo and juliet: symbols, romeo and juliet: literary devices, romeo and juliet: quizzes, romeo and juliet: theme wheel, brief biography of william shakespeare.

Historical Context of Romeo and Juliet

Other books related to romeo and juliet.

• Full Title: Romeo and Juliet
• When Written: Likely 1591-1595
• Where Written: London, England
• When Published: “Bad quarto” (incomplete manuscript) printed in 1597; Second, more complete quarto printed in 1599; First folio, with clarifications and corrections, printed in 1623
• Literary Period: Renaissance
• Genre: Tragic play
• Setting: Verona, Italy
• Climax: Mistakenly believing that Juliet is dead, Romeo kills himself on her funeral bier by drinking poison. Juliet wakes up, finds Romeo dead, and fatally stabs herself with his dagger.
• Antagonist: Capulet, Lady Capulet, Montague, Lady Montague, Tybalt

Extra Credit for Romeo and Juliet

Tourist Trap. Casa di Giulietta, a 12-century villa in Verona, is located just off the Via Capello (the possible origin of the anglicized surname “Capulet”) and has become a major tourist attraction over the years because of its distinctive balcony. The house, purchased by the city of Verona in 1905 from private holdings, has been transformed into a kind of museum dedicated to the history of Romeo and Juliet , where tourists can view set pieces from some of the major film adaptations of the play and even leave letters to their loved ones. Never mind that “the balcony scene,” one of the most famous scenes in English literature, may never have existed—the word “balcony” never appears in the play, and balconies were not an architectural feature of Shakespeare’s England—tourists flock from all over to glimpse Juliet’s famous veranda.

Love Language. While much of Shakespeare’s later work is written in a combination of verse and prose (used mostly to offer distinction between social classes, with nobility speaking in verse and commoners speaking in prose), Romeo and Juliet is notable for its heady blend of poetic forms. The play’s prologue is written in the form of a sonnet, while most of the dialogue adheres strictly to the rhythm of iambic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet alter their cadences when speaking to each another, using more casual, naturalistic speech. When they talk about other potential lovers, such as Rosaline and Paris, their speech is much more formal (to reflect the emotional falsity of those dalliances.) Friar Laurence speaks largely in sermons and aphorisms, while the nurse speaks in blank verse.

How to Write a Romeo and Juliet Essay ( OCR GCSE English Literature )

Revision note.

English Content Creator

How to Write a Romeo and Juliet Essay

Your OCR GCSE English Literature exam will include questions on the Shakespeare play that you’ve been studying.

You will have 50 minutes to complete one Romeo and Juliet question from a choice of two options:

Either a question based on an extract (of about 40 lines) from Romeo and Juliet

Or a “discursive” essay question, which is not based on any extract

You will not have access to a copy of Romeo and Juliet for either of these two options, so it’s important that you know the plot of the play very well. Examiners want you to track themes or character development by referring to key parts of the play. A good tip is to consider the way the theme or character has been introduced, how they develop, and how the play’s ending presents them. OCR examiners state that, for the Romeo and Juliet essay, you need to use evidence from elsewhere in the play, even for the extract-based question : to get a Grade 9, it’s not enough to rely on the text from the extract. See our Romeo and Juliet Quotations and Analysis revision note page for key quotations you can use in your answer.

How do you start a Romeo and Juliet essay?

It’s always daunting when you know you have 50 minutes to write only one long answer. So how do you start writing? It might sound frightening, but the answer is: don’t start writing. With such limited time, preparation is key, so try not to rush into it.

The single most important thing you can do in order to get the highest mark on your Romeo and Juliet essay is to hold off on writing anything before you make a plan. A plan should include your general answer to the question, and then some references from across the play that will support your argument. For both the OCR extract-based question and the discursive essay, examiners award the highest marks to students who create a “coherent line of argument” and who maintain a “focus on the question” and a “critical style”. What do these phrases actually mean?

By creating a plan before you start writing, you are ensuring that your essay covers all three of these points.

Your plan could look something like this:

How do you structure a Romeo and Juliet essay?

OCR Examiners give the highest marks to students who have managed to create a “coherent line of argument” throughout their essay. One of the best ways to achieve this is – before you start writing – to form your own answer to the question: this is your interpretation or argument. Once you have done this, you can plan how to structure your ideas. This means considering how each paragraph will analyse a different point in your argument, and choosing relevant evidence from across the play to support your ideas. To achieve a grade 9, OCR recommends that students include an introduction , clearly organised paragraphs and a conclusion .  If you look at the example plan above, you will see that the example plan includes a “ thesis statement ” and “ topic questions ”. See how to include these into your essay below:

Top tips for structuring your Romeo and Juliet essay

Always begin with a clear thesis statement that sets out your argument:

Your thesis statement should be one or two sentences that focus on the question you’ve been set

It can also include a reference to what you think Shakespeare’s overall message might be

For a character-based question, consider what the character represents or how they convey a theme 

You could consider genre:

For example, the fact that Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy

Include three or four paragraphs in your essay:

Including more paragraphs can result in a vague essay that doesn’t specifically answer the question – writing more about less leads to a coherent essay

For the extract question, remember to spend some time considering the rest of the play, such as how the character has changed or will change by the end

Each paragraph should begin with a topic sentence:

This is one sentence that sets out the argument of the paragraph

Topic sentences should always be directly related to your thesis statement

All the evidence (quotes or references) should prove your topic sentence

Finish your essay with a short conclusion:

The conclusion shouldn’t include any new evidence

Try to reuse the words of the question, and the words in your thesis statement

As it should sum up your argument, it may help to reread your introduction

Some schools and teachers recommend students use a “writing frame” for structuring essay paragraphs. This usually takes the form of an acronym, like PEE (Point, Evidence, Explanation).

This is a good way to help you achieve the objectives on the mark scheme, but do make sure it does not limit your analysis. For example, OCR examiners want to see you explore an idea thoroughly before moving onto another piece of evidence. But what does this mean? It does not mean repeating what you have said in different words. Instead, it means that you should consider the evidence you use in the wider context of the play, or a particular character’s development. For example, rather than simply analysing a metaphor in a particular line, consider if this is typical language for that character, how it may be received by other characters and, importantly, how it is delivered to the audience and what they know at this point.

To see an example of how to include these elements in your essay, see our model answer for the OCR Romeo and Juliet extract question , and a model answer for the Romeo and Juliet discursive essay question .

Romeo and Juliet essay top tips

Shakespeare, William. Complete Works of William Shakespeare . Edited by Peter Alexander, HarperCollins, 1994. Accessed 26 March 2024.

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Author: Sam Evans

Sam is a graduate in English Language and Literature, specialising in journalism and the history and varieties of English. Before teaching, Sam had a career in tourism in South Africa and Europe. After training to become a teacher, Sam taught English Language and Literature and Communication and Culture in three outstanding secondary schools across England. Her teaching experience began in nursery schools, where she achieved a qualification in Early Years Foundation education. Sam went on to train in the SEN department of a secondary school, working closely with visually impaired students. From there, she went on to manage KS3 and GCSE English language and literature, as well as leading the Sixth Form curriculum. During this time, Sam trained as an examiner in AQA and iGCSE and has marked GCSE English examinations across a range of specifications. She went on to tutor Business English, English as a Second Language and international GCSE English to students around the world, as well as tutoring A level, GCSE and KS3 students for educational provisions in England. Sam freelances as a ghostwriter on novels, business articles and reports, academic resources and non-fiction books.

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Body Language: Making Love in Lyric in Romeo and Juliet

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Hester Lees-Jeffries, Body Language: Making Love in Lyric in Romeo and Juliet , The Review of English Studies , Volume 74, Issue 314, April 2023, Pages 237–253, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgac097

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With a particular focus on an intensive close reading of the scenes between the lovers and their portrayal of desire and intimacy, this essay discusses how Shakespeare transforms lyric poetry, especially its formal features, not simply into dramatic poetry but into theatre, demonstrating how Shakespeare creates the lovers’ world and the passionate intimacy of their relationship through the embodiment of lyric forms, especially the sonnet, the epithalamium, and the aubade. Explicitly thinking about bodies (and bodies on stage) rather than ‘the body’, it draws on a number of Shakespeare’s sources, especially Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander , as well as Arthur Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet , exploring in precise detail how Shakespeare works with them, the particularity of his transformations, and their effects. 1

In Bad Blood , her extraordinary memoir of a childhood and adolescence at once self-consciously cerebral and intensely corporeal, the critic Lorna Sage wrote about her relationship with Vic, whom she was to marry, aged 16, in 1959:

We’re trying to get inside each other’s skins, but without taking our clothes off … There are no leisurely caresses, no long looks, it’s a bruising kind of bliss mostly made of aches … We’re dissolving, eyes half shut, holding each other’s hands at arm’s length, crucified on each other, butting and squirming. Our kisses are like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation—you’d think we were dying it’s so urgent, this childish mathematics of two into one won’t go. 2

Sage took the urgency of teenage passion entirely seriously and took characteristic care in putting it into words with such vivid, striking intensity. Shakespeare does the same in Romeo and Juliet , with equal seriousness and a little more tender indulgence, and with particular attentiveness to the opportunities afforded by verse and by drama for the exploration and expression of love, desire, and intimacy. As Lloyd Davis pointed out, the force of the play’s ‘celebration of personal desire … comes partly from its dramatic mode, staging the lovers’ experiences for a “live” audience’, 3 but it also comes from its transformation of lyric forms into theatre. The ways in which two can become one were being scrutinized legally and theologically when Shakespeare was writing: in Romeo and Juliet , such union is enacted both poetically and dramatically. It is lyric, above all, which creates and enables its space and its time, its conditions of possibility. The sonnet that Romeo and Juliet share at their meeting, so familiar in discussions of the play, is shockingly intimate, not just in its eventual enabling of a kiss, but in its sharing: two become one in formal terms, writing a new interdependent identity on and in the body of the sonnet itself.

Writing about Shakespeare’s sources, Kenneth Muir long ago suggested that ‘Shakespeare infused the quintessence of Elizabethan love-poetry’ into Romeo and Juliet ; he gives a handful of examples in his brief survey, noting that ‘Brooke was a feeble poet and he could give Shakespeare little beyond the story and a few phrases and images’. 4 Generations of editors have identified many more sources than Brooke, but it is the nature of source study (dismissed as ‘the elephants’ graveyard’ by Stephen Greenblatt) very often to leave it at that. 5 But, borrowing the term for her title, Catherine Belsey pointed out that ‘comparison with the sources is where we catch Shakespeare at work. It’s what he changes that throws into relief what makes him Shakespeare’. 6 This essay attempts to think more precisely about what Shakespeare does with some late Elizabethan poetry than Muir’s ‘infused quintessence’, with a particular focus on how Shakespeare turns poetry, especially lyric poetry, into drama and to what effect. In Romeo and Juliet , Shakespeare is experimenting with lyric forms—not just the famous sonnet, with which this essay inevitably begins, and around which its first part is focused—in the same way as were other poets in the mid 1590s. This essay works particularly with five episodes from the play, the lovers’ meeting (1.5), the ‘balcony’ scene (2.2), Juliet’s ‘Gallop apace’ (3.2), the dawn scene (3.5) and the tomb scene (5.3). 7 It is concerned less with source-hunting than with thinking about the uses to which Shakespeare puts sonnet, epithalamium and aubade, and in particular the interplay between language, form, and performance, the intentional interactions of bodies in space. Shakespeare looks to poetry, especially lyric poetry, as sources for his play’s conceits, but also experiments with what plays can do that poems cannot, and how a playwright might be able to work with the particular capacities and qualities of poetry, especially in formal terms, to create intimacy and express desire, when lyric forms are spoken and embodied by human actors in space and in time.

As Cynthia Marshall puts it, ‘early modern drama was deeply and precociously engaged in working out what it means to live as a conscious self within a mortal body’. 8 Her focus is on the suffering body, the violated body, as so often has been the case in work on ‘the body’ in early modern literature and beyond; she points out that ‘this aesthetic of violence served a phenomenological purpose. In the theater, the representation of physical pain calls attention to bodiliness in a complex way’. 9 In David Hillman’s phrase, early modern drama ‘maximally raised the stakes of somatology’. 10 In Romeo and Juliet , however, the descriptions of Mercutio’s and Tybalt’s death wounds, which might seem to exemplify Marshall’s account of how ‘language and the body interanimate one another’, 11 are more than matched by the play’s focus on other kinds of bodiliness, on bodies that desire, touch, long and lack. Such bodies, above all the lovers’ bodies, are also Merleau-Ponty’s ‘expressive spaces’, 12 arenas for intellection, perception, cognition, emotion, and sensation. But Romeo and Juliet’s bodies are less ‘the body’ as phenomenon than they are bodies , and one of the preoccupations of this essay is the play’s exploration of bodily particularity and bodily presence in the time and space of theatre. Steven Mullaney describes early modern drama as ‘a form of embodied social thought’ and theatres themselves as ‘an inhabited affective technology’, 13 and in an essay in the same collection, Katharine Craik writes about the bodiliness of George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589), noting that ‘Literary “volubility”, a form of delight located firmly in the body, features prominently in his innovative theory of literary affect’; as she observes, for Puttenham and his contemporaries, ‘it matters deeply what poetry feels like’. 14 This essay suggests that Romeo and Juliet performs how poetry feels as well as what it feels like; its lyric forms might be imagined both as another affective technology and as being particularly susceptible to embodiment, potently interacting with the spatio-temporal dimensions of theatre.

At the same time as Marshall describes ‘the actor’s peculiar goal [as being] to extend the sense or sensation of suffering to viewers, whose sympathetic bodies might accordingly feel imagined pain’, 15 she notes the anti-theatricalists’ louder condemnation of theatre’s capacity for ‘relentless erotic titillation’, 16 but she does not explore the intersections between theatre’s ability to make love as well as war, desire and intimacy as well as pain and death, all of which so potently overlap in Romeo and Juliet in the interanimation of language and body, the affective technologies of theatrical space and lyric poetry. That Romeo and Juliet is profoundly influenced by Petrarchan idioms and by lyric forms, above all the sonnet (Carla Freccero terms it ‘this sonnet-infested play’) 17 is well known and has been much explored. 18 Grounded in close reading, this essay brings together the scenes between the lovers as well as some other key moments to chart in a single sequence (even something of a headlong rush) 19 how the play’s use of lyric forms is central to the lovers’ articulation and experience of their physical relationship, its dramatic intimacy and intensity, and hence the affective response of the audience for, as Valerie Traub points out, ‘we, as well as early moderns, are embodied’. 20

One of the earliest sketches of John Donne described him as ‘a great frequenter of Playes, a great writer of conceited Verses’, 21 and although few direct allusions to plays have been identified in his poems, the implication that his contemporaries perceived a connection between the two is suggestive. In John Donne’s ‘The Canonization’, he and his lover will ‘build in sonnets pretty rooms’, perhaps punning on the Italian stanza , meaning room: 22 for Romeo and Juliet, the room they make creates a space apart in the busy world of the Capulet party, aurally distinct, even, from the rest of the scene’s blank verse, and especially from Tybalt’s petulant couplets which immediately precede it. Julia Reinhard Lupton suggests that the sonnet takes over from the circle of light cast by the torch which Romeo has apparently been carrying on his arrival at the party, ‘spin[ning] a kind of virtual shell around them’, 23 and for a modern audience, it can be like a sonnet-shaped spotlight, creating emphasis as much as space. Crystal Bartolovich notes that for all the sonnet’s clichéd familiarity, ‘ this specific poem—like this love— is new. The lovers do not simply rehearse well-known lines borrowed from miscellanies; their emergent love generates a sonnet. Sixteenth-century fantasies of aristocratic sprezzatura notwithstanding, spontaneous generation of sonnets is not commonplace. The poem thus figures Romeo’s and Juliet’s encounter as extraordinary’. 24 This sonnet has the spontaneity of improvisation but its formal perfection gives it a textual quality also, as if the lovers conjure, write, and read the same page; as Diana Henderson puts it, it ‘defies simple opposition of orality versus textuality, lyric versus drama, true love versus courtly infatuation’. 25 Such moments are a reminder, too, that for early moderns reading and writing were also embodied practices.

Although Hero and Leander was not printed until 1598, it must have been written before Christopher Marlowe’s death on 30 May 1593. Editors now assume that Shakespeare knew Marlowe’s poem in manuscript; Katherine Duncan-Jones and Henry Woudhuysen go so far as to argue that Marlowe and Shakespeare worked on Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis more or less simultaneously, knowing that they were both engaged in writing ‘ambitiously classical narrative poems to show the reading public what great things they could achieve that had nothing to do with “play-making”’. 26 As well as Shakespeare’s echoes of it in Venus and Adonis , Marlowe’s Hero and Leander is also recalled at key moments in Romeo and Juliet ; Shakespeare looked to Marlowe’s poem not simply as a model for writing about desire, but as a way of getting from the flat-footed language and low-stakes scenario depicted by Brooke and Painter in the moment of the lovers’ meeting to the dramatic intensity of their encounter in his play. The polysemous eroticism of Marlowe’s poem is present elsewhere in Shakespeare’s play, too, above all in Juliet’s epithalamium. Marlowe’s Hero and Leander is not drama, but it is emphatically the work of a dramatist.

