Romeo and Juliet — Commentary

In brief

Two great families of Verona are at war. Romeo, a Montague, sick with love for a woman called Rosaline who never appears, goes masked to a Capulet feast and falls in love with Juliet, the daughter of the house, who is not yet fourteen. They marry the next afternoon in secret, with the help of Friar Lawrence and Juliet’s Nurse. Within the hour Romeo’s friend Mercutio has been killed, Romeo has killed Juliet’s cousin Tybalt, and the Prince has banished him. Juliet’s father orders her to marry Count Paris. The Friar gives her a drug that imitates death and sends a letter to Romeo in Mantua explaining the trick. The letter does not arrive. Romeo hears only that she is dead, buys poison, kills Paris at the tomb and dies beside her. She wakes, finds him and stabs herself. The families are reconciled over the bodies.

The argument

The Prologue announces “A pair of star-cross’d lovers” (Prologue) and the ending in advance, so the question the play hands its audience is why it happens. Scholars remain divided between fate and bad luck. My view is that fate is what the characters call it and haste is what we watch. The stars get the good lines. Romeo fears “Some consequence yet hanging in the stars” (1.4), cries “O, I am fortune’s fool!” (3.1), and on hearing of Juliet’s death answers “Then I defy you, stars!” (5.1). But every decisive act is a human hurry, and the play keeps saying so. Juliet herself calls the betrothal “too rash, too unadvis’d, too sudden” (2.2). The Friar warns “Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast” (2.3) and marries them within hours. Capulet asks Paris “Do you like this haste?” (3.4), and Juliet answers “I wonder at this haste” (3.5).

The clearest case is Capulet’s. The wedding is fixed for Thursday, and the Friar’s plan is built on that date: “Wednesday is tomorrow” (4.1). When Juliet pretends to submit, her delighted father brings it forward a day, “We’ll to church tomorrow” (4.2), over his wife’s protest. So she takes the drug a night early and is carried to the vault a day early, and Balthasar sees it and rides to Mantua. Romeo, told to have patience, buys poison the same day. Nobody in that chain is compelled by anything but feeling. The accident of the letter is real, but it only matters because no one in Verona can wait.

What the stars add is meaning, and the characters reach for them when it suits. Fleeing the tomb, the Friar tells Juliet that “A greater power than we can contradict” (5.3) has done this. A few minutes later the Prince gives a different account: “See what a scourge is laid upon your hate”. The play lets both stand, which is why the ending feels like a verdict and an accident at once.

The shape of the play

Romeo and Juliet runs as a comedy until the middle of the third act. It has bawdy servants, a young man in love with love, a crusty father, a garrulous Nurse, and a clever girl outwitting her family, and critics have long noted that up to 3.1 nothing in it requires anyone to die. Mercutio’s dying joke marks the turn: “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man”. After it, the comic machinery runs on in the wrong key. Capulet’s bustle over the wedding feast in 4.4 leads straight to the Nurse’s discovery, and the musicians hired for a wedding stay on bandying jokes in 4.5 with an apparent corpse upstairs.

The speed is Shakespeare’s invention. In Arthur Brooke’s poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), his main source, the story takes about nine months. Shakespeare cuts it to under a week, in the mid-July heat that Benvolio remarks on: “now these hot days, is the mad blood stirring” (3.1). The lovers meet at night and marry next afternoon. On the night of Tybalt’s death Paris tells Capulet that it is “Monday, my lord” (3.4).

Juliet’s age goes the same way. Brooke makes her nearly sixteen and Bandello’s Italian novella nearly eighteen. Shakespeare insists on it: “She hath not seen the change of fourteen years” (1.2), and in the next scene “She’s not fourteen” and her birthday is “A fortnight and odd days” off (1.3). English brides of that age were rare. Capulet himself first asks for “two more summers”, and warns against girls “so early made” (1.2), before abandoning all of it in the shock of Tybalt’s death. The lowered age makes her the more startling mind, since the most clear-sighted person in the play is a child, and it makes what the adults do to her worse.

Sonnets inside the play

Shakespeare wrote this play in the decade of the English sonnet craze, and he builds the form into its structure. The Prologue is a sonnet, and so is the Chorus to the second act (Chorus). Romeo first talks like a bad sonneteer, in stacks of paradox: “Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!” (1.1). The Friar’s verdict on that love is exact: “Thy love did read by rote, that could not spell” (2.3).

Then at the feast the form turns into a conversation (1.5). Romeo speaks a quatrain beginning “If I profane with my unworthiest hand”. Juliet answers with a quatrain rhyming on his, “Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much”. They split the last six lines between them and the rhymes tie them together, ending on “Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake” and “Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take”. It is a perfect Shakespearean sonnet, and it ends in a kiss. What matters is who has the wit. He brings the conceit of pilgrim and shrine, and she takes it over, conceding nothing until she chooses. They at once begin another, “Thus from my lips, by thine my sin is purg’d”, and get four lines in, to “You kiss by the book”, before the Nurse breaks in. The word can be taken two ways: skilfully, or by rote. Juliet is the one who then abandons the book. On the balcony she refuses the set vow, “Do not swear at all” (2.2), and asks directly “Dost thou love me?”

