Romeo and Juliet

By William Shakespeare

Summary

Romeo and Juliet is a story about two teenagers who fall in love but are forbidden to see each other by their parents. They meet one night at a party (Romeo is actually there to check out another girl, Rosaline) and quickly fall in love. Unfortunately, Juliet’s parents already have a husband picked out for her. So, the two decide to get married and enlist the help of Juliet’s nurse to act as a messenger between the two and Friar Laurence who agrees to marry them. However, plans go awry after Romeo is banished from Verona and doesn’t get filled in on the plans that Juliet has for them to live happily ever after…

Setting

The story is set in the late 1500’s mostly in the town of Verona, Italy. However, there are a few acts set in Mantua, Italy a smaller town just a few miles away.

Timeline

Sunday – Act One

Monday – Act Two

Tuesday – Act Three

Wednesday – Act Four

Thursday – Act Five

The Feud

Romeo’s family, the Montagues, have a long standing feud with Juliet’s family, the Capulets. While the audience never learns about the source of the ancient quarrel, we do learn that it has recently grown stronger.

Comedy and Tragedy

Elements of a tragedy

•Must have a tragic hero/heroine

•Ends in the death of many of the main

characters

Romeo and Juliet begins as a comedy but ends as a tragedy

Elements of a comedy

The shift from comedy to tragedy is what sets Romeo and Juliet apart from the rest of Shakespeare’s plays

•A struggle of young lovers to

overcome difficulty that is often presented

by elders

•Separation and unification

•Heightened tensions, often within a family

Themes

Love

•The power of love

•Love as a cause for violence

Fate

•The inevitability of fate

Hate

•Hate as a forced emotion

Writing Style

Much of Romeo and Juliet is written as a sonnet, a poem of 14 lines written and rhymed in iambic pentamenter. Each sonnet ends with a couplet.

A couplet is two consecutive lines that rhyme.

Iambic pentamenter refers to the rhyme scheme of a sonnet:

A – B – A – B – C – D – C – D – E – F – E – F – G - G

Plagiarism!?

Shakespeare did not invent the story of Romeo and Juliet. A poet named Arthur Brooks wrote the story of Romeus and Juliet as a long poem that was itself not original, but rather an adaptation of adaptations that stretched across nearly a hundred years and two languages. Many of the details of Shakespeare’s plot are taken directly from Brooks’ poem, including the meeting of Romeo and Juliet at the ball, their secret marriage, Romeo’s fight with Tybalt, the sleeping potion, and the timing of their suicides.

Interesting…

“Star-crossed lovers” refers to two people who are in love but have conflicting astrological signs. In Shakespeare’s times, people believed the course of their lives was determined by the exact second they were born.

The Italian city of Verona, where Romeo and Juliet lived, receives about 1,000 letters addressed to Juliet every Valentine's Day.

Verona Today

Today, Verona has an incredible amount of graffiti, which is legal, provided that you are writing about your love for someone.