Romeo and Juliet — themes & analysis

Romeo and Juliet meet at the Capulet ball and within fourteen lines have spoken a perfect Shakespearean sonnet between them, finishing each other's quatrains as if they had been writing it together for years. He calls her hand a holy shrine; she answers in the same metaphor. The sonnet ends; he kisses her. Then he kisses her again. They have not yet exchanged names. When they do — moments later, from the Nurse — both are stricken: she is a Capulet, he is a Montague. "My only love sprung from my only hate."

Shakespeare did not invent the love story. He had Arthur Brooke's narrative poem in hand, and behind it Italian sources stretching back through Bandello to Masuccio Salernitano. What he wrote was the version that defined the form. Almost every story Western culture now tells about young love that overrides everything — family, sense, time, the future — is downstream of this play. The pattern of stranger-eyes-meet-across-room, of love declared in metaphor before names are exchanged, of the world insisting it is impossible while the lovers insist it is the only thing that is real, comes from here.

The speed is the argument. An hour earlier, Romeo had been sighing over a woman named Rosaline who never appears on stage. The instant he sees Juliet he forgets Rosaline entirely. Friar Laurence, in Scene 9, mocks him for it: "Young men's love then lies / not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes." The play seems to agree, and then it doesn't. What looked like Romeo's adolescent fickleness becomes, by the end of the same week, the thing he dies for. Shakespeare refuses to settle whether love that arrives that fast is real or hallucinatory. He writes both readings into the same play.

What the speed accomplishes formally is that it gives the play no time to be talked out of itself. Slower love stories admit doubt — lovers wonder, families negotiate, friends advise. This one does not. Each scene closes a door, and by the time anyone could plausibly say "wait" — the friar tries, twice — the marriage is already done, the cousin is already dead, the banishment is already issued, the potion is already drunk. The play's tragedy is not that the lovers were wrong about each other. It is that nothing in the world they were born into would let them be right slowly.

Where to follow it: Scene 6 (the meeting), Scene 8 (the balcony), Scene 12 (the marriage), Scene 17 (the parting at dawn).

The play opens with two Capulet servants, Sampson and Gregory, picking a fight in the street. They have no quarrel of their own; they have learned that this is what their lives are for. A Montague servant arrives. Sampson bites his thumb. Swords come out. Tybalt arrives and refuses to put his away. The Prince arrives and orders the next outbreak punished by death. The whole machinery of the feud is on stage in twenty minutes — and not one of the men holding a sword can name the original injury.

Shakespeare is deliberate about this. The prologue calls the quarrel an "ancient grudge"; the play never describes its cause; no character cites a specific wrong. The young men of both houses inherit the quarrel ready-made and bleed for it. Mercutio, who is technically of neither house — he is kinsman to the Prince — dies for an argument he was not part of. Tybalt dies an hour after Romeo's secret marriage to his cousin. Both lovers die paying for an argument they did not start and do not believe in.

What the feud is, the play insists, is structural rather than personal. The argument is gone but the violence isn't. Sampson and Gregory are not angry; they are bored, and the feud gives them a script. Capulet, in Scene 6, tries briefly to act on what is left of his good sense — he stops Tybalt from attacking Romeo at the ball, recognizing the prince of the Montagues as "a virtuous and well-governed youth" — and is overruled, two scenes later, by his own honor when his nephew is killed.

The play's argument is that the people too young to have agreed to the feud are the ones who pay for it. Romeo is sixteen or so, Juliet is thirteen. Tybalt, Mercutio, and Paris are not much older. By the final scene the dead include all four of them and Lady Montague (off-stage, of grief), and Capulet and Montague are forced into a public reconciliation over their children's bodies. Modern readers carrying inherited political enmities recognize the pattern immediately. The play does not celebrate the reconciliation; it grieves the price.

Where to follow it: Scene 2 (the brawl), Scene 6 (Tybalt at the ball), Scene 13 (Mercutio and Tybalt die), Scene 25 (the houses reconciled).

Five young people are dead by Friday morning: Mercutio first, then Tybalt the same hour, then Paris in the tomb, then Romeo, then Juliet. None of them is older than their early twenties. The play is not, primarily, a love story; it is a play about what happens to teenagers in a world that has not removed their access to swords. The verse is lyrical because the lovers are lyrical. The deaths are abrupt because adolescence does not negotiate.

Mercutio's death is the pivot. Tybalt has come into the public square to challenge Romeo to a duel; Romeo, secretly married to Tybalt's cousin an hour ago, refuses. Mercutio cannot bear the refusal — to him it looks like cowardice — and draws his own sword. Tybalt thrusts at him under Romeo's arm as Romeo tries to break the fight up. The wound is bigger than Mercutio first admits. "A scratch, a scratch — marry, 'tis enough." Then: "a plague o' both your houses." After his death the comedy of the play stops entirely. Romeo, broken with grief, kills Tybalt within the next ten lines.

