Romeo and Juliet Summary: Plot, Characters and Themes in Shakespeare's Verona Tragedy
What it is about
The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is a play by William Shakespeare, first published in a quarto version in 1597 and believed to have been written between 1591 and 1595. It is set in Verona, Italy, and follows the romance between two young people whose families are sworn enemies. The Montagues and the Capulets have been feuding so long that even their servants brawl in the street. The play opens with one of those brawls, broken up by Prince Escalus, who declares that any further breach of the peace will be punished by death.
Against that backdrop, Count Paris asks Capulet for permission to marry his daughter Juliet. Capulet asks him to wait two years and invites him to a ball. Elsewhere, Romeo, son of Montague, is sunk in lovesickness over a girl named Rosaline. His cousin Benvolio and his friend Mercutio persuade him to crash the Capulet ball, where he hopes to see Rosaline. He meets Juliet instead, and the two fall in love on sight.
What follows is a sequence of secret decisions made at speed. A clandestine wedding, a duel, a banishment, a forced betrothal and a desperate plan involving a sleeping potion. The whole story runs on a few days. Shakespeare based the plot on an Italian tale by Matteo Bandello, which Arthur Brooke turned into English verse as The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet in 1562 and William Painter retold in prose in Palace of Pleasure in 1567. Shakespeare borrowed heavily from both, but he expanded the story by developing the supporting characters, particularly Mercutio and Paris.
The main characters
Romeo is a Montague, young and prone to extremes of feeling. His verse grows more skilled across the play, and he becomes more adept at the sonnet as he develops. Juliet is a Capulet, pressed by her mother and her nurse to accept Paris's courtship, and much sharper and more decisive than her age suggests. The pair are regarded as archetypal young lovers.
Mercutio is Romeo's friend, quick-tongued and easily provoked, and one of Shakespeare's additions to the inherited story. Tybalt is Juliet's cousin, furious that Romeo gatecrashed the ball and looking for a fight. Benvolio is Romeo's cousin and the voice trying to calm things down. Friar Laurence marries the couple in secret, hoping the union will reconcile the two households. The Nurse is Juliet's confidante. Count Paris is the respectable suitor Juliet does not want. Prince Escalus holds the only authority in Verona that either family will heed, and he loses a kinsman to the feud himself.
The themes
Love and death are bound together from the start. The lovers are called "star-cross'd", and the play repeatedly places desire next to the grave. Family is the engine of the tragedy. The feud is inherited rather than chosen, and neither Romeo nor Juliet can explain why it exists, only that it governs what they are allowed to want. Capulet's shift from indulgent father to a man who threatens to disown his daughter shows how quickly family love turns to coercion.
Revenge drives the middle of the play. Tybalt's grievance, Mercutio's pride and Romeo's guilt chain together into killings that nobody set out to commit. Mercutio's dying curse, "A plague on both your houses!", hangs over everything that follows. There is also the theme of haste. Messages go astray, timings slip, and the plan that was meant to save the lovers depends on a letter that never arrives.
Shakespeare's technique has been praised as an early sign of his dramatic skill. He switches between comedy and tragedy to heighten tension, expands minor characters and threads in sub-plots. He also gives different poetic forms to different characters, and sometimes changes a character's form as they develop.
How it ends (spoilers)
After Romeo kills Tybalt and is exiled, Juliet is ordered to marry Paris. Friar Laurence gives her a potion that will leave her in a deathlike coma for "two and forty hours", and promises to send Friar John to Romeo with the plan. Plague stops Friar John from travelling. Romeo hears from his servant Balthasar only that Juliet is dead. He buys poison, goes to the Capulet crypt, kills Paris in a fight at the door and drinks the poison beside her. Juliet wakes, finds him dead and stabs herself with his dagger. The families and the Prince arrive to find three bodies. Friar Laurence explains everything, the feud ends, and the Prince closes the play with an elegy for the lovers.
Why it still matters
It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays in his own lifetime and, with Hamlet, remains one of his most frequently performed. Its stage history is also a history of how each era edits its classics. William Davenant heavily revised it during the Restoration. David Garrick's eighteenth-century version cut material then thought indecent. Georg Benda's opera Romeo und Julie trimmed much of the action and gave it a happy ending. Nineteenth-century performances, including Charlotte Cushman's, restored the original text and pushed towards realism, and John Gielgud's 1935 production stayed very close to Shakespeare's text with Elizabethan costume and staging.
On screen it has been remade for every generation, from George Cukor in 1936 to Franco Zeffirelli in 1968, Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet in 1996 and Carlo Carlei in 2013. It suits readers coming to Shakespeare for the first time, anyone who likes a tightly plotted tragedy, and anyone interested in how a borrowed Italian tale became the standard story of young love in the English language.
