Prologue — the Chorus speaks a sonnet

A single voice walks onto the stage before the play, technically, has begun. The Chorus speaks fourteen lines — a sonnet, perfectly rhymed — and tells the audience exactly what is about to happen. Two households of equal dignity in fair Verona. An ancient grudge that has lately broken into new violence, civil blood on civil hands. From the "fatal loins of these two foes," a pair of "star-cross'd lovers" who will take their lives. The "fearful passage of their death-mark'd love" and the "continuance of their parents' rage" are what the next two hours will show.

What only the lovers' deaths can resolve, the Chorus says, is what these two families have been refusing to resolve for generations. The promise is not subtle. The play will end with both lovers dead and the feud, finally, ended. The Chorus asks for the audience's patience — "the two hours' traffic of our stage" — and promises that whatever the play leaves out, the players will work to make up for in performance. Then the Chorus exits. The next thing the audience will see is two Capulet servants in the street picking a fight.

The choice to begin this way is itself an argument. A revenge tragedy or a romance would normally hold the ending back; Shakespeare gives it away in the first thirty seconds. What this does is shift the audience's attention from outcome to mechanism. We are not watching to find out whether they die — we know they die — but to see exactly how five days, four chance encounters, one undelivered letter, and a household feud no one alive can remember the cause of conspire to make their deaths inevitable. The sonnet's compression — fourteen lines for the whole play — is the play's first signal that speed itself will be the subject.