What is on stage in Scene 13 is not melodrama. It is the speed at which adolescent feeling, given weapons, becomes irreversible. Romeo had a choice — refuse Mercutio's funeral, ride to Mantua, write to Juliet, wait. Instead he kills Tybalt before he has finished thinking the sentence "I should not kill Tybalt." Friar Laurence's later line — "these violent delights have violent ends" — is delivered before the killing, in Scene 12, and is the play's most direct warning to its protagonists. It is also ignored.

Juliet's violence is quieter and is turned inward. She faces the Friar's potion knowing it might kill her ("what if it be a poison...?") and drinks it anyway. She faces the dagger in the tomb, finds it on Romeo's body, and uses it on herself in three lines. Paris, the suitor she did not want, dies trying to stop Romeo at the door of the vault. The play is not squeamish about any of this. What it is, instead, is unillusioned: it shows what young people do, given the means, when the world's adults have failed them.

Where to follow it: Scene 13 (Mercutio and Tybalt die), Scene 15 (Romeo offers his own knife), Scene 20 (Juliet drinks the potion), Scene 25 (Paris, Romeo, and Juliet).

Friar Laurence is the play's most sympathetic adult. He collects herbs at dawn. He reads moral lessons in their properties. He marries the lovers in secret hoping the union will reconcile their houses. He counsels Romeo when Romeo wants to die in his cell after the banishment. He devises the sleeping-potion plan that is supposed to save Juliet from the Paris marriage. He sends a letter explaining everything to Romeo in Mantua. By the play's end, every plan he has made has made things worse.

The marriage in Scene 12 is the first error. He performs it knowing the lovers met yesterday afternoon, knowing he has not consulted either family, knowing it solves nothing politically until the families are told. He performs it anyway, on the calculation that the secret will somehow force a reconciliation later. Within twenty-four hours, the secret has produced two corpses (Mercutio, Tybalt), Romeo's banishment, and Juliet's father's rage at her refusal to marry Paris.

The potion in Scene 18 is the second error. Faced with Juliet's threat of suicide and her father's wedding deadline, the Friar improvises. She will drink a vial that will produce the appearance of death for forty-two hours. She will be buried in the family tomb. He will write to Romeo in Mantua explaining the plan. Romeo will return on the night of the burial, find her waking, and carry her away to Mantua. It is a plan that requires every link in the chain to hold.

The letter is the third error. He sends it by another friar, Friar John, who is quarantined en route by a plague scare and never reaches Mantua. Romeo hears of Juliet's death from his servant Balthasar instead. By the time Friar Laurence understands what has happened, he is running toward the tomb with a crowbar, alone, hours too late. He arrives in time to find Romeo dead, panics when he hears the watch coming, and abandons Juliet there to wake and die. The play is unsparing about him: not because he is wicked, but because well-meaning adult improvisation was not equal to the situation his secret marriage created.

Where to follow it: Scene 9 (the Friar agrees to marry them), Scene 12 (the wedding), Scene 18 (the potion plan), Scene 24 (the letter undelivered), Scene 25 (the Friar at the tomb).

The prologue settles one question and opens another. It tells the audience the lovers are "star-cross'd" — that the stars themselves have aligned against them — and that they will die. The form of the prologue, a Shakespearean sonnet, is itself an argument that everything is already determined: the rhyme scheme is closed before the play begins. The play is then a working-out of how the inevitability happens. By the end, it will not be clear how much of it was inevitable.

The play keeps both readings live. Romeo, in Scene 5, has a premonition before the Capulet ball — "some consequence yet hanging in the stars / shall bitterly begin his fearful date / with this night's revels." After he kills Tybalt, he cries "I am fortune's fool." From Mantua, when Balthasar tells him Juliet is dead, he answers — in five words that have been quoted for four hundred years — "Then I defy you, stars." Each is a moment when a character names fate as the agent and accepts it.

But the play is also full of choices. Romeo chooses to crash the Capulet party. He chooses to climb the wall into the orchard. He chooses to ride at night to the apothecary. Juliet chooses to drink the potion. The Friar chooses to send the letter by Friar John rather than ride himself. Tybalt chooses to come back into the square after Mercutio's death. Capulet chooses to move the wedding to Wednesday instead of Thursday — a single shifted day that makes the Friar's timing collapse. None of these is forced.

Shakespeare refuses to resolve the question. He gives the audience both arguments, in fully articulated form, and trusts them to feel the friction. The play is a tragedy of fortune in the sense that the characters keep saying it is. It is a tragedy of bad choices in the sense that the audience watches every one of them being made. It is a tragedy of the feud in the sense that none of the choices would have been forced without it. The most honest reading is that all three are true at once and none of them is sufficient on its own — which is also, for what it's worth, what most actual tragedies feel like in the lives of the people inside them.

Where to follow it: Scene 1 (the Chorus, "star-cross'd"), Scene 5 (Romeo's premonition), Scene 13 ("I am fortune's fool"), Scene 23 ("Then I defy you, stars").