In Brooke, Juliet has sat down after dancing, with Romeo ‘at thone side of her chayre’ and on the other ‘one cald Mercutio’. This is not the unforgettable friend Shakespeare gives his hero, and Brooke’s Mercutio has one memorably anti-social quality, his icy hands: ‘as soon as had the knight | the vyrgins right hand raught: | Within her trembling hand her left | hath louing Romeus caught … Then she with tender hand | his tender palme hath prest’. 27 Mercutio’s hands are every bit as cold in Painter’s version, but there, it is Rhomeo who takes Julietta’s hand. It is clear where Shakespeare gets at least some impetus for the scene of his lovers’ meeting, but both Brooke and Painter are a very long way from the extraordinary intimacy of the sonnet which Shakespeare’s lovers share, some of the drama and erotic charge of which are supplied by the meeting of Hero and Leander in Marlowe’s poem. Leander has seen Hero at a festival in the temple of Venus, and they have instantly fallen in love with each other: ‘Where both deliberate, the love is slight | Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?’, the narrator observes (175–6). (Romeo on seeing Juliet: ‘Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight! | For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night’, 1.5.51–2.) 28 Leander kneels in prayer, at which ‘Chast Hero to her selfe thus softly said: | Were I the saint hee worships, I would heare him’ (178–9), anticipating Romeo’s conceit of the shrine and the saint when he first speaks to Juliet. And, when Leander ‘toucht her hand, in touching it she trembled … These lovers parled by the touch of hands , | True love is mute, and oft amazed stands’ (183, 185–6, my emphasis). 29

There is comedy (and a farcical, adolescent realism) in Juliet’s plight in Brooke and Painter, one hand in the chilly grip of Mercutio, the other warmly clasped by Romeo. But it is a scenario which would not easily translate to the stage, too crowded and static, too socially fraught, and also (demonstrating Shakespeare’s practical skills in dramaturgy) too dependent on furniture, which in his version has explicitly been cleared away to allow for dancing (1.5.5–6, 25–6). Marlowe’s poem, however, already suggests the possibility of a symbiosis of the poetic and the dramatic, the voice and the body. Like Marlowe’s lovers, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet do ‘parl’ by the touch of hands; let lips do what hands do, speak and kiss. There is too, as Gayle Whittier suggests, a pleasing verbal play in the way in which Juliet’s ‘mannerly devotion’ (1.5.97) encompasses both ‘the English “manly” and the French word for hand, “ la main ”’; words as well as poems can contain bodies and their parts, it seems. 30 In their shared conceits, Romeo and Juliet are already inside each other’s heads, inside each other’s sonnet skin. The joining of their hands even in the moment of their first encounter is a handfasting which their kiss seals: lips do what hands do, at the same time as bodies do what words do—and what lyric forms do, through rhyme, repetition, refrain. In their meeting, and also in the lovers’ relationship as it unfolds, ‘the little room of the sonnet is, unusually, shared by two equal, interdependent, and—most important—embodied voices’; as Davis puts it, it is also ‘re-envoiced as dialogue’. 31 In Romeo and Juliet , Shakespeare is exploring not simply the performance but the embodiment of lyric.

Recognition, of self and self-in-other, is one of the conditions of true intimate friendship and of love, and the sonnet Romeo and Juliet share formally enacts less a meeting than this moment of recognition, at the same time both building on and disrupting the essential homosociality of the sonnet form. 32 Shakespeare’s own Sonnets to the young man depict a relationship which struggles for mutuality in the face of inequality (of age, attractiveness, social status, and affection), in so doing exploring a variation on the fundamental and multiple asymmetries of the Petrarchan tradition more generally, the performative powerlessness of the poet, the silent (or silenced) power of the beloved. When Romeo and Juliet meet and recognize each other in a sonnet, its tensions, formal and otherwise, are disrupted and resolved; they are alike, and equal. Moreover, in their encounter, ‘everything that the Petrarchan tradition has yearned for over thousands of years, while making it a defining condition that it should not achieve that desire within its own body or in its own time , is achieved in the play’s interaction: words, touch, kiss, given and taken’. 33 When Juliet matches Romeo’s quatrain with one of her own, it is that moment of recognition and that achievement expressed in both language and form, that here are two halves making a whole and two people recognizing their other selves, as lovers and as friends, a shared subjectivity. ‘Romeo and Juliet have experienced a self-discovery. Like Donne’s happy lovers, they “possess one world, each hath one and is one”’. 34 Juliet answers a question that Romeo does not even quite realize that he has asked, simply and straightforwardly claiming the position of co-creator, not object, demonstrating not only that she understands this language, but that she speaks it fluently. 35

Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella is demonstrably an influence on Shakespeare’s play, but not only in its idiom and conceits. Its sonnets and songs are frequently dramatic, even theatrical, in their effect, and Sidney plays with this; so does his first ‘editor’. A quartet of sonnets (79–82) in the middle of the sequence remember, imagine, or anticipate kissing Stella, for instance, but for Astrophil the kiss itself cannot be sufficiently expressed or contained in the sonnet form; it is always just outside its temporal and textual envelope. Any real action is devolved to the songs: Astrophil almost kisses the sleeping Stella in the Second Song; he tries and fails to persuade her (to return his kisses? more?) in the Fourth Song. In the Eleventh Song, they duet: ‘Who is it that this darke night, | Underneath my window playneth?’, asks Stella. 36 Sidney’s sequence, then, sets out not just the tropes of adoration, desire, frustration, denial, and alienation, but plays with what sonnets are capable of doing and expressing, in both their forms and their language, and also what sonnets are apparently in capable of doing. ‘The voice that Sidney banishes to the songs of his sequence, Shakespeare the dramatist incorporates into the body of the sonnet, giving it the power not merely to say “yes”, but to converse’. 37 What is not generally cited in relation to Romeo and Juliet is Thomas Nashe’s preface to the unauthorized 1591 edition of Astrophil and Stella , in which he refers to Sidney’s sonnets as ‘this Theater of pleasure … a paper stage streud with pearle’ in which ‘the tragicommody of loue is performed by starlight’. But (he continues) ‘the chiefe Actor here is Melpomene ’. 38 Whether or not the idea of a ‘tragicommody of loue … performed by starlight’, its action shaped above all by the tragic muse, was noted by Shakespeare, Nashe here is thinking about not only the drama of sonnets but their inherent theatricality . Shakespeare takes up the challenge of the paper stage and makes it flesh; he not only writes sonnets (and other lyrics) for his characters to speak but explores the potential of what speaking, embodying, and staging them might be able to do. Shakespeare’s transformation of his sources is simultaneously a radical poetic metamorphosis and a theatrical one, mapping his version of the story at the level of plot, form, and language onto the spaces of the stage and embodying it in his actors. The brilliance of the 1.5 sonnet—which apparently begins to generate another, the first quatrain of which the lovers speak (1.5.106–9)—can over-compensate for the fact that the lovers do not share another; their subsequent encounters, for all that they are enabled by this initial dialogue, its vocabulary and terms (as this essay will go on to explore) take other forms As so many early modern sonnet sequences attest, including Sidney’s and Shakespeare’s own, sonnets all too often beget more sonnets in default of other options, as textual substitutes for other forms of physical and erotic experience. 39 Romeo and Juliet have to move beyond the sonnet, and they do; the rest of this essay explores how they do so by reading, mostly in order, the lovers’ scenes together (with the exception of 2.6, the marriage scene) and some other key moments, notably Juliet’s ‘Gallop apace’, in the light of some of the forms and conventions of lyric poetry.

The Prologue’s sonnet has established the principle that the houses of Capulet and Montague are both alike in dignity, but it also highlights the tensions of the sonnet form, its essential formal imbalance. 40 A sonnet looks like a discrete unit, and the Prologue usually has a single speaker, but a sonnet can also be a form that exists in a state of constant tension. Its 14 lines are not easily divisible into two equal halves; there is an asymmetry, a dynamic pull, and the firmer closure of the final couplet does not necessarily give the sestet a weight equal to the neat alternate rhymes of the octave. In the Prologue, that couplet very much undermines its own potential finitude: it shifts to the conditional (‘if you’), and the final avowed intention to ‘strive to mend’ is just that, a promise of effort rather than accomplishment, and an admission, therefore, that restoration and wholeness might not be possible. ‘Two’, the sonnet begins: it is interested in pairs and pairedness, in its vocabulary (‘two’ is repeated three times), in things that come in pairs (hands, loins, lovers, parents) and in its paired and balanced figures (‘ancient grudge’/‘new mutiny’; ‘civil blood’/‘civil hands’). It hints at the oxymoron (‘fatal loins’, when they should be generative) and yokes together, in its rhymes, ‘dignity’ and ‘mutiny’, ‘life’ and ‘strife’ and, through their proximity, ‘love’ and ‘rage’ too. The Prologue is also interested in the collective as a larger context for both the individual and the couple, even as the lovers have but a ‘single life’ to take. It speaks as ‘we’, on behalf of the actors; it invokes households, the city of Verona, and the plural ‘you’ of the audience. So this single sonnet contains multitudes. It is repeatedly, emphatically binary; it is full of pairs that pull apart even as they cling together; it presents the possibility of the unified whole at the same time as it undermines it. And the opening to the play proper, especially as it is juxtaposed with the Prologue’s sonnet, also puts bodies, in whole and in parts, centre stage. As Gregory and Sampson perform their laboured banter, with heads and maidenheads, standing tools, pieces of flesh and naked weapons, they enact an easy slippage between the linguistic and the physical; they add another layer, in another register, to the fatal loins, civil blood, and civil hands of the Prologue. Bodies and what can be done to them are ever-present, not simply as a frame for the play’s action, not merely embedded in its characteristic conceits, but woven into its verbal textures, its rhetorical strategies, and its habits of thought and feeling.

The language of Romeo and Juliet might properly be called body language. It is important to think of bodies, and not simply the familiar, more abstract construct of ‘the body’, familiar from some of the work cited at the beginning of this essay, because Romeo and Juliet is interested not only in embodiment, touch, the reach of arm and blade, the lightness of dancing feet, but also in experiencing a particular body, in relation and especially in proximity to another particular body. Drama particularizes body language in a way that poetry cannot; there is an actual body in question and in view: 41 ‘See how she leans her cheek upon her hand! | O, that I were a glove upon that hand, | That I might touch that cheek!’ Romeo rhapsodizes (2.2.23–5), and by the time he speaks these words, he has already touched Juliet’s hand, and perhaps her cheek too. The glove in his conceit has all the erotic associations of a Petrarchan fetish, the beloved glove, caro guanto , 42 but is further charged by touch and by proximity, remembered and imagined: the soft leather fits the hand closely, like the second skin it is, and the curve of the cheek fits exactly into the curve of the gloved hand. This is emphatically not an empty glove, the paper-flat cliché of sonnetteers like Barnabe Barnes, who hymned his mistress’s ‘fayre sweet gloue’ at considerable length in Ode 6 of Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593), wishing to be transformed into such a glove in Sonnet 63 in the same work, but neither is it the erotic fetish all too easily mocked in John Marston’s Scourge of Villainie (1598), which lists some of the more ridiculous (and potentially obscene) items of clothing and accessories into which pining lovers wish themselves to be transformed (busk, necklace, farthingale, and fan; puppy, monkey and flea, not impossibly John Donne’s). 43 There is a properly tangible immediacy to Romeo’s conceit of the glove, because Juliet is actually there, and because he has already touched and been touched by her: Romeo simply wants both to touch Juliet again, and to be touched, even penetrated, by her. Romeo’s glove-longing does not merely animate a tired Petrarchan cliché, but re-embodies it. It is striking that Romeo’s three lines here are almost entirely monosyllabic, and with no modifying adjectives. What matters most is that it is her cheek, her hand, that hand, that cheek, because there are bodies in this scene, and the audience’s attention is called to the non-existent space between that hand and that cheek, the particularity of Romeo’s desire to touch, and his (and their own) inability to do so. (By contrast, in his earlier infatuation with Rosaline, ‘Romeo’s praise [has been] as bodiless as his love itself’; Marjorie Garber observes that she is described ‘in the stalest possible terms, like a kind of mail-order Stella’.) 44 The death wounds in Romeo and Juliet are as fake as Titus ’s more grotesque dismemberments, but the touches, embraces, and kisses are real, and the bodies of characters and of actors are frequently perfectly aligned in terms of what they do and experience.

Body language characterizes the lovers’ relationship, contrasted not only with the fragile, blustering banter of Sampson and Gregory but in particular with the more sophisticated fantasies which Mercutio articulates, developed (albeit in baroque and sometimes obscene directions) on solidly Petrarchan foundations, when he mocks the concealed Romeo with his bawdy blazon of the never-seen Rosaline: ‘I conjure thee by Rosaline’s bright eyes, | By her high forehead and her scarlet lip, | By her fine foot, straight leg, and quivering thigh, | And the demesnes that there adjacent lie’ (2.1.17–20). Rosaline never appears and Romeo refuses to appear to his friends, but a moment later, not only does Juliet appear but she conjures up Romeo himself, in her own blazon of frustration that the name of Montague ‘is nor hand nor foot, | Nor arm nor face, nor any other part | Belonging to a man’ (2.2.40–42). Language works with bodies in the making and description of new relationships and identities, but there is always a gap between word and thing, name and person, language and body; in this scene, there must be a crucial gap between bodies too, and ‘the geographical gap between [Romeo] and Juliet silently reminds us that we are not in a world of poetic transcendence, but in a world of finite things’. 45 That Juliet begins with ‘hand’ matters, hands having been central to the previous encounter between the couple, and hands are prominent in both the language and the action of this scene too, which has at its heart ‘a Petrarchan situation made geographical’, 46 a beautiful woman on a pedestal, a wooing man below. 47 But Juliet speaks and reciprocates, and acknowledges and articulates her own desires: as Catherine Belsey points out, even in (imagined) soliloquy in this scene, both Juliet and Romeo address each other with the familiar, intimate ‘thou’. 48 There is a delicately adolescent balance of frustration and restraint in Romeo and Juliet perhaps only being able to touch each other’s hands, as well as a sense of the gap in language and experience, when touch can express what words cannot. Yet there can be real electricity in that single point of contact, made all the more sensual by the evocation of the sweet-smelling rose (2.2.43–4). ‘Balcony’ was a word unknown to Shakespeare’s audience, but they might have noted the location in the orchard, a walled garden with fruit trees (2.2.63, 108), a setting for erotic encounters since at least the Song of Solomon. 49

Juliet sometimes gets a laugh on ‘any other part belonging to a man’, or grins at her own daring: one of the most appealing things about her character is her frankness; she is never coy. The parts of the body she names are solid, not merely tangible but graspable (hand, arm, foot, face) not the more delicate features of the conventional blazon (brow, lip, cheek). She matches Romeo’s conceit of virginity as a ‘vestal livery’ that should be ‘ cast off’ with a name as something that can be ‘doffed’: if Romeo takes off his name, as he would a hat or a shirt, she will give him, instead of his name, ‘all herself’. They are both thinking, as it happens, as much about undressing as about bodies. But there is a poignant fantasy here not simply of wholeness but of reintegration: just as hand has met hand, and lip, lip in the embodied speaking of a sonnet, so here the parts of the body, fragmented by names and the destructive practices associated with them, by blazon and by banter, can be re-embodied and renewed, given and taken, experienced as a whole: ‘take all myself’, Juliet says. When she demands of Romeo ‘What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?’ (2.2.126), another line which can get a laugh in performance, ‘her reply does not so much reject the implied gratification as defer it to a more suitable time’: her desire for Romeo is as great as his for her, ‘as boundless as the sea’ (2.2.133); the symmetry of their exchanges, their shared idioms and the space that they make together is about parity of passionate desire as much as it is about mutuality and reciprocity. 50

Diana Henderson terms the shared space which Romeo and Juliet create at their meeting ‘their own lyrical world of erotic infatuation’, noting that the lovers never appear together in public again: ‘lyricism, then, is presented as an alternative discourse outside the political reality of Verona, an escape from its bloody force’. 51 In her account, lyric ‘attempts to slow down the experience of time’: 52 the recognition sonnet in 1.5, with its complex patterns of reiteration and generation, its stichomythic structure, frames time as kairos , less a moment of stasis (although it is that too) than ecstasy, a standing outside of time, and also a decisive, timely moment. Lupton describes this sonnet as a ‘little room of roaming space … a moment of advent and annunciation, occurring, however, on a human plane whose summer heat holds the teenagers in the lambent kairos of the kiss’; 53 Philip Maguire suggests that the dancing in Romeo and Juliet ‘embodies a norm of appropriately paced, timely action’, so that when Romeo does not dance and Juliet steps out of the dance to talk with him, the play’s untimely, disordered action (a clandestine love affair; the death of young lovers) is precipitated and foreshadowed. 54 The play is frequently explicit about its embeddedness in chronos , worldly time, invoking clocks and the calendar, years, seasons, months, weeks, days, hours, and minutes; yet, as Carla Freccero argues, ‘in the face of every ideological apparatus—parents, the church, the law—striving to inculcate a politics of reproductive futurity, Romeo and Juliet insist that there is no time; the time is now; it is sonnet/lyric time, not narrative time; there is no future’. 55 Lyric dilates, temporarily suspending the relentless forward momentum of blank verse, but at the same time it gains its kairotic force from the recognition that such a suspension and dilation can only ever be temporary.

Juliet’s ‘Gallop apace’ soliloquy (3.2.1–31) most certainly does wish the time away; it is not straightforwardly lyrical but, recognizable as an epithalamium (and almost certainly influenced by Spenser’s) it builds on and extends the dynamics, conceits, and strategies which originate in the shared sonnet and are then developed in the balcony scene, above all in its imagining of darkness, bodies, intimacy and touch. 56 Modern productions and films often stage the scene in Juliet’s bedchamber, but it might originally have been played aloft, from the space identified as Juliet’s balcony or window: the previous scene ends with a full stage and a body to carry off (Tybalt’s), and so a shift to another part of the acting area might make practical sense. More particularly, though, it would make sense in terms of the heavenly, sky-filled language of the speech, its return to the intimacy and privacy of the balcony scene and its imagining of darkness; it would reinforce the balcony’s status as a place of reverie and erotic anticipation. Even if the stage is clear by the time Juliet enters, it would also signal the shift of pace and tone for her to be aloft, a clarifying, transcendent shift, transforming the violent energies of the duels, the crowd and, latterly, the tight couplets at the end of the previous scene into cascading blank verse and passionate anticipation.

