Romeo and Juliet

Overview

About two hundred and eighty pages, Shakespeare’s tragedy, written around 1595. In Verona, where the Montague and Capulet families feud in the streets, Romeo Montague crashes a Capulet feast and falls in love with Juliet Capulet. They are married in secret by Friar Laurence the next day. Hours later Romeo kills Juliet’s cousin Tybalt to avenge his friend Mercutio and is banished.

To escape a forced marriage Juliet takes a potion that feigns death; the letter explaining the plan never reaches Romeo, who kills himself at her tomb, and she wakes to stab herself.

What happens

Romeo crashes the feast. Romeo Montague crashes a Capulet feast, uninvited among the family his own family feuds with, and there first sees and falls in love with Juliet Capulet.

The secret marriage. Romeo and Juliet are married in secret by Friar Laurence the very next day, their love developing with a speed that will prove both the relationship’s genuine intensity and its considerable danger.

Tybalt’s death and Romeo’s banishment. Hours after the marriage, Romeo kills Juliet’s cousin Tybalt to avenge his friend Mercutio, an act of inherited feud violence that gets him immediately banished from Verona.

The forced marriage threat. Juliet’s family, unaware of her secret marriage to Romeo, arranges a forced marriage to another suitor, creating the crisis that will drive her toward increasingly desperate measures.

The feigned death potion. Juliet takes a potion from Friar Laurence that feigns death, a plan intended to let her escape the forced marriage and eventually reunite with the banished Romeo.

The failed letter and the deaths. The letter explaining the feigned death plan never reaches Romeo, who believes Juliet truly dead and kills himself at her tomb; she wakes to find him dead and stabs herself.

How to read it

Read the compressed timeframe, Romeo and Juliet meeting, marrying and dying within days rather than years, as giving their love genuinely dangerous intensity, passion so concentrated it cannot survive contact with the slower world surrounding it.

Pay close attention to how Romeo’s killing of Tybalt to avenge Mercutio demonstrates how thoroughly the older generation’s feud reasserts itself even within the younger generation’s attempted escape from it, violence intruding through inherited obligation.

Notice how the letter explaining Juliet’s feigned death failing to reach Romeo stages tragic catastrophe as genuinely contingent rather than inevitable, a specific correctable accident complicating the play’s own repeated invocations of star-crossed destiny.

Consider how the lovers’ deaths finally reconciling the feuding families demonstrates tragedy’s genuine capacity for social consequence beyond individual loss, private catastrophe accomplishing the public reconciliation years of prior civic effort had proven unable to achieve.

Read this tragedy alongside Shakespeare’s own Othello to compare two studies of love destroyed by external circumstance, one by accident and inherited feud, the other by deliberately manufactured jealousy and manipulation.

Questions it raises

• Does the play’s repeated invocation of star-crossed fate adequately account for the lovers’ deaths, or does the specific, correctable accident of the failed letter suggest their tragedy resulted from contingent misfortune rather than genuinely predetermined destiny?
• How does Romeo’s killing of Tybalt complicate any simple reading of the play as pure romantic tragedy? Does this act of inherited feud violence implicate Romeo himself in perpetuating the very conflict his love with Juliet seemed to transcend?
• What does the speed of Romeo and Juliet’s romance, meeting and marrying within a single day, suggest about the play’s understanding of genuine love versus infatuation? Does this compressed timeframe strengthen or undermine the relationship’s claimed depth?
• How should a reader weigh the families’ eventual reconciliation against the devastating cost required to achieve it? Does this outcome suggest the lovers’ deaths served some redemptive social purpose, or does it simply compound the tragedy’s senseless waste?
• Given that Friar Laurence’s plan depends on a letter that fails to arrive, what does this reliance on fragile communication suggest about the play’s broader treatment of human plans against circumstance and chance beyond any character’s actual control?
• What does this play’s status as one of literature’s most famous love stories suggest about audiences’ continued fascination with young, doomed romantic passion? Does the tragedy’s enduring popularity reveal something about how societies romanticize love found and lost quickly?