The opening invocation of the ‘fiery footed steeds’ begins the speech not simply with flames but with intense physicality and speed, a headlong almost out-of-control career. These bright globe-trotting horses are imagined only to be shut out, however, as the speech becomes much smaller in scale, much more intimate, private and tactile, and also less visual. Night is imagined as falling like the curtains being drawn around a bed 57 and the world of the lovers will shrink to that little room of darkness and discovery, where Romeo will ‘leap to these arms, untalked of and unseen’ (3.2.7), the deictic ‘ these arms’ recalling Romeo’s earlier specification of ‘ that hand’ and ‘ that cheek’. 58 While Shakespeare does not include the wedding night, lingered on by both Brooke and Painter, Brooke’s Juliet’s preparations leave a trace in ‘Gallop apace’, for there she illuminates her chamber with candles, described as ‘quariers’, large and square:

The windowes close are shut, / els looke they for no gest, To light the waxen quariers, / the auncient nurce is prest, Which Iuliet had before / prepared to be light, That she at pleasure might beholde / her husbandes bewty bright (C8)

Shakespeare reworks the vision of the candle-filled bedchamber, and inverts it: ‘lovers can see to do their amorous rites | By their own beauties’, his Juliet anticipates, 59 but she also goes on to imagine Romeo in terms of light in comparison with the darkness which will surround them (3.2.8–9, 17, 19). She initially imagines an encounter in total darkness, and although the conceit of love and beauty being light enough is a lovely one, what is also implicit here is the imagining of touch. In total darkness, the lovers will recognize each other by touch alone, as they recognized each other by sight at their first meeting, and by their voices in the balcony scene: their ‘ardent tactility’ has been ‘predicted’, literally already spoken into being, by the palmers’ kiss. 60 The body language in Juliet’s speech is allusive and delicate: while in the balcony scene Juliet imagines her ‘maiden blush bepaint[ing]’ her cheek’ (2.2.86), here she evokes a blush not as paint but as blood, ‘bating’, fluttering like the wings of an untrained hawk. It is a fleeting conceit but an intensely inward, corporeal one; paint becomes pulse. She imagines intimacy in the terms the lovers’ shared sonnet has established too: paradox (‘learn me how to lose a winning match’), and above all balance and mutuality. And she assumes the ‘match’ will be ‘played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods’, her (paired) terms reinforced by alliteration and assonance: there is nothing to suggest that Romeo is any more sexually experienced than Juliet is. 61

Most epithalamia are stanzaic and have refrains, as the speaker or speakers (usually the wedding guests, sometimes the bridegroom, as in Spenser’s Epithalamion ) long for night to come. Juliet conflates night with Romeo himself in the closest thing her speech has to a refrain, its central invocation ‘Come, Night, come, Romeo, come, thou day in night’ (3.2.17), 62 and it turns to the imagining of light in darkness, again recapitulating a conceit from the lovers’ earlier encounters, but applying to Romeo one of the key ways in which Juliet herself has been described. The evocation of the ‘rich jewel in the Ethiop’s ear’ (1.5.45) to which Romeo compares Juliet is about proximity and the possibility of touch (the implicit cheek) as much as it is about tonal contrast (the jewel is surely a pearl). As Kim F. Hall pointed out in her foundational study Things of Darkness (1996), the language of dark/fair oppositions in the Renaissance, so common in Petrarchan sonnets, ‘is always potentially racialized’. 63 Hall’s starting point is A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Lysander’s disparagement of his former beloved Hermia as ‘Ethiop’ and ‘tawny Tartar’, which she relates to the play’s concern with the politics of trade and of gender. 64 Generally agreed to share their mid-1590s date of composition, Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet also have in common their concern with ‘marriage and the proper pairing of male and female … questions about the value of women who are the means for the appropriate transfer of property and forming of bloodlines’; Hall demonstrates that Lysander’s ‘Ethiop’ epithet ‘evokes the unlawful mixing that so much of the play is about’. 65

Juliet’s later speech ‘jumbles blackness, night, sex, and death together in an orgiastic tangle’: 66 Romeo’s conceit of the earring has potently activated ‘the racialized sexual consciousness built into the historical moment of Romeo and Juliet ’, and ‘the play’s invocations of mysterious, potent, revelatory darkness finally not only embody the prohibitions hedging love in Verona, but racialize them, as a fragment of an otherwise sanctioned black body becomes the expressive vehicle for the impact of Romeo’s sudden flash of emotional and erotic insight’. 67 Romeo imagines a black/white conceit more conventionally a few lines later when he compares Juliet to ‘a snowy dove trooping with crows’ (1.5.47), and Juliet both echoes and combines the two when she imagines Romeo lying ‘upon the wings of night, | Whiter than new snow upon a raven’s back’. Her conceit is more delicate, however, because the words ‘snowflake’ and ‘feather’ remain implicit; the feathers are strokable and sooty soft, but the snow will vanish if so much as breathed on. Romeo will ‘leap’ to Juliet’s arms and, while the Nurse and Mercutio have referred to women as bearing the weight or burden of men in sexual intimacy, sometimes with the implication of violence (1.3.43, 57; 1.4.27–8, 92–3; 2.5.75), Juliet imagines her physical union with Romeo in terms of gentleness, softness, taking flight.

One reason why this speech is so effective and so moving is that Juliet seems delighted by her own wit, the ingenuity of her conceits, and the generative ways in which they unfold. To imagine Romeo transformed into a constellation, cut out in little stars, is outrageous as well as dazzling: the scale of the epithalamium has become progressively smaller and more delicate, but now the ephemeral snowflake, viewed at such close, intimate proximity, is transformed, not only sent skywards, but transmuted and eternized. Hugh Grady notes the ‘startling violence’ of Juliet’s desire here, but goes on to suggest that it is ‘a violence mediated through art, a rhetorical chiaroscuro that charms us with its baroque union of opposites, its violent wit, and its passionate declaration of love and admiration heightened, not undercut, by the violence’. 68 Lupton terms Juliet’s conceit a kind of ‘cute classicism’, which reconfigures ‘the elegiac and heroic impulses of stellification’, the Ovidian metamorphosis of heroes into stars and constellations after their deaths, into ‘a more feminine and handheld poetics of praise’, small-scale and intimate. 69 But the radically extended timeframe, its abrupt imagining of transformation after death when hitherto the future has meant only the next few hours, also has a particular pathos in this context.

Juliet’s conceit also marks a return to the Ovidian framing of the epithalamium’s opening, with ill-fated Phaëton: the speech begins with light falling into darkness, before the world shrinks to a bed, and its main movement ends here with light rising again, beautifying the night sky for ever more. ‘Adolescence is metamorphosis, an Ovidian truth tapped in this play’: 70 as Juliet embraces and longs for her own transformation, her change of state from virgin to wife, Romeo’s eventual death or her own 71 seem as remote as the stars themselves, matter for delighted and delightful poetry, not existential dread. The death being imagined here is sexual, too, but the little stars themselves might also be textual, asterisks , * * *, black on white rather than white on black, a further typographical variation on the theme of chromatic contrast and complementarity which so marks the play and this speech in particular. (That asterisks can also stand, typographically, for the unsayable, is in keeping with Juliet’s conjuring of that which must remain untalked of and unseen; as Madhavi Menon suggests, Juliet ‘wants her escapades to be silent affairs, or at least affairs devoid of language’.) 72 The little rooms of lyric, like the little room of the bridal chamber and the bed, contain apparently infinite riches and possibilities.

As Valerie Traub points out, ‘repeatedly in the period sex is likened to a form of knowledge’. 73 In her soliloquy, Juliet acknowledges both that she does not know and that she badly wants to know and to be known, and in Traub’s terms, ‘knowing that one does not know … can engender tremendous erotic frisson’. 74 This might be one way of thinking about Juliet’s frank declaration that she has ‘bought the mansion of a love, | But not possessed it’, and that she is ‘sold’ but ‘not yet enjoyed’, comparing herself to ‘an impatient child that hath new robes’ for a festival, but is not yet allowed to wear them (3.2.26–31). Here, Shakespeare seems to rework another passage from Hero and Leander : in Marlowe’s poem, it is Leander, persuading Hero to make love, who argues that Rich robes, themselves and others do adorne, Neither themselves nor others, if not worne. Who builds a pallace and rams up the gate, Shall see it ruinous and desolate. Ah simple Hero , learne thy selfe to cherish, Lone women like to emptie houses perish   (237–42)

It is in keeping with having Juliet speak an epithalamium at all that Shakespeare reworks Leander’s words for her: for Juliet, the mansion is a dwelling place, still awaiting its occupants, full of potential and possibility which is simultaneously unfulfilled and as yet unable to be defined or described fully. Juliet anticipates that her sexual relationship with Romeo will enable her to inhabit, experience, and know her own body more completely. The conceits of the mansion and festival once again bring together space and time, and the ‘mansion of a love’ in particular, the space where lovers’ souls and bodies will join and dwell together, can also be mapped on to Juliet’s bedchamber and the dark, curtained space of the bed within it. Since the lovers’ first meeting, the conceits and formal strategies of lyric poetry have enabled their burgeoning, wondering knowledge of themselves and of each other, at breakneck speed. Together and apart, Romeo and Juliet have recognized and are coming to know each other in words of intense intimacy, an intimacy more profound than that of the sexy back-and-forth of stichomythic exchange familiar from Shakespeare’s comedies, because it is grounded in a shared language of bodies and touch, light in darkness, proximity and mutual world-making in a little room.

When Romeo and Juliet turn to lyric again in the aubade that initiates their parting, they are explicitly attempting to hold back time, for ‘going out into the day means stepping into time and narrative’, 75 and so they redefine the lark as the nightingale, the cold light of dawn as a shooting star. The echoic structures of their exchange, its refrain-like qualities, align it once again with the longed-for lyric space which their shared sonnet brought into being, but for the lovers ‘a new tragic knowledge’ has intervened ‘between the vows (word) and the consummation (body) of their love—that is, the knowledge of death and death’s companion, time’. 76 Even as it attempts to suspend time, an aubade is always after . 77 However precarious the moment, though, the lovers now inhabit their lyric space together both poetically and physically: they are ‘aloft’ (3.5.1SD), and the sonnet space is concealed behind them, the little room of their marriage bed, where two have become one, ‘untalked of and unseen’ (as Juliet has imagined in her epithalamium): ‘not only does the consummation of Romeo and Juliet stand outside the play’s real performance time, hovering in the nowhere of narrative time, but it also stands essentially outside the play’s language’. 78 Modern directors, though, almost always set the dawn scene in Juliet’s chamber, staging the lovers, husband and wife, awaking together. One unintended effect might be to make just a little too real the imagining of this inexperienced sexual union, as can be the case in performance when the Nurse discreetly rearranges a coverlet or swiftly strips the sheets as Lady Capulet enters; the unseen can more easily retain the perfection of the idealized. 79 Keeping not only the lovers’ sole sexual encounter but also the space of their love-making untalked of and unseen is practical and shrewd, as well as far more in keeping with the intense intimacy of lyric forms.

The aubade is an ancient form, a dawn song for lovers who do not want to part, but must: sometimes they are joined, unwittingly, by a third voice, that of a watchman, but here the voices that Romeo and Juliet hear (or think they do) are the birds, heard even before it has properly started to grow light, birdsong which ‘pierces’ (3.5.3) like a rapier’s point. Later in the scene Juliet will describe the lark as singing out of tune, no longer making ‘sweet division’, a rapid, trilling melody, but rather sounding harsh and discordant, ‘for she divideth us’ (3.5.29–30). Her first line, ‘Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day’ (3.5.1) has the monosyllabic directness which characterizes some of the lovers’ most intimate exchanges, and their intricately constructed duet is bittersweet, even ironic, because (as Fiona Green points out) ‘talk is the very thing that heralds the dawn, because it is the first symptom of twoness’. The ‘unrecoverable past of the dawn song is blissful unity’, Green suggests, for waking, not-yet-parting lovers ‘lie in the aftermath of a wordless oneness to which we were not privy and to which they cannot return’. 80 Language itself arises ‘in the realization of embodiedness—which is to say, of bodily separation—but also in the concurrent attempt to heal this separation, to heal through touch’, 81 and the lovers very often speak their dialogue not simply in close proximity to one another but in touch with each other, cuddled together whether in bed or aloft, one flesh, two voices. Even the most telepathically informed dialogue is still by definition divided, and an aubade, formally and metrically undefined, lacks the implicit singleness of the sonnet. That which brought the lovers together has also already created the terms of their parting.

John Donne’s aubades (broadly interpreted) are some of his most dramatic poems in their evocation of situation and setting, but they tend to speak with only one voice, a voice that (above all in ‘The Sunne Rising’) identifies as the voice of a we as well an I in its rejection of any other home, or world, but this. When the speaker in that poem magnificently tells the sun to do the lovers’ bidding, asserting that kings and princes, empires and kingdoms near and faraway ‘all here in one bed lay’ (20), here is certainly the bed, its curtains pierced with unwelcome morning light. But here is also the poem and the page where it is written, the (only) places where such uninterrupted and perfect union and such a dilatory idyll are possible. Romeo and Juliet’s aubade, for all that its dialogue itself enacts separation, for all that its intertwined speakers must physically part and become two once more, still evokes (even as it strains and ultimately fractures) some of the textual singleness established in their previous lyrical encounters, the sense of co-creation, two voices speaking and thinking as one, writing the same poem on a single page.

The play between joining and parting, one and two, continues in Romeo’s beautiful description of the way in which the ‘envious streaks’ of the rising sun’s rays ‘lace the severing clouds in yonder east’ (3.5.7–8): laces (braid, trimmings generally) might decorate a garment but also join its parts together; the clouds are ‘severing’ because they are being pierced by the rays of the sun but also, even more, because they are parting the lovers. But then the stark, uncompromising monosyllables return: ‘I must be gone and live, or stay and die’, says Romeo to his wife (3.5.11), and even Juliet’s fantasy that the light is not daybreak but rather a meteor ‘to be to thee this night a torch-bearer’ (3.5.14) is a reminder that he goes to Mantua alone, without his light-in-darkness, depriving Juliet of her light-in-darkness too. There is such intricate delicacy to the writing here, voices and thinking utterly intertwined even as they enact their painful pulling apart. It is certainly enabled by the shared sonnet in the ball scene, but it also overgoes it: this dialogue has the intimacy and integrity of that moment but does without the tight formal structures of a sonnet. Almost ostentatiously, these are not alternating quatrains but, in the first part of the exchange at least, slightly longer units (Juliet speaks five lines, followed by six from Romeo, then another five from Juliet, nine from Romeo and 10 from Juliet) manifest their desire to delay and dilate, and simply to keep talking, because they love each other’s company (2.2.173). There is pathos in Romeo’s imagining of their future conversations, when he suggests that ‘all these woes shall serve | For sweet discourses in our times to come’ (3.5.52–3), not least because lovers who have the time to talk and delight in doing so just as much as Romeo and Juliet are such a staple of comedy.

It takes a third party, the Nurse, to force their final parting when she enters to confirm that ‘the day is broke’ (3.5.40), another image of rupture, and the moment of parting is marked, ironically, by a couplet and a kiss, like a terrible parody of the shared sonnet in 1.5. Q1 supplies the direction ‘ he goeth down ’ in between Romeo’s ‘Farewell, farewell! one kiss and I’ll descend’ and Juliet’s answering ‘Art thou gone so, love, lord, ay husband, friend?’ (3.5.43), her addressing of him with multiple titles (including one, ‘husband’, that only she can use) making good on his promise to her in the balcony scene, ‘Call me but love and I’ll be new baptised’ (2.2.50). Whereas the scene began with the lovers attempting to slow time through poetry in their denial of the dawn, Juliet now imagines the future as one in which time will drag: minutes, let alone hours, will seem like many days; she imagines that she will be years older by the time she sees Romeo again (3.5.44–7). Even though the Nurse has prompted Romeo’s descent, she is not there to pull Juliet away, and there is no servant or friend waiting for Romeo, urging him to hurry: separation, the definitive division of one back into two is something that the lovers have to do themselves, to each other, together. After the soaring lyricism of the scene’s opening their parting is hurried and fragmented: in Romeo’s final couplet the repetition of ‘Adieu, adieu’ (3.5.59) commends them both to God and is also one last pairing, but the gloriously interwoven figures and rhymes of their earlier dialogue (let alone their recognition sonnet) have gone. All they can do now is kiss and part, for there is no help.

There is a poignant symmetry in the two scenes of the lovers’ partings: at the end of the balcony scene, it is Juliet who exits first, aloft, back into her chamber, her couplet (‘Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, | That I shall say good night till it be morrow’, 2.2.184–5) a miniature of the lovers’ lyric idiom, with its oxymoron and temporal play. But in the dawn scene it is Juliet left alone, aloft, her desperate plea to Fortune (‘Be fickle, Fortune: | For then I hope thou wilt not keep him long, | But send him back’, 3.5.62–4) ending on a half line. On the page, Lady Capulet completes the line as she enters below (‘Ho, daughter, are you up?’, 3.5.64), but there might well be a gap (for a sob, a gasp) as much as a felt absence in the blank verse. 82 The household is waking up and Juliet must descend from the lofty, intimate space of lyric as the play swerves back into the time of narrative. When Juliet encounters Paris at Friar Lawrence’s cell (4.1.18–43), she is guarded in their repartee, icily polite in an exchange that sounds like a parody of Romeo and Juliet’s shared sonnet (the only shared line is divided between Juliet and the Friar, 4.1.21). It even concludes with a kiss (‘Till then, adieu, and keep this holy kiss’, Paris says as he leaves, 4.1.43), achingly reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet’s first ‘holy palmer’s kiss’ and of their snatched kiss as Romeo departed. In this joyless contrast to the lovers’ lyrical exchanges, Paris is both creepy and dull and Juliet’s responses are brittle, but when she so urgently begs the potion from the Friar, her ‘Give me, give me! O tell not me of fear’ (4.1.121) echoes her epithalamium, in which desire, apprehension and death so potently overlapped.

In many ways the tomb scene is Romeo’s biggest in the play, and it includes his longest speech: he finally gets his aria, a passionate threnody as erotic as it is desolate, fatally reanimating the circumstances of the lovers’ first meeting and the language of their relationship, light in darkness, tender sensuality, a deadly kiss. The tomb turns out to be the last little room of the sonnet and the hidden, private space of Romeo and Juliet’s marriage and its consummation, at last made visible: Marvell was wrong when he declared that ‘the grave’s a fine and private place, | But none I think do there embrace’, for it is in the tomb that Romeo and Juliet at last are seen to lie down together. Juliet’s beauty and, even more, Romeo’s description of it makes the tomb not ‘a grave’ but ‘a feasting presence full of light’ (5.3.84–6): Romeo is back in the moment of their first encounter, at the party, in the hall, the presence chamber, full of light and warmth and erotic promise. Their sonnet created the conditions of the lovers’ relationship in dramatic poetry; in this last scene, its strategies (its symbiosis of bodies and words, its single thought co-written and re-envoiced as dialogue) also create the conditions of their deaths, as touch goes unreciprocated, half-lines unanswered and rhyme fails.

It is light that Romeo puns on, the lightening before death (5.3.90), and yet it is not simply a circling back to the terms of the lovers’ meeting, because Romeo addresses Juliet not just as ‘my love’ but as ‘my wife’ (5.3.91). It is the only time he calls her his wife, in the moment when, touchingly, he believes that he is her widower. Mark Van Doren suggests that ‘five short words at Juliet’s bier—“O my love! my wife!”—make up for all of Romeo’s young errors’, 83 and even if one might quibble over the nature or magnitude of those errors, it is impossible to deny the force of Romeo’s words. Unlike Juliet, Romeo has most often appeared in dialogue with others (Mercutio and Benvolio, the Friar, above all Juliet herself) and here, surrounded by the dead (Paris, Tybalt, Juliet, as he thinks) he is very alone, more alone than if this were in fact pure soliloquy. He is speaking mostly to Juliet: ‘thou art not conquered’ (5.3.94), he says, as he delivers, with lingering sensuality, a brief blazon of her beauty, the ‘crimson’ of her lips and cheeks (5.3.95). He is so caught up in his agony and his resolve that he does not consider that his question, ‘Why art thou yet so fair?’ (5.3.102), might have more than one answer. Instead, there is the strange, compelling fantasy of Juliet being kept, Proserpina-like, as death’s own lover, 84 and ‘for fear of that’, says Romeo, ‘I still will stay with thee’ (5.3.102–6), both to prevent death claiming Juliet but also to protect her, to stop her being afraid, and himself too, as he promises them both that he will never leave her again. ‘Here, here will I remain’, he vows, and the deictic, embodied specificity of drama allows here to be not only in the tomb but in Juliet’s arms.

Singing his swansong, Romeo is also a desperate Orpheus, in the underworld not to rescue his lost Eurydice, but to stay with her forever. He looks not only deliberately but lingeringly on Juliet’s face, wondering once more at her beauty, and his narration of his final actions (‘Eyes, look your last! | Arms, take your last embrace! and, lips, O you | The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss | A dateless bargain to engrossing death!’, 5.3.112–15) imagines her looking at him, embracing him, and kissing him even as he embraces and kisses what he imagines is her lifeless body; it is as much a blazon of Juliet’s body as it is of Romeo’s own, emphasizing that they are indeed one flesh, one sonnet-body. Kenneth Muir notes that Romeo’s speech draws on Astrophil and Stella 85 (‘let eyes | See Beautie’s totall summe summ’d in her face: | Let eares heare speech, which wit to wonder ties, | Let breath sucke up those sweetes, let armes embrace | The globe of weale, lips Love’s indentures make’), and that the ‘injunctions to eyes, arms, and lips [are] in the same order’. 85 But the closeness of Shakespeare’s version to the sensual enjambments of Sidney’s verse only emphasizes how different it might be in performance, what a difference real bodies can make. The embrace and the kiss must be awkward, and pathetic in their awkwardness in a way that cannot register on the page, because Juliet cannot participate or reciprocate; she is a dead weight in Romeo’s arms, when previously her physicality has been so equal and eager. Romeo’s actions must also take up time, disrupting the flow of the verse, making it awkward too until, at the last, he dies, with a kiss.

The first line of Juliet’s final speech (‘Go get thee hence, for I will not away’, 5.3.160) forms a painful couplet with the Friar’s exit line (‘I dare no longer stay’, 5.3.159), and her intention is clear from that very first line: she is not going anywhere, she is going to stay with Romeo, just as he said ‘I still will stay with thee’. That fractured couplet, like Romeo’s talking to Juliet’s apparent corpse, emphasizes her aloneness; the rest of her speech is in blank verse, but with hints of half-rhyme (hand/end, drop/lips) which sound just enough like pairs emphatically not to be pairs. The thing that used to be one of a pair and half of a whole, that has lost its other half, is of a different order of loneliness and loss to the thing which has always been alone. As with Romeo’s speech, what looks regular on the page must be interrupted by time-taking, narrative action, a final fall from lyric into plot: prising a vial from Romeo’s fingers, attempting to drink from it and then a kiss. This last kiss is followed by the terrible half-line: ‘thy lips are warm’ (5.3.167), met only with empty silence, not any kind of response. It is a particularly good example of how Shakespeare utterly transforms Brooke’s poem, in which ‘A thousand times she kist [Romeus’s] month [ sic ] as cold as stone’ (K4v): Shakespeare focuses the pathos much more terribly and economically in that readily imagined warmth, and in that palpable, metrical absence, both of which indicate that Romeo has only just died, that Juliet is only just too late.

This last encounter between the lovers is both a culmination and a breakdown of the play’s body language, its embodiment of lyric language and lyric forms that has been traced here. In ‘Gallop apace’, Juliet longed for night and for Romeo, and imagined both sex and death as a kind of transcendent, metamorphic ecstasy, true union. Juliet’s last words, like her earlier speech (and in some ways the play in general) are aptly animated by the sexual sense of ‘die’. This is an urgently erotic speech, and Juliet’s death becomes a version of the unseen and untalked of consummation of the lovers’ marriage, Romeo’s dagger sheathed in Juliet’s body. The dagger is ‘happy’ because luckily it is there, to hand; it is also fortunate because it will be the means whereby (as Juliet thinks) the lovers will achieve their ecstatic union in death. 86 There is also perhaps the sense that the dagger will penetrate Juliet’s body as easily, as rightly as it has slipped into the scabbard that was made for it, a perfect fit, an ‘eternal sexual embrace’. 87 At the very last there is still a sense of things fitting together beautifully, rightly, so that no other way would be imaginable: thoughts and voices; hands, kisses, bodies; a jointly crafted sonnet, couplet after couplet and shared verse lines; conceits of darkness and light tossed back and forth unerringly, joyfully. That is how Romeo and Juliet die, in each other’s arms, together and here , and echoing each other’s final words even in death: ‘Thus with a kiss I die’; ‘There rust, and let me die’, two half-lines that, together, make up more (in metrical terms) than the sum of their parts. Two bodies and two lives or, as the Prologue has announced, a pair of star-crossed lovers who take their life, singular and shared, two and one. In part, Romeo and Juliet ’s emotional and psychological impact derives from the way in which the intense yet unfocused desire of adolescence, its hazy, urgent longings, undirected yearnings and simultaneous sense of lack, excess, and an overwhelming longing to give, is shown as being reciprocated and overcome, with vivid particularity and exactness, in its poetry and its embodiment of lyric forms and idioms It may be ‘an adult fantasy about adolescent desire’, 88 but the play still ‘gets’, takes seriously, and portrays with great tenderness the all-or-nothing intensity of young love. Desire may be lack, but in Romeo and Juliet dramatic poetry, embodied lyric, creates the conditions of its redress and fulfils them, in its conceits and in its forms, the sonnet’s room, the couplet’s kiss.

This essay substantially develops some aspects of my new introduction to the New Cambridge Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet (Cambridge, 2023).

Lorna Sage, Bad Blood (London, 2000), 234–5.

Lloyd Davis, ‘“Death-Marked Love”: Desire and Presence in Romeo and Juliet ’, Shakespeare Survey 49 (1996), 57–67 (60).

Emphasis added. Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare’s Sources: Comedies and Tragedies (London, 1957, 1961), 30.

Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’, in Patricia P. Parker and Geoffrey H. Hartman (eds), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York, 1985), 163–86 (163).

Catherine Belsey, ‘The Elephants’ Graveyard Revisited: Shakespeare at Work in Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet and All’s Well That Ends Well ’, Shakespeare Survey , 68 (2015), 62–72 (63).

All references are to the New Cambridge Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet , ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Cambridge, 1984, 2003), and are given in the text.

Cynthia Marshall, ‘Bodies in the Audience’, Shakespeare Studies , 29 (2001), 51–6 (54).

Marshall, ‘Bodies in the Audience’, 54.

David Hillman, ‘Staging Early Modern Embodiment’, in David Hillman and Ulrike Maude (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature (Cambridge, 2015), 41–57 (46).

Marshall, ‘Bodies in the Audience’, 51.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , trans. Colin Smith (London, 1962), 146, cited in Marshall, ‘Bodies in the Audience’, 53.

Steven Mullaney, ‘Affective Technologies: Toward an Emotional Logic of the Elizabethan Stage’, in Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr (eds), Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2007), 71–89 (73, 74). His essay is particularly concerned with religious and Reformation trauma.

Katharine Craik, ‘“The Material Point of Poesy”: Reading, Writing and Sensation in Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie ’, in Floyd-Wilson and Sullivan (eds), Environment and Embodiment , 153–70 (162, 166).

Carla Freccero, ‘Romeo and Juliet Love Death’, in Madhavi Menon (ed.) Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare (Durham, 2011), 302–8 (304).

Melissa E. Sanchez observes, for instance, that ‘In Romeo and Juliet as well as his sonnets, Shakespeare engages with a tradition that recognized the insufficiency of Petrarchan clichés to the complexity of erotic experience’ (‘Impure Resistance: Heteroeroticism, Feminism, and Shakespearean Tragedy’, in Valerie Traub (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment (Oxford, 2016), 302–17 (310)), but all too often, critical discussions of this tradition neglect both the specificities of drama and also the ways in which Petrarchan discourse and, even more, its forms, can still be enabling, even if they must always and inevitably fall short.

Thereby, perhaps, resisting the ‘critical disembodiment’ warned against by Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago, 2004), 244.

Valerie Traub, ‘Introduction—Feminist Shakespeare Studies: Cross Currents, Border Crossings, Conflicts, and Contradictions’, in Traub (ed.), Shakespeare and Embodiment , 1–36 (32). Readers and critics have bodies as much as actors and audiences do.

Richard Baker, A Chronicle of the Kings of England (London, 1643), Vvvv2v.

The Complete Poems of John Donne , ed. Robin Robbins (London, 2010); dated by Robbins to spring 1604.

Julia Reinhard Lupton, Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life (Chicago, 2018), 67.

Crystal Bartolovich, ‘ Romeo and Juliet as Event’, in Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy (Oxford, 2016), 358–73 (359).

Diana E. Henderson, Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender, and Performance (Urbana, 1995), 217.

Shakespeare’s Poems , ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen (London, 2007), 20–21.

Arthur Brooke, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (London, 1562), A8. All future references are given in the text.

See also AYLI 3.6.80–81.

Roma Gill notes that ‘the encounter seems to anticipate the first contact—“palm to palm”—of Romeo and Juliet’, but editors of Romeo and Juliet have mostly not. Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe , vol. 1, ed. Roma Gill (Oxford, 1986), 183–5 n. All references are to this edition.

Gayle Whittier, ‘The Sonnet’s Body and the Body Sonnetized in Romeo and Juliet ’, Shakespeare Quarterly , 40 (1989), 27–41 (35).

David Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge, 2002), 67; Davis, ‘“Death-Marked Love”’, 65.

The sonnet as a moment of ‘mutual recognition’ is noted by Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (London, 1968, 2005), 95. See also Evelyn Gajowski, The Art of Loving: Female Subjectivity and Male Discursive Traditions in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Newark, 1992), 33–4.

Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance , 68 (original emphasis).

M. M. Mahood, from Shakespeare’s Wordplay (1957), in John F. Andrews (ed.), Romeo and Juliet: Critical Essays (London, 1993), 56–72 (63).

‘The poem’s novelty is in fact underscored because its atypical enacted co-authorship inserts mutuality—as well as dialectical dynamism by way of embodied carnality—into the familiar figures of love as worship in sonnets’ (Bartolovich, ‘ Romeo and Juliet as Event’, 359). Bartolovich’s discussion of the shared sonnet in 1.5 overlaps with some of the ideas here; she largely does not, however, extend her discussion into the lovers’ other scenes.

The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney , ed. William A. Ringler (Oxford, 1962), 206–8, 233, lines 1–2.

Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance , 68.

Syr P.S. His Astrophel and Stella (1591), A3.

The notable exception to this is Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion , published in the same year as the likely composition and first performances of Romeo and Juliet (and possibly as early as November 1594). It is almost certainly a source for Shakespeare’s play (see Belsey, ‘The Elephants’ Graveyard’); its sonnets drive towards the marriage and consummation celebrated in the Epithalamion; Amoretti 1 plays with hands, poems, and books in ways perhaps not unrelated to Romeo and Juliet’s shared sonnet.

‘It also draws attention to a specific “now” of performance, one in which the audience is addressed directly in its serial specificity’ (Bartolovich, ‘ Romeo and Juliet as Event’, 370).

As the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy wrote in his 1992 essay Corpus , ‘Les corps sont des lieux d’existence, et il n’y a pas d’existence sans lieu, sans là , sans un “ici”, “voici”, pour le ceci ’ (Bodies are places of existence, and nothing exists without a place, a there , a ‘here,’ a ‘here is,’ for a this .) (Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus , trans. Richard A. Rand (New York, 2008), 14, 15).

On gloves, see Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe’, Critical Practice , 28 (2001), 114–32. Petrarch’s ‘ciclo del guanto’ (glove cycle) is sonnets 199–201 in the Canzoniere .

‘Would I were chang’d but to my mistresse gloues, | That those white louely fingers I might hide, | That I might kisse those hands, which mine hart loues’, Barnabe Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe (London, 1593), sig. F4, P4; John Marston, Satire 8, Scourge of Villainie (London, 1598), sig. G4–G4v. Robbins suggests a date in the early 1590s for Donne’s poem (188), but the conceit was a very popular one and there are many flea poems from around the same date.

Whittier, ‘The Sonnet’s Body’, 30; Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (New York, 1981, 1997), 97.

Whittier, ‘The Sonnet’s Body’, 33.

Whittier, ‘The Sonnet’s Body’, 36.

One who might be termed a voyeur, as suggested by Robert N. Watson and Stephen Dickey, ‘Wherefore Art Thou Tereu? Juliet and the Legacy of Rape’, Renaissance Quarterly , 58 (2005), 127–56 (128). I disagree with many of the essay’s conclusions, but it is a provocative account of the play’s sexual politics.

Catherine Belsey, Romeo and Juliet: Language and Writing (London, 2014), 10.

Noted by Garber, Coming of Age , 163–5, and Bartolovich, ‘ Romeo and Juliet as Event’, 363.

Belsey, Romeo and Juliet , 29. Citing Faramerz Dabhoiwala’s The Origins of Sex (2012), Belsey notes that ‘until the seventeenth century it was generally assumed that that women were equally capable of desire and sexual pleasure; by 1800, however, it was just as widely believed that men were the lustful and predatory sex, while women, or at least good women, were expected to act as a restraining force’ (27).

Henderson, Passion made Public , 4, 5.

Henderson, Passion made Public , 22–4; see also 218.

Lupton, Shakespeare Dwelling , 67.

Philip C. Maguire, ‘On the Dancing in Romeo and Juliet ’, in Andrews (ed.), Romeo and Juliet , 215–28 (220).

Freccero, ‘Romeo and Juliet Love Death’, 305.

See Denise Walen, ‘Unmanning Juliet’, Shakespeare Survey , 69 (2016), 253–76, and Gary M. McCown, ‘“Runawayes Eyes” and Juliet’s Epithalamium’, Shakespeare Quarterly , 27 (1976), 150–70.

Like Spenser, Juliet speaks her own epithalamium. Juliet calls on night to ‘spread thy close curtain’ and imagines being concealed by night’s ‘black mantle’ (3.2.5,15); Spenser’s speaker implores night to ‘spread thy broad wing ouer my loue and me, | That no man may vs see, | And in thy sable mantle vs enwrap’ ( The Works of Edmund Spenser, a Variorum Edition , vol. 2, ed. Edwin Greenlaw (Baltimore, 1932), 319–21). The point is almost less the echo than the voice, the direct invocation which Spenser models, and the sense of dramatic occasion, of really speaking aloud.

See n. 41, above.

‘Darke night is Cupids day’, the narrator observes in Hero and Leander (191), just after the lovers meet; the phrase ‘amorous rites’ is also Marlowe’s (548).

Lupton, Shakespeare Dwelling , 56.

Gajowski notes that here consummation is imagined ‘not in the customary masculine language of conquest but as a reciprocal game of risk, venturing, or quest’, Art of Loving , 39.

See Walen, ‘Unmanning Juliet’, 257; the sexual sense is only just emerging at this time (OED ‘come’ v. 22). Walen notes that 3.2 was often cut in nineteenth-century productions, that Zeffirelli cut Juliet’s whole speech and Luhrmann all but 11 lines (272, 273).

Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1996), 261. She does not specifically discuss the ‘Ethiop’s ear’ in Romeo and Juliet .

Hall, Things of Darkness , 22.

Hall, Things of Darkness , 22; here, Hall draws on Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London, 1987), 122–3.

Joyce Green MacDonald, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World (Cham, 2020), 52.

MacDonald, Shakespearean Adaptation , 47, 49.

Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (Cambridge, 2009), 217–8.

Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘“Cut Him Out in Little Stars”: Juliet’s Cute Classicism’, Shakespeare Survey , 70 (2017), 240–48 (242).

Lupton, ‘Cute Classicism’, 243.

Q2–3 and F’s ‘when I shall die’ is preferred by most editors over Q4’s ‘when he shall die’. (In Q1 the speech is only four lines long.)

Madhavi Menon, Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Toronto, 2004), 79. On asterisks, see Laurie Maguire, The Rhetoric of the Page (Oxford, 2020), especially 172–4, 182–91, 217–9, although this use of asterisks is more characteristic of later texts.

This is especially the case in legal contexts: Traub quotes the 1540 act of Parliament (Act 32 Hen. 8, c. 38) which describes marriage as ‘consummate with bodily knowledge’, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia, 2015), 9.

Traub, Thinking Sex , 307.

Fiona Green, ‘Aubade: Jorie Graham and the “Pitch of the Dawn”’, in Edward Allen (ed.), Forms of Late Modernist Lyric (Liverpool, 2021), 13–36 (32).

Whittier, ‘The Sonnet’s Body’, 37.

Green, ‘Aubade’, 35.

Celia R. Daileader, Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire, and the Limits of the Visible (Cambridge, 1998), 43. See also the discussion of this scene by Menon, Wanton Words , 79–84, especially 79 n 15 on aubades more generally. She argues that ‘this aubade serves as the representation of a sex act that is otherwise never seen’ (79).

For a different perspective, see Christine Varnado, ‘“Invisible Sex!”: What Looks Like the Act in Early Modern Drama?’, in James M. Bromley and Will Stockton (eds), Sex before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England (Minneapolis, 2013), 25–52.

Green, ‘Aubade’, 14, 32.

Daileader, Eroticism , 142.

‘Cet instant où tel corps n’est plus là, ici même où il était … il laisse ce même espacement “derrière lui”—comme on dit—, c’est-à-dire à sa place , et cette place rest la sienne, absolument intacte et absolument abandonnée, à la fois’ (the moment when some body’s no longer there , right here where he was … while leaving its very spacing ‘behind’—as one says—in its place , with this place remaining its own, at once absolutely intact and absolutely abandoned), Nancy, Corpus , 32, 33.

Mark Van Doren, ‘ Romeo and Juliet ’, in Andrews (ed.), Romeo and Juliet , 3–11 (11).

See Janice Valls-Russell, ‘Erotic Perspectives: When Pyramus and Thisbe Meet Hero and Leander in Romeo and Juliet ’, in Agnès Lafont (ed.), Shakespeare’s Erotic Mythology and Ovidian Renaissance Culture (New York, 2016), 78–89 (81).

Sidney, Poems , 210, 85.9–13; Muir, Shakespeare’s Sources , 30.

Ramie Targoff notes the lovers do not imagine reunion in the afterlife: theirs is ‘a distinctly mortal conception of love, governed by two central premises. First, that love is fleeting, brief, and restricted to this world; and second, that this temporal restriction intensifies and renders more precious the nature of erotic experience’, ‘Mortal Love: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and the Practice of Joint Burial’, Representations , 120 (2012), 17–38 (26).

Davis, ‘“Death-Marked love”’, 65. Q1 has ‘rest’.

Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (London, 1998), 109.

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Romeo and Juliet - Entire Play

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The prologue of Romeo and Juliet calls the title characters “star-crossed lovers”—and the stars do seem to conspire against these young lovers.

Romeo is a Montague, and Juliet a Capulet. Their families are enmeshed in a feud, but the moment they meet—when Romeo and his friends attend a party at Juliet’s house in disguise—the two fall in love and quickly decide that they want to be married.

A friar secretly marries them, hoping to end the feud. Romeo and his companions almost immediately encounter Juliet’s cousin Tybalt, who challenges Romeo. When Romeo refuses to fight, Romeo’s friend Mercutio accepts the challenge and is killed. Romeo then kills Tybalt and is banished. He spends that night with Juliet and then leaves for Mantua.

Juliet’s father forces her into a marriage with Count Paris. To avoid this marriage, Juliet takes a potion, given her by the friar, that makes her appear dead. The friar will send Romeo word to be at her family tomb when she awakes. The plan goes awry, and Romeo learns instead that she is dead. In the tomb, Romeo kills himself. Juliet wakes, sees his body, and commits suicide. Their deaths appear finally to end the feud.

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How to write Romeo and Juliet Essay? Outline and Topics

Almost everyone has heard of Shakespeare's play "Romeo and Juliet" at some point. It is a classic tragedy that has been part of literary and cultural education for centuries. This story is about fate and affection. It was written in 1595 or 1596. Moreover, this play is set in the city of Verona. Many essays are written to describe this play in words. Professors still assign Romeo and Juliet essay to students as a writing task.  If your teacher assigned a task to write an essay about Romeo and Juliet, but you don't know how to compose it, you came to the right place! In this blog, we'll share effective tips for writing essays on Romeo and Juliet as well as Romeo and Juliet essay topics. If you're short on time or struggling with the task, you can always consider seeking assistance from professional writers at Nerdpapers who offer services to buy essay online .

How to write a Romeo and Juliet essay?

Essays about Romeo and Juliet are common in schools and colleges. Most students don't like the idea of reading books of 100+ pages. But that's not a good thing. You should read the book so that you get to know the characters, story, and important characters in it.  This essay follows the same structure as other essays. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to write an essay  about Romeo and Juliet.  

Carefully read the play

Even though you may have already read thousands of concise summaries, it is still worthwhile to read the literary work for yourself. It will help you better understand the plot and notice the minor details that are frequently ignored in overviews in order to keep them concise.

Ask questions

Write down any questions you have when you read the play. Try to find out the answer to these questions. This will assist you in forming your own opinion on the individuals and their deeds and may perhaps inspire a brilliant topic or introduction for your essay.

Make an outline

Make an outline of the topics you will cover in your essay once you have compiled all of your questions and their responses. The outline will help you to structure your thoughts and maintain a logical flow between concepts. 

An essay on Romeo and Juliet, like any assignment on a literary work, is ideal to include a few brief quotes from the tragedy. If correctly cited, the relevant quotations will serve as compelling evidence for your arguments and support your line of reasoning. When quoting, always place the text in quotation marks and include the precise page number from where you took the material. Remember that quotes shouldn't make up more than 10% of the text as a whole.

Never hesitate to seek help

It's always acceptable to ask for help! If you need assistance with your essay, you may always contact your teacher for guidance, go to a writing center, check online tutorials, or look for expert writing instruction online. Before implementing any advice, make sure it will be helpful and applicable to your writing process.

Proofread Your Essay

Once you've finished writing your essay, read it multiple times, preferably after a day or two, to get a new perspective on the writing's quality. You can also show your essay to friends or family members so that they can not only point out any mistakes you've made but also tell you if it sounds coherent and professional.

See also: “ Essay Writing Tips ”

How to make an outline for an essay of Romeo and Juliet?

A crucial step in any paper writing process is the outline. It helps in keeping our thoughts organized and properly structuring the text from the very start. You must include the following components in your outline:

Romeo and Juliet essay introduction

The introduction of Romeo and Juliet essay is the attention grabber section in which the writers try to grab the reader's attention. In order to write it properly, there is need to be:

• As the first sentence of the introduction, this one should pique the reader's interest in the topic. Quotations, relevant information, or even hypothetical questions might serve as effective hooks for Romeo and Juliet essays.
• Once you have written the hook, give readers some background information about the topic and explain why you chose it. If you use any factual data in this area, be careful to cite it.
• A Romeo and Juliet thesis statement would be the final sentence of your introduction. List the key arguments that you intend to address in the paper's body in this section.

The body section is the longest and most detailed part of your essay on Romeo and Juliet. In this step, you need to examine each of the previously given arguments and support them with information gathered via research.

Romeo and Juliet Essay Conclusion

How to write a conclusion for a Romeo and Juliet essay? Firstly, restate your thesis statement and summarize the points you have discussed in the body section of the essay. Second, in order to ensure that your essay has a thoughtful conclusion, address the "so what" query. In other words, explain why what you have said so far is important. Lastly, keep in mind that a strong closing line for an essay leaves the reader with a positive impression and encourages them to think about the topic further. Therefore, be sure that your essay's conclusion refers to and restates the most important points you have already made, connects them to broader contexts, or urges the reader to take a certain course of action.

Creative Topics for Romeo and Juliet Essay

Here are some exciting ideas for Romeo and Juliet essays:

• Literary analysis of Romeo and Juliet
• Romeo and Juliet themes essay
• Romeo and Juliet essay on love
• Romeo and Juliet essay on fate
• Romeo and Juliet essay on conflict
• How is love presented in Romeo and Juliet essay
• Romeo and Juliet movie review essay
• Who is responsible for the death of Romeo and Juliet essay

What kind of essay to choose?

You can think about working on a variety of essays about Romeo and Juliet. If you are allowed to select any topic and, consequently, any essay form, we advise selecting one of the following: Persuasive essay on Romeo and Juliet: Such an essay's primary objective is to persuade the audience that your point of view is the correct one. In addition to creating a concise argument, it's critical to appeal to people's emotions and sense of logic. Argumentative essay on Romeo and Juliet: Once you've chosen a controversial subject, you'll need to make up your opinion and back it up with facts. Romeo and Juliet Literary analysis essay: You can discuss specific story points, imagery, and literary strategies in such a paper. Compare and contrast essay on Romeo and Juliet: Choose two personalities or circumstances and explain the similarities and differences between them.  Romeo and Juliet critical essay: To conduct a critical analysis, you must assess the source material. Inform readers of what you think about the play and provide evidence for it from the text and other reliable sources.

Wrapping Up

Writing an essay about 'Romeo and Juliet' can be an exciting adventure into Shakespeare's world, but it's also an opportunity to practice and refine your academic writing skills. Just follow the steps we mentioned above, and you'll be able to write a great essay on different aspects of this classic love story. If you still have any confusion, you can ask experts for assistance. Our team of skilled essay writers is ready to assist you in your academic journey. They can offer valuable advice, assist in improving your arguments, and make sure your essay reaches its full potential.

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Persuasive essay topics – how to choose one for you, how to write a persuasive essay- expert tips.

A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Although it was first performed in the 1590s, the first  documented  performance of Romeo and Juliet is from 1662. The diarist Samuel Pepys was in the audience, and recorded that he ‘saw “Romeo and Juliet,” the first time it was ever acted; but it is a play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life, and the worst acted that ever I saw these people do.’

Despite Pepys’ dislike, the play is one of Shakespeare’s best-loved and most famous, and the story of Romeo and Juliet is well known. However, the play has become so embedded in the popular psyche that Shakespeare’s considerably more complex play has been reduced to a few key aspects: ‘star-cross’d lovers’, a teenage love story, and the suicide of the two protagonists.

In the summary and analysis that follow, we realise that Romeo and Juliet is much more than a tragic love story.

Romeo and Juliet : brief summary

After the Prologue has set the scene – we have two feuding households, Montagues and Capulets, in the city-state of Verona; and young Romeo is a Montague while Juliet, with whom Romeo is destined to fall in love, is from the Capulet family, sworn enemies of the Montagues – the play proper begins with servants of the two feuding households taunting each other in the street.

When Benvolio, a member of house Montague, arrives and clashes with Tybalt of house Capulet, a scuffle breaks out, and it is only when Capulet himself and his wife, Lady Capulet, appear that the fighting stops. Old Montague and his wife then show up, and the Prince of Verona, Escalus, arrives and chastises the people for fighting. Everyone leaves except Old Montague, his wife, and Benvolio, Montague’s nephew. Benvolio tells them that Romeo has locked himself away, but he doesn’t know why.

Romeo appears and Benvolio asks his cousin what is wrong, and Romeo starts speaking in paradoxes, a sure sign that he’s in love. He claims he loves Rosaline, but will not return any man’s love. A servant appears with a note, and Romeo and Benvolio learn that the Capulets are holding a masked ball.

Benvolio tells Romeo he should attend, even though he is a Montague, as he will find more beautiful women than Rosaline to fall in love with. Meanwhile, Lady Capulet asks her daughter Juliet whether she has given any thought to marriage, and tells Juliet that a man named Paris would make an excellent husband for her.

Romeo attends the Capulets’ masked ball, with his friend Mercutio. Mercutio tells Romeo about a fairy named Queen Mab who enters young men’s minds as they dream, and makes them dream of love and romance. At the masked ball, Romeo spies Juliet and instantly falls in love with her; she also falls for him.

They kiss, but then Tybalt, Juliet’s kinsman, spots Romeo and recognising him as a Montague, plans to confront him. Old Capulet tells him not to do so, and Tybalt reluctantly agrees. When Juliet enquires after who Romeo is, she is distraught to learn that he is a Montague and thus a member of the family that is her family’s sworn enemies.

Romeo breaks into the gardens of Juliet’s parents’ house and speaks to her at her bedroom window. The two of them pledge their love for each other, and arrange to be secretly married the following night. Romeo goes to see a churchman, Friar Laurence, who agrees to marry Romeo and Juliet.

After the wedding, the feud between the two families becomes violent again: Tybalt kills Mercutio in a fight, and Romeo kills Tybalt in retaliation. The Prince banishes Romeo from Verona for his crime.

Juliet is told by her father that she will marry Paris, so Juliet goes to seek Friar Laurence’s help in getting out of it. He tells her to take a sleeping potion which will make her appear to be dead for two nights; she will be laid to rest in the family vault, and Romeo (who will be informed of the plan) can secretly come to her there.

However, although that part of the plan goes fine, the message to Romeo doesn’t arrive; instead, he hears that Juliet has actually died. He secretly visits her at the family vault, but his grieving is interrupted by the arrival of Paris, who is there to lay flowers. The two of them fight, and Romeo kills him.

Convinced that Juliet is really dead, Romeo drinks poison in order to join Juliet in death. Juliet wakes from her slumber induced by the sleeping draught to find Romeo dead at her side. She stabs herself.

The play ends with Friar Laurence telling the story to the two feuding families. The Prince tells them to put their rivalry behind them and live in peace.

Romeo and Juliet : analysis

How should we analyse Romeo and Juliet , one of Shakespeare’s most famous and frequently studied, performed, and adapted plays? Is Romeo and Juliet the great love story that it’s often interpreted as, and what does it say about the play – if it is a celebration of young love – that it ends with the deaths of both romantic leads?

It’s worth bearing in mind that Romeo and Juliet do not kill themselves specifically because they are forbidden to be together, but rather because a chain of events (of which their families’ ongoing feud with each other is but one) and a message that never arrives lead to a misunderstanding which results in their suicides.

Romeo and Juliet is often read as both a tragedy and a great celebration of romantic love, but it clearly throws out some difficult questions about the nature of love, questions which are rendered even more pressing when we consider the headlong nature of the play’s action and the fact that Romeo and Juliet meet, marry, and die all within the space of a few days.

Below, we offer some notes towards an analysis of this classic Shakespeare play and explore some of the play’s most salient themes.

It’s worth starting with a consideration of just what Shakespeare did with his source material. Interestingly, two families known as the Montagues and Capulets appear to have actually existed in medieval Italy: the first reference to ‘Montagues and Capulets’ is, curiously, in the poetry of Dante (1265-1321), not Shakespeare.

In Dante’s early fourteenth-century epic poem, the  Divine Comedy , he makes reference to two warring Italian families: ‘Come and see, you who are negligent, / Montagues and Capulets, Monaldi and Filippeschi / One lot already grieving, the other in fear’ ( Purgatorio , canto VI). Precisely why the families are in a feud with one another is never revealed in Shakespeare’s play, so we are encouraged to take this at face value.

The play’s most famous line references the feud between the two families, which means Romeo and Juliet cannot be together. And the line, when we stop and consider it, is more than a little baffling. The line is spoken by Juliet: ‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ Of course, ‘wherefore’ doesn’t mean ‘where’ – it means ‘why’.

But that doesn’t exactly clear up the whys and the wherefores. The question still doesn’t appear to make any sense: Romeo’s problem isn’t his first name, but his family name, Montague. Surely, since she fancies him, Juliet is quite pleased with ‘Romeo’ as he is – it’s his family that are the problem. Solutions  have been proposed to this conundrum , but none is completely satisfying.

There are a number of notable things Shakespeare did with his source material. The Italian story ‘Mariotto and Gianozza’, printed in 1476, contained many of the plot elements of Shakespeare’s  Romeo and Juliet . Shakespeare’s source for the play’s story was Arthur Brooke’s  The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet  (1562), an English verse translation of this Italian tale.

The moral of Brooke’s tale is that young love ends in disaster for their elders, and is best reined in; Shakespeare changed that. In Romeo and Juliet , the headlong passion and excitement of young love is celebrated, even though confusion leads to the deaths of the young lovers. But through their deaths, and the example their love set for their parents, the two families vow to be reconciled to each other.

Shakespeare also makes Juliet a thirteen-year-old girl in his play, which is odd for a number of reasons. We know that  Romeo and Juliet  is about young love – the ‘pair of star-cross’d lovers’, who belong to rival families in Verona – but what is odd about Shakespeare’s play is how young he makes Juliet.

In Brooke’s verse rendition of the story, Juliet is sixteen. But when Shakespeare dramatised the story, he made Juliet several years younger, with Romeo’s age unspecified. As Lady Capulet reveals, Juliet is ‘not [yet] fourteen’, and this point is made to us several times, as if Shakespeare wishes to draw attention to it and make sure we don’t forget it.

This makes sense in so far as Juliet represents young love, but what makes it unsettling – particularly for modern audiences – is the fact that this makes Juliet a girl of thirteen when she enjoys her night of wedded bliss with Romeo. As John Sutherland puts it in his (and Cedric Watts’) engaging  Oxford World’s Classics: Henry V, War Criminal?: and Other Shakespeare Puzzles , ‘In a contemporary court of law [Romeo] would receive a longer sentence for what he does to Juliet than for what he does to Tybalt.’

There appears to be no satisfactory answer to this question, but one possible explanation lies in one of the play’s recurring themes: bawdiness and sexual familiarity. Perhaps surprisingly given the youthfulness of its tragic heroine, Romeo and Juliet is shot through with bawdy jokes, double entendres, and allusions to sex, made by a number of the characters.

These references to physical love serve to make Juliet’s innocence, and subsequent passionate romance with Romeo, even more noticeable: the journey both Romeo and Juliet undertake is one from innocence (Romeo pointlessly and naively pursuing Rosaline; Juliet unversed in the ways of love) to experience.

In the last analysis, Romeo and Juliet is a classic depiction of forbidden love, but it is also far more sexually aware, more ‘adult’, than many people realise.

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4 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet”

Modern reading of the play’s opening dialogue among the brawlers fails to parse the ribaldry. Sex scares the bejeepers out of us. Why? Confer “R&J.”

It’s all that damn padre’s fault!

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 6 )

Shakespeare, more than any other author, has instructed the West in the catastrophes of sexuality, and has invented the formula that the sexual becomes the erotic when crossed by the shadow of death. There had to be one high song of the erotic by Shakespeare, one lyrical and tragi-comical paean celebrating an unmixed love and lamenting its inevitable destruction. Romeo and Juliet is unmatched, in Shakespeare and in the world’s literature, as a vision of an uncompromising mutual love that perishes of its own idealism and intensity.

—Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

Romeo and Juliet, regarded by many as William Shakespeare’s first great play, is generally thought to have been written around 1595. Shakespeare was then 31 years old, married for 12 years and the father of three children. He had been acting and writing in London for five years. His stage credits included mainly histories—the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III —and comedies— The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, and Love’s Labour’s Lost. Shakespeare’s first tragedy, modeled on Seneca, Titus Andronicus , was written around 1592. From that year through 1595 Shakespeare had also composed 154 sonnets and two long narrative poems in the erotic tradition— Venus  and  Adonis   and  The  Rape  of  Lucrece.  Both  his  dramatic  and  nondramatic  writing  show  Shakespeare  mastering  Elizabethan  literary  conventions.  Then,  around 1595, Shakespeare composed three extraordinary plays—R ichard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet —in three different genres—history, comedy, and tragedy—signalling a new mastery, originality, and excellence.  With  these  three  plays  Shakespeare  emerged  from  the  shadows  of  his  influences and initiated a period of unexcelled accomplishment. The two parts of Henry IV and Julius Caesar would follow, along with the romantic comedies The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night and the great tragedies Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra . The three plays  of  1595,  therefore,  serve  as  an  important  bridge  between  Shakespeare’s  apprenticeship and his mature achievements. Romeo and Juliet, in particular, is a crucial play in the evolution of Shakespeare’s tragic vision, in his integration of poetry and drama, and in his initial exploration of the connection between love and tragedy that he would continue in Troilus and Cressida, Othello, and Antony  and  Cleopatra.  Romeo  and  Juliet   is  not  only  one  of  the  greatest  love  stories in all literature, considering its stage history and the musicals, opera, music, ballet, literary works, and films that it has inspired; it is quite possibly the most popular play of all time. There is simply no more famous pair of lovers than Romeo and Juliet, and their story has become an inescapable central myth in our understanding of romantic love.

Despite  the  play’s  persistence,  cultural  saturation,  and  popular  appeal,  Romeo and Juliet has fared less well with scholars and critics, who have generally judged it inferior to the great tragedies that followed. Instead of the later tragedies of character Romeo and Juliet has been downgraded as a tragedy of chance, and, in the words of critic James Calderwood, the star-crossed lovers are “insufficiently endowed with complexity” to become tragic heroes. Instead “they  become  a  study  of  victimage  and  sacrifice,  not  tragedy.”  What  is  too  often missing in a consideration of the shortcomings of Romeo and Juliet by contrast with the later tragedies is the radical departure the play represented when compared to what preceded it. Having relied on Senecan horror for his first tragedy, Titus  Andronicus,  Shakespeare  located  his  next  in  the  world  of  comedy and romance. Romeo and Juliet is set not in antiquity, as Elizabethan convention dictated for a tragic subject, but in 16th-century Verona, Italy. His tragic protagonists are neither royal nor noble, as Aristotle advised, but two teenagers caught up in the petty disputes of their families. The plight of young lovers pitted against parental or societal opposition was the expected subject, since  Roman  times,  of  comedy,  not  tragedy.  By  showing  not  the  eventual  triumph  but  the  death  of  the  two  young  lovers  Shakespeare  violated  comic  conventions,  while  making  a  case  that  love  and  its  consequences  could  be  treated with an unprecedented tragic seriousness. As critic Harry Levin has observed, Shakespeare’s contemporaries “would have been surprised, and possibly shocked at seeing lovers taken so seriously. Legend, it had been hereto-fore taken for granted, was the proper matter for serious drama; romance was the stuff of the comic stage.”

Shakespeare’s innovations are further evident in comparison to his source material.  The  plot  was  a  well-known  story  in  Italian,  French,  and  English  versions. Shakespeare’s direct source was Arthur Brooke’s poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562). This moralistic work was intended as  a  warning  to  youth  against  “dishonest  desire”  and  disobeying  parental  authority. Shakespeare, by contrast, purifies and ennobles the lovers’ passion, intensifies  the  pathos,  and  underscores  the  injustice  of  the  lovers’  destruction.  Compressing  the  action  from  Brooke’s  many  months  into  a  five-day crescendo, Shakespeare also expands the roles of secondary characters such as  Mercutio  and  Juliet’s  nurse  into  vivid  portraits  that  contrast  the  lovers’ elevated lyricism with a bawdy earthiness and worldly cynicism. Shakespeare transforms Brooke’s plodding verse into a tour de force verbal display that is supremely witty, if at times over elaborate, and, at its best, movingly expressive. If the poet and the dramatist are not yet seamlessly joined in Romeo and Juliet, the play still displays a considerable advance in Shakespeare’s orchestration of verse, image, and incident that would become the hallmark of his greatest achievements.

The play’s theme and outcome are announced in the Prologue:

Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life; Whose misadventur’d piteous overthrows Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.

Suspense over the lovers’ fate is eliminated at the outset as Shakespeare emphasizes the forces that will destroy them. The initial scene makes this clear as a public brawl between servants of the feuding Montagues and Capulets escalates to involve kinsmen and the patriarchs on both sides, ended only when the Prince of Verona enforces a cease-fire under penalty of death for future offenders of the peace. Romeo, Montague’s young son, does not participate in the scuffle since he is totally absorbed by a hopeless passion for a young, unresponsive beauty named Rosaline. Initially Romeo appears as a figure of mockery, the embodiment of the hypersensitive, melancholy adolescent lover, who  is  urged  by  his  kinsman  Benvolio  to  resist  sinking  “under  love’s  heavy  burden”  and  seek  another  more  worthy  of  his  affection.  Another  kinsman,  Mercutio, for whom love is more a game of easy conquest, urges Romeo to “be  rough  with  love”  and  master  his  circumstances.  When  by  chance  it  is  learned that Rosaline is to attend a party at the Capulets, Benvolio suggests that they should go as well for Romeo to compare Rosaline’s charms with the other beauties at the party and thereby cure his infatuation. There Romeo sees Juliet, Capulet’s not-yet 14-year-old daughter. Her parents are encouraging her  to  accept  a  match  with  Count  Paris  for  the  social  benefit  of  the  family.  Love  as  affectation  and  love  as  advantage  are  transformed  into  love  as  all-consuming, mutual passion at first sight. Romeo claims that he “ne’er saw true beauty till this night,” and by the force of that beauty, he casts off his former melancholic  self-absorption.  Juliet is  no  less  smitten.  Sending her nurse  to  learn the stranger’s identity, she worries, “If he be married, / My grave is like to be my wedding bed.” Both are shocked to learn that they are on either side of the family feud, and their risk is underscored when the Capulet kinsman, Tybalt, recognizes Romeo and, though prevented by Capulet from violence at the party, swears future vengeance. Tybalt’s threat underscores that this is a play as much about hate as about love, in which Romeo and Juliet’s passion is  increasingly  challenged  by  the  public  and  family  forces  that  deny  love’s  authority.

The  first  of  the  couple’s  two  great  private  moments  in  which  love’s  redemptive and transformative power works its magic follows in possibly the most famous single scene in all of drama, set in the Capulets’ orchard, over-looked by Juliet’s bedroom window. In some of the most impassioned, lyrical, and famous verses Shakespeare ever wrote, the lovers’ dialogue perfectly captures the ecstasy of love and love’s capacity to remake the world. Seeing Juliet above at her window, Romeo says:

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun! Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief That thou her maid art far more fair than she.

He overhears Juliet’s declaration of her love for him and the rejection of what is implied if a Capulet should love a Montague:

O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name! Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be a Capulet. . . . ’Tis but thy name that is my enemy. Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet .So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name; And for that name, which is no part of thee, Take all myself.

In  a  beautifully  modulated  scene  the  lovers  freely  admit  their  passion  and  exchange vows of love that become a marriage proposal. As Juliet continues to be called back to her room and all that is implied as Capulet’s daughter, time and space become the barriers to love’s transcendent power to unite.

With the assistance of Friar Lawrence, who regards the union of a Montague and a Capulet as an opportunity “To turn your households’ rancour to pure  love,”  Romeo  and  Juliet  are  secretly  married.  Before  nightfall  and  the  anticipated consummation of their union Romeo is set upon by Tybalt, who is by Romeo’s marriage, his new kinsman. Romeo accordingly refuses his challenge, but it is answered by Mercutio. Romeo tries to separate the two, but in the  process  Mercutio  is  mortally  wounded.  This  is  the  tragic  turn  of  the  play  as  Romeo,  enraged,  rejects  the  principle  of  love  forged  with  Juliet  for  the claims of reputation, the demand for vengeance, and an identifi cation of masculinity with violent retribution:

My very friend, hath got this mortal hurt In my behalf; my reputation stain’d With Tybalt’s slander—Tybalt, that an hour Hath been my kinsman. O sweet Juliet, Thy beauty hath made me effeminate And in my temper soft’ned valour’s steel!

After killing Tybalt, Romeo declares, “O, I am fortune’s fool!” He may blame circumstances for his predicament, but he is clearly culpable in capitulating to the values of society he had challenged in his love for Juliet.

The lovers are given one final moment of privacy before the catastrophe. Juliet, awaiting Romeo’s return, gives one of the play’s most moving speeches, balancing sublimity with an intimation of mortality that increasingly accompanies the lovers:

Come, gentle night; come, loving, black-brow’d night; Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die, 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.

Learning the terrible news of Tybalt’s death and Romeo’s banishment, Juliet wins her own battle between hate and love and sends word to Romeo to keep their appointed night together before they are parted.

As Romeo is away in Mantua Juliet’s parents push ahead with her wedding to Paris. The solution to Juliet’s predicament is offered by Friar Lawrence who gives her a drug that will make it appear she has died. The Friar is to summon Romeo,  who  will  rescue  her  when  she  awakes  in  the  Capulet  family  tomb.  The Friar’s message to Romeo fails to reach him, and Romeo learns of Juliet’s death. Reversing his earlier claim of being “fortune’s fool,” Romeo reacts by declaring, “Then I defy you, stars,” rushing to his wife and breaking society’s rules by acquiring the poison to join her in death. Reaching the tomb Romeo is surprised to find Paris on hand, weeping for his lost bride. Outraged by the intrusion  on  his  grief  Paris  confronts  Romeo.  They  fight,  and  after  killing  Paris, Romeo fi nally recognizes him and mourns him as “Mercutio’s kinsman.” Inside the tomb Romeo sees Tybalt’s corpse and asks forgiveness before taking leave of Juliet with a kiss:

. . . O, here Will I set up my everlasting rest And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-wearied flesh.

Juliet  awakes  to  see  Romeo  dead  beside  her.  Realizing  what  has  happened,  she responds by taking his dagger and plunges it into her breast: “This is thy sheath; there rest, and let me die.”

Montagues, Capulets, and the Prince arrive, and the Friar explains what has happened and why. His account of Romeo and Juliet’s tender passion and devotion shames the two families into ending their feud. The Prince provides the final eulogy:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings. The sun for sorrow will not show his head. Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things; Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished; For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

The  sense  of  loss  Verona  and  the  audience  feels  at  the  lovers’  deaths  is  a  direct  result  of  Shakespeare’s  remarkable  ability  to  conjure  love  in  all  its  transcendent power, along with its lethal risks. Set on a collision course with the values bent on denying love’s sway, Romeo and Juliet manage to create a dreamlike, alternative, private world that is so touching because it is so brief and perishable. Shakespeare’s triumph here is to make us care that adolescent romance matters—emotionally,  psychologically,  and  socially—and  that  the  premature and unjust death of lovers rival in profundity and significance the fall of kings.

Romeo and Juliet Oxford Lecture by Emma Smith

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Plays

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Romeo and Juliet

By william shakespeare, romeo and juliet essay questions.

In what way do Romeo and Juliet break gender conventions? How do these roles fluctuate throughout the play?

At the beginning of the play, the young lovers' behavior reverses common gender conventions – Romeo acts in a way that his friends call feminine, while Juliet exhibits masculine qualities. Romeo is by no means an archetypal Elizabethan man; he is disinterested in asserting his physical power like the other male characters in the play. Instead, Romeo chooses to stew in his pensive melancholy. On several instances, Romeo's companions suggest that his introspective behavior is effeminate. On the other hand, Juliet exhibits a more pronounced sense of agency than most female characters in Shakespeare's time. While the women around her, like her mother, blindly act in accordance with Lord Capulet's wishes, Juliet proudly expresses her opinion. Even when she has lost a battle (like when Lord Capulet insists she consider marrying Paris), she demonstrates a shrewd ability to deflect attention without committing to anything. In her relationship with Romeo, Juliet clearly takes the lead by insisting on marriage and proposing the plan to unite them. As the play progresses, Romeo starts to break out of his pensive inaction to the point that Mercutio notices this change. Romeo also makes a great shift from his cowardly attempt at suicide in Act III to his willful decision in Act V. Overall, Romeo and Juliet are arguably a good match because they are so distinct. Juliet is headstrong, while Romeo is passive until passion strikes and inspires him to action.

Contrast Romeo's attempted suicide in Act 3 with his actual suicide in Act 5. How do these two events reveal changes in his character and an evolving view of death?

Romeo considers suicide in both Act 3 and Act 5. In Act 3, Romeo's desire to take his own life is a cowardly response to his grief over killing Tybalt. He is afraid of the consequences of his actions and would rather escape the world entirely than face losing Juliet. Both Friar Laurence and the Nurse criticize Romeo for his weakness and lack of responsibility - taking the knife from his hands. In contrast, Romeo actually does commit suicide in Act V because he sees no other option. He plans for it, seeking out the Apothecary before leaving Mantua, and kills himself out of solidarity with Juliet, not because he is afraid. While suicide is hardly a defensible action, Romeo's dual attempts to take his life reveal his growing maturity and his strengthened moral resolve.

Several characters criticize Romeo for falling in love too quickly. Do you believe this is true? Does his tendency towards infatuation give the audience occasion to question Romeo's affection for Juliet?

This question obviously asks for a student opinion, but there is evidence to support both sides of the argument. In Act 2, Friar Laurence states his opinion that Romeo does indeed fall in love too quickly. Romeo is arguably in love with being in love more than he is in love with any particular woman. The speed with which his affections shift from Rosaline to Juliet – all before he ever exchanges a word with the latter – suggests that Romeo's feelings of 'love' are closer to lust than commitment. This interpretation is supported by the numerous sexual references in the play, which are even interwoven with religious imagery in Romeo and Juliet's first conversation. However, it also possible to argue that Romeo's lust does not invalidate the purity of his love. Romeo and Juliet celebrates young, passionate love, which includes physical lust. Furthermore, whereas Romeo was content to pine for Rosaline from afar, his love for Juliet forces him to spring into action. He is melancholy over Rosaline, but he is willing to die for Juliet. Therefore, a possible reading is that Romeo and Juliet's relationship might have been sparked by physical attraction, but it grew into a deep, spiritual connection.

Examine the contrast between order and disorder in Romeo and Juliet . How does Shakespeare express this dichotomy through symbols, and how do those motifs help to underline the other major themes in the play?

The contrast between order and disorder appears from the Prologue, where the Chorus tells a tragic story using the ordered sonnet form. From that point onwards, the separation between order and disorder is a common theme. Ironically, violence and disorder occurs in bright daylight, while the serenity of love emerges at night. The relationship between Romeo and Juliet is uncomplicated without the disorderly feud between their families, which has taken over the streets of Verona. The contrast between order and disorder underscores the way that Shakespeare presents love - a safe cocoon in which the lovers can separate themselves from the unpredictable world around them. At the end of the play, it becomes clear that a relationship based on pure love cannot co-exist with human weaknesses like greed and jealousy.

Many critics note a tonal inconsistency in Romeo and Juliet . Do you find the shift in tone that occurs after Mercutio's death to be problematic? Does this shift correspond to an established structural tradition or is it simply one of Shakespeare's whims?

After the Prologue until the point where Mercutio dies in Act III, Romeo and Juliet is mostly a comic romance. After Mercutio dies, the nature of the play suddenly shifts into tragedy. It is possible that this extreme shift is merely the product of Shakespeare's whims, especially because the play has many other asides that are uncharacteristic of either comedy or tragedy. For example, Mercutio's Queen Mab speech is dreamy and poetic, while the Nurse's colorful personality gives her more dimension than functional characters generally require. However, it is also possible to see the parallels between this tonal shift and the play's thematic contrast between order and disorder. Shakespeare frequently explored the human potential for both comedy and tragedy in his plays, and it is possible that in Romeo and Juliet , he wanted to explore the transition from youthful whimsy into the complications of adulthood. From this perspective, the play's unusual structure could represent a journey to maturity. Romeo grows from a petulant teenager who believes he can ignore the world around him to a man who accepts the fact that his actions have consequences.

Eminent literary critic Harold Bloom considers Mercutio to be one of Shakespeare's greatest inventions in Romeo and Juliet . Why do you agree or disagree with him? What sets Mercutio apart?

One of Shakespeare's great dramatic talents is his ability to portray functional characters as multi-faceted individuals. Mercutio, for example, could have served a simple dramatic function, helping the audience get to know Romeo in the early acts. Then, his death in Act 3 is a crucial plot point in the play, heightening the stakes and forcing Romeo to make a life-changing decision. Mercutio barely appears in Arthur Brooke's Romeus and Juliet , which Romeo and Juliet is based on. Therefore, Shakespeare made a point of fleshing out the character. In Mercutio's Queen Mab speech, Shakespeare has the opportunity to truly delve into the bizarre and often dangerous sexual nature of love. Further, Mercutio's insight as he dies truly expresses the horrors of revenge, as he declares a plague on both the Montague and Capulet families. He is the first casualty of their feud - and because he transcends functionality, the audience mourns his untimely death and can relate to Romeo's capricious revenge.

How does Shakespeare use symbols of gold and silver throughout the play? What does each element represent?

Shakespeare uses gold and silver as symbols to criticize human folly. He often invokes the image of silver to symbolize pure love and innocent beauty. On the other hand, he uses gold as a sign of greed or desire. For example, Shakespeare describes Rosaline as immune to showers of gold, an image that symbolizes the selfishness of bribery. Later, when Romeo is banished, he comments that banishment is a "golden axe," meaning that banishment is merely a shiny euphemism for death. Finally, the erection of the golden statues at the end of the play is a sign of the fact that neither Lord Capulet nor Lord Montague has really learned anything from the loss of their children. They are still competing to claim the higher level of grief. Romeo, however, recognizes the power of gold and rejects it - through him, Shakespeare suggests a distinction between a world governed by wealth and the cocoon of true love.

Do a character analysis of Friar Laurence. What motivates him? In what ways does this motivation complicate his character?

Friar Laurence is yet another character who transcends his functional purpose. When Romeo first approaches the Friar to plan his marriage to Juliet, the older man questions the young man's sincerity, since Romeo openly pined for Rosaline only a few days before. However, the Friar shows a willingness to compromise by agreeing to marry the young lovers nevertheless. What ultimately motivates Friar Laurence is his desire to end the feud between the Capulets and the Montagues, and he sees Romeo and Juliet's marriage as a means to that end. While his peaceful intentions are admirable, his devious actions to achieve them – conducting a marriage that he explicitly questions – suggests he is more driven by politics than by an internal moral compass. The fact that a religious figure would compromise one of the Church's sacraments (marriage) further suggests that the Friar wants his power to extend beyond the confines of his Chapel. He also displays his hubris by helping Juliet to fake her death, rather than simply helping her get to Mantua to be with Romeo. While Friar Laurence is not an explicit villain, his internal contradictions speak to Shakespeare's ability to create multi-faceted characters.

Should Romeo and Juliet be considered a classical tragedy (in which fate destroys individuals)? Or is it more a tragedy of circumstance and personality? Moreover, could the tragic ending of Romeo and Juliet have been avoided?

In classical tragedy, an individual is defeated by Fate, despite his or her best efforts to change a pre-determined course of events. A classical tragedy both celebrates an individual's willpower while lamenting the fact that the universe cannot be bested by mankind. The tragic elements in Romeo and Juliet are undeniable - two young lovers want nothing more than to be together and fall victim to an ancient feud and rigid societal conventions. However, while Romeo and Juliet's deaths result from human folly, the immovable power of fate also has a hand in sealing their destinies. For instance, Romeo and Juliet had many opportunities to simply run away together instead of being separated after Romeo is banished from Verona. Furthermore, many of the tragic occurrences are contingent on antagonistic characters running into one another, and then choosing to pursue vengeance rather than simply walk away. Based on this evidence, it is possible to read Shakespeare's intent as suggesting that behavioral adjustment can often prevent tragic events.

How is Romeo and Juliet a criticism of organized religion? Examine the play's secularism to develop your answer.

While Romeo and Juliet does not present explicit attacks against religion, Shakespeare reveals his skepticism of Christianity in subtle ways. In many ways, Romeo and Juliet must reject the tenets of Christianity in order to be together. In their first meeting, they banter, using religious imagery to share their sexual feelings. In this exchange, the lovers acknowledge the omnipresence of Christianity, but cheekily use religious images in an unexpected context. Further, Christian tradition would have required Juliet to submit to her father's desire, but instead, she manipulates his expectations to distract him from her real agenda. Even Friar Laurence, an explicitly religious figure, uses Christianity as a tool towards his own ends. In this way, the play implicitly suggests that the rigid rules of religion often work in opposition to the desires of the heart - and to pursue true happiness, one must throw off the shackles of organized faith.

Romeo and Juliet Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Romeo and Juliet is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Can you find verbal irony in the play? Where?

One example of verbal irony would be Romeo's reference to the poison he has purchased as a "sweet medicine". A cordial is a sweet liquor or medicine.

Come, cordial and not poison, go with me To Juliet's grave; for there must I use thee.

What do we learn about Mercutio in queen man speech?

The whole speech is based on pagan Celtic mythology. Mercutio’s speech is laced with sexual innuendo. The words “queen” and “mab” refer to whores in Elizabethan England. As his speech goes on we notice the subtext get increasingly sexual...

What does Romeo fear as he approaches Capulet house? What literary device would this be an example of?

Romeo feels something bad is going to happen.

I fear too early, for my mind misgives Some consequence yet hanging in the stars

Looks like foreshadowing to me!

Study Guide for Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet study guide contains a biography of William Shakespeare, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Romeo and Juliet
• Romeo and Juliet Summary
• Romeo and Juliet Video
• Character List

Essays for Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.

• Unity in Shakespeare's Tragedies
• Fate in Romeo and Juliet
• Romeo and Juliet: Under the Guise of Love
• The Apothecary's Greater Significance in Romeo and Juliet
• Romeo and Juliet: Two Worlds

Lesson Plan for Romeo and Juliet

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Romeo and Juliet
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Romeo and Juliet Bibliography

E-Text of Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet e-text contains the full text of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.

• List of Characters

Wikipedia Entries for Romeo and Juliet

• Introduction
• Date and text

114 Romeo and Juliet Essay Titles & Examples

Looking for Romeo and Juliet essay titles? The world’s most tragic story is worth writing about!

🥀 Best Romeo and Juliet Essay Titles

🖤 romeo and juliet essay prompts.

• 🏆 Best Romeo and Juliet Essay Examples

📌 Interesting Romeo and Juliet Essay Topics

🎭 easy titles for romeo and juliet essays, 👍 exciting romeo and juliet title ideas, ❓ romeo and juliet essay questions.

Romeo and Juliet is probably the most famous tragedy by William Shakespeare. It is a story of two young lovers whose deaths reconcile their feuding families. Whether you are assigned an argumentative, persuasive, or analytical essay on this piece of literature, this article will answer all your questions. Below you’ll find Romeo and Juliet essay examples, thesis ideas, and paper topics.

• “Romeo and Juliet”: character analysis
• What role does the setting play in “Romeo and Juliet”?
• “Romeo and Juliet” and antique tradition of tragic love stories
• Theme of love in “Romeo and Juliet”
• What role does the theme of fate play in “Romeo and Juliet”?
• “Romeo and Juliet”: dramatic structure analysis
• Analyze the balcony scene in “Romeo and Juliet”
• “Romeo and Juliet”: feminist criticism
• The most famous adaptations of “Romeo and Juliet”
• “Romeo and Juliet” in the world culture

Keep reading to learn the key points you can use to write a successful paper.

• Original Italian Tale vs. Shakespeare’s Tragedy

The story described in Shakespeare’s tragedy is based on the Italian tale that was translated into English in the sixteenth century. Original version represents situations and lines from Romeo and Juliet lives.

Shakespeare added a few more main characters: Mercutio, Paris, and Tybalt. Numerous researches state that Shakespeare used three sources to write his tragedy: a novella Giulietta e Romeo by Matteo Bandello, written in 1554; a story Il Novellio, by Masuccio Salernitano; and the Historia Novellamente Ritrovata di Due Nobili Amanti, written by Luigi Da Porto.

You can learn more about these novels to find out similarities and differences between primary sources and Shakespeare’s work

• Love and Fate in Romeo and Juliet

If you’re going to write Romeo and Juliet essay on fate, read this paragraph. Fate is the fundamental concept of the plot. It makes us look at Romeo and Juliet affair as a single tragedy.

At the same time, another core element of the story is love. From the very beginning of the drama, you will clearly understand that the story will end in tragedy.

Shakespeare shows us the value of fate events.

However, love remains a crucial thematic element. The roles of Nurse, Paris, and Romeo show us a physical attraction, sympathy, and romantic affection while being the embodiment of love. Analyze what type of love is represented by each character in your essay. Explain, what do you think real love is.

• Value and Duality in Romeo and Juliet

Among the central idea to consider for your Romeo and Juliet essay titles is an issue of value and duality. Shakespeare actively uses duality in his tragedy by representing the deaths of Romeo and Juliet as reasons of tragedy in Verona, which brought new order to the city.

Friar Laurence also reveals ambiguity when he helped Romeo and thus forced young lovers to suffer in the end. The decision to marry couple had a reason to end the conflict between Montague and Capulets.

Romeo and Juliet’s example discloses happiness and blame brought by key episodes and change in society. In your writing, you may analyze how the effect of adoration had influenced Romeo, Juliet, and other people lives.

• Masculinity in Romeo and Juliet

A lot of Romeo and Juliet essay examples analyze the role of gender and masculinity in the tragedy. Mercutio is shown as a classic example of a real man: active, brave citizen.

He is a person of action. On the other hand, Romeo is described as a boy who seeks for love. Romeo and Juliet love thrown into quarreling world.

You can analyze the reasons why Romeo fights and kills Paris when finding him near Juliet body.

Covering all of the points mentioned above will help you to produce an outstanding Romeo and Juliet essay. Check the samples below to get inspiration and more ideas that you can use in your own paper.

🏆 Best Romeo and Juliet Topic Ideas & Essay Examples

• Different Types of Love Portrayed in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet Term Paper In regards to this communication, the issue of romantic love between Romeo and Juliet is highlighted7. The concept of true love is no where to be seen in Romeo and Juliet’s relationship.
• William Shakespeare “Romeo and Juliet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” This paper examines romantic love as the source of joy and fulfillment in “Romeo and Juliet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. Love is the source of pain and suffering in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.
• The Portrayal of Fate in “Romeo and Juliet” Thus, the play Romeo and Juliet demonstrates that fate is the invisible, unavoidable force behind the entirety of the human experience.
• Symbolism and Foreshadowing in “Romeo and Juliet” The love of Juliet to Romeo at the early stages is described as the “bud love, expected to grow into a beauteous flower” when the two meet later.
• The Renaissance Time During Romeo and Juliet Men and women performed different roles in the household; the man was responsible for farming while the woman took care of the poultry and dairy. In the upper-class, marriages were arranged and the parents chose […]
• Analysis of the Play ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Another interesting scene of the production that makes it real understanding of the authors work is the casting of the romantic love between Romeo and Juliet, the physical love of the nurse and the contractual […]
• William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” in Baz Luhrmann’s Interpretation The fragility of love in this work is contrasted with its hardness – it can be compared in quality and beauty to a cut diamond.
• Breaking the Rules: Romeo and Juliet’s Quest for Independence Finally, the death of Romeo and Juliet puts an end to their love and is powerful enough to reconcile their feuding families.
• Romeo and Juliet’s Analysis and Comparison With the Film Romeo Must Die It can be concluded that, in the case of the original Romeo and Juliet, the main heroes are dying, but their families reconcile.
• Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” Adaptation As the plot of the play develops and the reader gets more involved in the reading of the play, the constant need to read the stage directions has a disruptive effect on the reader’s interaction […]
• Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: Act 1 Scene 4 Review In this speech alone we see Mercutio in direct opposition to all of the characters in Romeo and Juliet while at the same time we are provided an alternate point of view to the ideals […]
• “Romeo and Juliet” by William Shakespeare: Play’s Concept In Romeo and Juliet, the development of characters eventually led to the tragedy of the main characters. The love of Romeo and Juliet is a remarkable love as they have to undergo many obstacles to […]
• Forbidden Love in Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare From Freud’s perspective, the characters’ problems can be perceived as the result of a conflict between their superego, id and ego.
• Analysis of “Romeo and Juliet” Directed by Simon Godwin The actors played in the theater without an audience, and the shooting itself took two and a half weeks, but also due to the director’s attempt to combine the action on the theater stage and […]
• Romeo and Juliet: Analysis of Play Being a tragedy, the story narrates the challenges two lovers, Romeo and Juliet, go through due to the enmity between their respective families. For example, the story of Juliet and Romeo presents a romantic and […]
• Friar Lawrence in “Romeo and Juliet” by Shakespeare The strengths of such friendships can be seen in the way Friar Laurence accepts and anticipates Romeo’s actions, showing that he is ready to hear him as a friend not as a priest, “Doth couch […]
• “Analysis of Causes of Tragic Fate in Romeo and Juliet Based on Shakespeare’s View of Fate” by Jie Li The article is easy to read and makes a compelling case for the reasons that precipitated the tragedy in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
• “Romeo and Juliet”: Play and Film Preminger et al.claim that poetry is to be educative and pleasurable and both versions of “Romeo and Juliet” meet this criterion regardless of the fact that they had to appeal to the audience of a […]
• “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Winter’s Tale” Comparison Because of the importance of the role of plants and trees in the two abovementioned plays, it would be reasonable to consider each of the plays in detail.
• Love and Sadness in the First Act of “Romeo and Juliet” The love story of Romeo and Juliet is well known to most people, but one might forget that Romeo was initially not in love with Juliet; he met her later.
• Carlo Carlea’s Film “Romeo and Juliet” The new adaptation of my play generally made a controversial impression: the actors look suitable for their roles, but the internal theme of the play seems to be not so profoundly got.
• “Romeo and Juliet” Staged in Greek Style According to the analysis, it is evident that even though the story, plot, and characters stay the same, the change in the style of “Romeo and Juliet” will have a significant difference from the original […]
• Personality and Maturity in the Romeo and Juliet Play by W. Shakespeare While this idea is not always true in specific cases, it can be assumed to be true in the case of Romeo and Juliet because of the ways in which they act.
• Oh Tae-Suk’s Romeo and Juliet Oh Tae-suk is a South-Korean playwright and director, well-known for his masterful portrayal of modern Korean life and the use of the elements of the traditional Korean theater in his plays.
• What Shapes More Lovers’ “Story of Romeo and Juliet?” In Romeo and Juliet, love is the central theme of the tragedy, and the images of the protagonists are mostly shaped by the relationships and challenges they had to face.
• Nurse and Friar Laurence in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” The way Friar Laurence supported Romeo and Juliet to get Married, The way the Nurse is opposing in her regards of Romeo and Paris, When Friar Laurence clandestinely married them, the way the Nurse is […]
• Character Analysis of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” The Renaissance in Italy was a time in which historians and writers were most active, sparking a new wave of literacy in the Italian world, said to be the father of Renaissance Europe.
• Romeo and Juliet: The Twentieth Century This is the first scene of the play. In the mean time, Capulet learns that Juliet has fallen in love with Romeo, and he is infuriated with the behavior of her daughter.
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IvyPanda. (2023, December 7). 114 Romeo and Juliet Essay Titles & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/romeo-and-juliet-essay-examples/

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What are some examples of film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet ?

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Romeo and Juliet

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What is Romeo and Juliet about?

Romeo and Juliet is about a young hero and heroine whose families, the Montagues and the Capulets, respectively, are ferocious enemies. Romeo and Juliet ’s passionate star-crossed love leads to their demise, which ultimately serves to pacify the relationship between their families.

What is Romeo and Juliet based on?

Shakespeare’s principal source for the plot of Romeo and Juliet was The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet , a long narrative poem written in 1562 by the English poet Arthur Brooke , who had based his poem on a French translation of a tale by the Italian writer Matteo Bandello .

Where is Romeo and Juliet set?

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is set in Verona , Italy.

How is Romeo and Juliet still relevant today?

The characters of Romeo and Juliet have been continuously depicted in literature, music, dance, and theatre. The premise of the young hero and heroine whose families are enemies is so appealing that Romeo and Juliet have become, in the modern popular imagination, the representative type of star-crossed lovers.

Some of the most distinct film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet are Franco Zeffirelli ’s 1968 version of the same name, which notably cast actors similar in age to the play’s young protagonists; Baz Luhrmann ’s visually vibrant 1996 Romeo + Juliet ; and the 2013 zombie romantic comedy Warm Bodies . Learn more.

Recent News

Romeo and Juliet , play by William Shakespeare , written about 1594–96 and first published in an unauthorized quarto in 1597. An authorized quarto appeared in 1599, substantially longer and more reliable. A third quarto, based on the second, was used by the editors of the First Folio of 1623. The characters of Romeo and Juliet have been depicted in literature , music, dance, and theatre. The appeal of the young hero and heroine—whose families, the Montagues and the Capulets, respectively, are implacable enemies—is such that they have become, in the popular imagination, the representative type of star-crossed lovers.

Shakespeare’s principal source for the plot was The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), a long narrative poem by the English poet Arthur Brooke , who had based his poem on a French translation of a tale by the Italian Matteo Bandello .

Shakespeare sets the scene in Verona , Italy . Juliet and Romeo meet and fall instantly in love at a masked ball of the Capulets, and they profess their love when Romeo, unwilling to leave, climbs the wall into the orchard garden of her family’s house and finds her alone at her window. Because their well-to-do families are enemies, the two are married secretly by Friar Laurence . When Tybalt, a Capulet, seeks out Romeo in revenge for the insult of Romeo’s having dared to shower his attentions on Juliet, an ensuing scuffle ends in the death of Romeo’s dearest friend, Mercutio . Impelled by a code of honour among men, Romeo kills Tybalt and is banished to Mantua by the Prince of Verona, who has been insistent that the family feuding cease . When Juliet’s father, unaware that Juliet is already secretly married, arranges a marriage with the eminently eligible Count Paris, the young bride seeks out Friar Laurence for assistance in her desperate situation. He gives her a potion that will make her appear to be dead and proposes that she take it and that Romeo rescue her. She complies. Romeo, however, unaware of the friar’s scheme because a letter has failed to reach him, returns to Verona on hearing of Juliet’s apparent death. He encounters a grieving Paris at Juliet’s tomb, reluctantly kills him when Paris attempts to prevent Romeo from entering the tomb, and finds Juliet in the burial vault. There he gives her a last kiss and kills himself with poison. Juliet awakens, sees the dead Romeo, and kills herself. The families learn what has happened and end their feud.

For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare’s entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s plays and poems .

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Romeo and Juliet — Conflict Shown in Romeo and Juliet

Conflict Shown in Romeo and Juliet

• Categories: Romeo and Juliet

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Words: 645 |

Published: Jan 29, 2024

Words: 645 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Family feuds, societal expectations, individual choices, culmination of conflict.

• Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. "Teaching Romeo and Juliet in the 21st century." Shakespeare Quarterly 60.2 (2009): 220-231.
• Hopkins, Lisa. "Conflicts in Romeo and Juliet." Scribbendi , 2019, https://www.scribendi.com/advice/conflicts_in_romeo_and_juliet.en.html.

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• Romeo and Richard III are enlisted in the casting wars

Who should play whom on stage?

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T WO HOUSES , both alike in dignity, have invoked ancient grudges and sparked new mutinies on the vexed question of who should play whom in drama. Both are theatres in London that have made headlines with Shakespearean leads. In different ways they suggest the commotion that casting decisions can cause, the benefits they can confer and the problems left unsolved.

There is a nice dramatic symmetry in casting Tom Holland, who plays Spider-Man in the Marvel films, in another classic tale of volatile adolescence, “Romeo & Juliet” (pictured). Both Spider-Man and Romeo hide big secrets; dragged into old enmities, both find their crush is the daughter of a foe.

There is a commercial logic, too. A megastar among young audiences, Mr Holland may be the most famous of the Hollywood A -listers to appear recently in the West End and on Broadway. After performances at the Duke of York’s theatre he is mobbed at the stage door. Almost all the few remaining tickets, in a run that lasts until August, cost £345 ($440). Critics of celebrity casting worry that it contributes to rising prices. Not every screen idol, they point out, has the chops for a soliloquy.

Mr Holland enters in a hoodie and the sort of nasty short-fringe haircut that some teenagers now go in for. With wit and warmth, plus a flash of bicep, he proves the doubters wrong. Nuanced and lucid, Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, a relative unknown, is even better as Juliet. (A black actor, she has been vilely abused by racists purporting to know what Juliet really looked like.) There is no balcony in this pared-back production. The star-cross’d couple sit touchingly side by side to declare their love.

Jamie Lloyd, the director, has brought in lots of young punters. Alas, his stylised staging lets them and the actors down. He uses cameras and screens to relay action from the foyer and roof; passion is intercut with bloodshed. Much less successful is the choice to have many lines declaimed into standing microphones, as if in a slam-poetry contest. Weakening the links between characters, this trick frays their bond with the audience.

Across the Thames at Shakespeare’s Globe, a new “Richard III” has set off another kind of ruckus. Michelle Terry, the theatre’s artistic director, is the titular villain in an almost entirely female cast. She has received abuse for presuming, as a woman, to play a king. But gender is not the main flashpoint.

Rather it is the flouting of a new orthodoxy. This holds that, for reasons of authenticity and justice, disabled parts must be played by disabled actors (and trans parts by trans actors—and so on with other marginalised groups). Richard III is described and typically portrayed as disabled. Thus, the Disabled Artists Alliance protested, “This role belongs to us.”

Like many battles in the culture wars, this is not a skirmish between lefties and reactionaries, but between progressives with diverging tactics. Committed to “anti-literalism” in casting, the Globe is a champion of inclusivity. Recently Francesca Mills, who has a form of dwarfism, was a sensational Duchess of Malfi. Nadia Nadarajah, who is deaf, will soon star in “Antony & Cleopatra”.

If the Globe is the wrong theatre to berate, this is also the wrong show. Largely described in insults, Richard’s physical affliction is sketchy in Shakespeare’s text. Here almost all these references are excised; the focus is on the play’s deep seam of misogyny. An able-bodied Richard glories in forcing the widow of a man he killed to marry him—then murders her. He hates women and, perceptively, they hate him back. The cross-gender casting makes you think anew about the play’s macho violence.

Yet this show, too, has a tragic flaw. It wants you to see the parallels between Richard and bullies today, especially Donald Trump . Unfortunately it whacks you over the head with this analogy like a Plantagenet knight with a mace. It is anyway a flimsy comparison. True, both men are dangerous bosses to serve; both disparage norms and women. But the king is less a demagogue than a machinator. He is funnier than Mr Trump—and has a glimmer of conscience.

Shakespeare, and the stage, belong to everyone. By and large directors should cast whomever they think best for a role. Wanting to make a point or turn a profit is perfectly fine. All the same, these productions fall down for the same reason their critics are mistaken. A casting choice is the beginning, not the end, of telling a story. Making art involves much more than causing a stir. ■

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ChatGPT Is Making Universities Rethink Plagiarism

In late December of his sophomore year, Rutgers University student Kai Cobbs came to a conclusion he never thought possible:  Artificial intelligence might just be dumber than humans. 

After listening to his peers rave about the generative AI tool  ChatGPT , Cobbs decided to toy around with the chatbot while writing an essay on the history of capitalism. Best known for its ability to generate long-form written content in response to user input prompts, Cobbs expected the tool to produce a nuanced and thoughtful response to his specific research directions. Instead, his screen produced a generic, poorly written paper he’d never dare to claim as his own. 

“The quality of writing was appalling. The phrasing was awkward and it lacked complexity,” Cobbs says. “I just logically can’t imagine a student using writing that was generated through ChatGPT for a paper or anything when the content is just plain bad.” 

Not everyone shares Cobbs’ disdain. Ever since OpenAI launched the chatbot in November,  educators have been struggling with how to handle a new wave of student work produced with the help of artificial intelligence. While some public school systems, like New York City’s, have banned the use of ChatGPT on school devices and networks to curb cheating, universities have been reluctant to follow suit. In higher education, the introduction of generative AI has raised thorny questions about the definition of plagiarism and academic integrity on campuses where new digital research tools come into play all the time. 

Make no mistake, the birth of ChatGPT does not mark the emergence of concerns relating to the improper use of the internet in academia. When  Wikipedia launched in 2001 , universities nationwide were  scrambling to decipher their own research philosophies and understandings of honest academic work, expanding policy boundaries to match pace with technological innovation. Now, the stakes are a little more complex, as schools figure out how to treat bot-produced work rather than weird attributional logistics. The world of higher education is playing a familiar game of catch-up, adjusting their rules, expectations, and perceptions as other professions adjust, too. The only difference now is that the internet can think for itself. 

According to ChatGPT, the definition of plagiarism is the act of using someone else’s work or ideas without giving proper credit to the original author. But when the work is generated by some thing rather than some one , this definition is tricky to apply. As Emily Hipchen, a board member of Brown University’s Academic Code Committee, puts it, the use of generative AI by students leads to a critical point of contention. “If [plagiarism] is stealing from a person,” she says, “then I don’t know that we have a person who is being stolen from.”

Hipchen is not alone in her speculation. Alice Dailey, chair of the Academic Integrity Program at Villanova University, is also grappling with the idea of classifying an algorithm as a person, specifically if the algorithm involves text generation.

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Dailey believes that eventually professors and students are going to need to understand that digital tools that generate text, rather than just collect facts, are going to need to fall under the umbrella of things that can be plagiarized from. 

Although Dailey acknowledges that this technological growth incites new concerns in the world of academia, she doesn’t find it to be a realm entirely unexplored. “I think we’ve been in a version of this territory for a while already,” Dailey says. “Students who commit plagiarism often borrow material from a ‘somewhere’—a website, for example, that doesn’t have clear authorial attribution. I suspect the definition of plagiarism will expand to include things that produce.” 

Eventually, Dailey believes, a student who uses text from ChatGPT will be seen as no different than one that copies and pastes chunks of text from Wikipedia without attribution. 

Students’ views on ChatGPT are another issue entirely. There are those, like Cobbs, who can’t imagine putting their name on anything bot-generated, but there are others who see it as just another tool, like spellcheck or even a calculator. For Brown University sophomore Jacob Gelman, ChatGPT exists merely as a convenient research assistant and nothing more.

“Calling the use of ChatGPT to pull reliable sources from the internet ‘cheating’ is absurd. It’s like saying using the internet to conduct research is unethical,” Gelman says. “To me, ChatGPT is the research equivalent of [typing assistant] Grammarly. I use it out of practicality and that’s really all.” Cobbs expressed similar sentiment, comparing the AI bot to “an online encyclopedia.”

But while students like Gelman use the bot to speed up research, others take advantage of the high-capacity prompt input feature to generate completed works for submission. It might seem obvious what qualifies as cheating here, but different schools across the country offer contrasting takes.

According to Carlee Warfield, chair of Bryn Mawr College’s Student Honor Board, the school considers any use of these AI platforms as plagiarism. The tool’s popularization just calls for greater focus in evaluating the intent behind students’ violations. Warfield explains that students who turn in essays entirely produced by AI are categorically different from those who borrow from online tools without knowledge of standard citations. Because the ChatGPT phenomenon is still new, students’ confusion surrounding the ethics is understandable. And it's unclear what policies will remain in place once the dust settles—at any school.

In the midst of fundamental change in both the academic and technological spheres, universities are forced to reconsider their definitions of academic integrity to reasonably reflect the circumstances of society. The only problem is, society shows no stagnance. 

“Villanova’s current academic integrity code will be updated to include language that prohibits the use of these tools to generate text that then students represent as text they generated independently,” Dailey explained. “But I think it’s an evolving thing. And what it can do and what we will then need in order to keep an eye on will also be kind of a moving target.”

In addition to increasingly complex questions about whether ChatGPT is a research tool or a plagiarism engine, there’s also the possibility that it can be  used for learning. In other educational settings, teachers see it as a way to show students the shortcomings of AI. Some instructors are already  modifying how they teach by giving students assignments bots couldn’t complete, like those that require personal details or anecdotes. There’s also the matter of detecting AI use in students’ work, which is a  burgeoning cottage industry all its own. 

Ultimately, Dailey says, schools may need rules that reflect a range of variables.

“My guess is that there will be the development of some broad blanket policies that essentially say, unless you have permission from a professor to use AI tools, using them will be considered a violation of the academic integrity code,” Dailey says. “That then gives faculty broad latitude to use it in their teaching or in their assignments, as long as they are stipulating explicitly that they are allowing it.”

As for ChatGTP, the program agrees. “Advances in fields such as artificial intelligence are expected to drive significant innovation in the coming years,” it says, when asked how schools can combat academic dishonesty. “Schools should constantly review and update their academic honor codes as technology evolves to ensure they are addressing the current ways in which technology is being used in academic settings.”

But, a bot would say that. 

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As the play begins, the lights turn off and the music grows louder and more frantic than ever, causing some to jump in their seats as if watching a horror movie.

Holland’s Romeo is introduced to the crowd first via screen; like in Lloyd’s Olivier-winning “Sunset Boulevard,” cameramen flank the actors at certain points throughout the show, broadcasting the video live. Like a boxer entering the ring, he steps on stage — and then starts weeping. It’s a shocking show of emotion from Holland, who viewers are far more used to seeing kick ass in the Marvel Cinematic Universe than shed tears on stage.

As it turns out, Holland’s extreme interpretation of Romeo’s lust for Rosaline is only a marker for things to come: between Romeo, Juliet (Francesca Amewudah-Rivers), the Nurse (Freema Agyeman) and the Friar (Michael Balogun), there is barely a dry eye on the stage for the play’s two and a half hour duration. Yet despite “Romeo & Juliet’s” vast emotions, Lloyd’s subversive staging — in which lines are delivered to the audience instead of to each other, props are basically eliminated and the use of video design becomes dizzying — gives those emotions nowhere to go. I suspect it’s this that has led to a majority of mixed reviews for Holland’s performance. Why have a big-name actor perform in such an intimate setting just to put him on a screen?

This isn’t Holland’s first time on stage — the 28-year-old got his start there, landing his first-ever professional role in Stephen Daldry’s “Billy Elliot the Musical” in 2008 — but it is his first time back in a decade away, during which he became a bona fide Hollywood star. Despite his roots, there is still a prevailing belief in some industry circles that starry actors turn to theater when they want a “rest” from film and TV. And though Holland did say in June 2023 that he planned to “take a year off” from acting due to the mental impact filming of the Apple TV+ series “The Crowded Room,” “Romeo & Juliet” clearly isn’t a break — he spends most of the show portraying a suicidal emotional wreck, a task which is not exactly easy.

To me, Holland’s Romeo is boyish in a way that’s reminiscent of Leonardo DiCaprio’s modern-day take, but with an extra dose of grit and instability that leads him down an even darker path. Dressed simply in a black sweatshirt and jeans — the rest of the cast also wears all black — and sporting a blunt haircut, Holland transforms from the nerdy-yet-charming facade of Peter Parker to one of pure, glassy-eyed desperation. The world of Lloyd’s “Romeo & Juliet” is dark and bleak, and Holland adapts to it surprisingly naturally, smoking cigarettes and covering himself in blood like he’s in some dystopian episode of “Skins.” At one point, blood drips down Holland’s face as if he wore the sticky substance as eyeliner, then it dries and cakes there, remaining for the rest of the play.

And, though it is admirable in its ambition, one of the play’s pivotal scenes — when Romeo finds out Juliet has apparently died — takes place on the roof of the theater, transmitted via video stream. Even when Holland does make it back down to the stage, the subtlety of the two lovers’ deaths, signified by them taking off the mics taped to their cheeks, ends the play with a whimper that opposes the bang that started it.

Outside after the performance, I’m once again reminded of a club as the street turns into a mosh pit, with throngs of fans taking their places at the stage door — behind metal barriers, of course — to anticipate Holland’s exit. It’s understood that he will not be taking pictures or signing autographs after his shows (how Hollywood!), but devotees still eagerly wait to catch just a glimpse of him, or better yet, a zoomed-in video on their phone. Indeed, Holland’s movie-star quality is on full display as he walks out, coffee mug in hand, waving to fans and mouthing “thank you” — he may have full-on said it, but the screams are too deafening to know for sure — before escaping in a luxury vehicle.

After Holland is gone, I stick around and chat to a few fans to get their take. As if unsure what to make of what they just experienced, and perhaps out of politeness, “interesting” and “different” emerge as key descriptors. Major, a 21-year-old English student who is studying abroad, says Holland did “a really good job interpreting” the role of Romeo “differently.”

Gabby, a 19-year-old on a trip for a college Shakespeare class, echoes that the play was “definitely very interesting” and “different than anything I’ve ever seen.”

Ruminating on the play’s unconventional staging, she adds: “We have all kinds of bawdy, crazy [versions of ‘Romeo & Juliet’], you know, the Baz Luhrmann movie. If you want spectacle, you watch that.”

Yes, this “Romeo & Juliet” may be stripped-back in nature, but with Holland at the center, it’s a spectacle all the same.

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