Mercutio and Queen Mab

Mercutio barely exists in the sources. In da Porto he is a youth with cold hands at the dance, and Brooke’s version of the fight is Romeo against Tybalt alone. Shakespeare makes him the most brilliant talker in the play and puts him at the centre of the catastrophe. Dryden wrote in 1672 that Shakespeare said he had to kill Mercutio in the third act or be killed by him.

The Queen Mab speech (1.4) begins as a jeweller’s fantasy, with the fairy no bigger than “an agate-stone” and a chariot that is “an empty hazelnut”. It passes through lovers, courtiers, lawyers and a parson, and then it darkens. A soldier dreams “of cutting foreign throats”, and “This is the hag” takes over from the fairy. Romeo has to stop him: “Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace, / Thou talk’st of nothing”. Something in Mercutio is out of control, and his answer that dreams are “the children of an idle brain” is a reply to the whole language of love and stars around him. He believes in neither, and he dies for neither. He fights because Romeo’s peaceable answer to Tybalt disgusts him: “O calm, dishonourable, vile submission!” (3.1). He dies because Romeo, trying to stop the fight, steps between: “I was hurt under your arm”.

The Friar and the plague letter

Friar Lawrence is the play’s planner, and he has a reason for his folly: he marries them “To turn your households’ rancour to pure love” (2.3). That is policy using two children, and it works, at their cost. He preaches moderation, “These violent delights have violent ends” (2.6), then hands a girl a vial and a plan with no second messenger, and leaves her alone in the tomb when he hears a noise: “I dare no longer stay” (5.3). He confesses fully, offers his life, and hears the Prince answer “We still have known thee for a holy man”. Brooke sent the Friar to a hermitage and hanged the apothecary. Shakespeare’s last word on punishment is a shrug: “Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished”.

The scene that undoes everything takes under fifty lines (5.2). Friar John went to find a fellow friar who was “visiting the sick”, and “the searchers of the town”, suspecting a house “Where the infectious pestilence did reign”, “Seal’d up the doors”. So the letter never left. No Elizabethan audience needed this explained, since London shut up infected houses in just this way. It is a piece of bad luck from everyday life, and it also answers something. Mercutio’s curse, “A plague o’ both your houses”, is spoken three times in 3.1, and two acts later a plague and a shut house kill the heirs of both. In the first printed text the curse is “A poxe of your houses”, so the echo exists only in the later one.

The people

Juliet

Juliet has the best verse and the fastest mind. Her reasoning on names, “What’s in a name?” (2.2), is the play’s real philosophy, and it fails, since the feud does not care. Before drinking she thinks through every risk, including that the drug may be poison and that she may “wake before the time” (4.3), and drinks anyway.

Romeo

Romeo is less clever and changes more. He begins in borrowed phrases, and in 3.1 he tries a real peace, telling Tybalt “Villain am I none”. Then Mercutio’s death makes him call it weakness, “Thy beauty hath made me effeminate”, and he kills. His last speech (5.3) is his finest.

The Nurse

The Nurse’s speech in 1.3 gives Juliet a whole childhood: a dead daughter, Susan, who “Were of an age” with her, and an earthquake “now eleven years” past. Then, when it counts, she advises marrying Paris, and Juliet’s “Ancient damnation!” (3.5) ends the friendship in two words. From then on Juliet is alone.

Capulet

Capulet is genial at the feast, where he curbs Tybalt (1.5), and terrifying in 3.5: “Hang thee young baggage, disobedient wretch!” The same fatherly energy drives both.

The bad quarto and the good one

The play was probably written about 1595. Scholars place it between 1591 and 1595, by its style and on the doubtful evidence of the Nurse’s earthquake, and the catalogue’s 1597 is the date it first reached print. That was the first quarto, printed by John Danter as “An excellent conceited Tragedie”. The second quarto of 1599 advertised itself as “Newly corrected, augmented, and amended” and runs about 800 lines longer. Modern texts rest on Q2, thought to come from Shakespeare’s own draft.

A. W. Pollard’s school of bibliography named Q1 a “bad quarto”, and T. J. B. Spencer called it “a detestable text”, probably rebuilt from memory by actors. That account is now disputed, and others see an abridgement for performance. Q1’s Prologue has twelve lines and so is not a sonnet, it has no second Chorus, and its Queen Mab is verse where Q2 prints the speech as prose. But it gives us things Q2 lacks, including stage directions that seem to come from performance: “Enter Iuliet somewhat fast, and embraceth Romeo”, and, in the mourning scene, “All at once cry out and wring their hands”.

It also supplies the most famous line in the play. Q2 reads “By any other word would smell as sweete”, and Q1 reads “By any other name would smell as sweet”. The modern text prefers the bad quarto. Q2 has its own marks of the theatre: in the musicians’ scene the entry for Peter reads “Enter Will Kemp”, naming the clown of Shakespeare’s company. The Folio of 1623 follows a later quarto and drops the Prologue altogether.

Afterlives

Samuel Pepys saw it in 1662 and called it the worst play he had ever heard. Thomas Otway’s Caius Marius (1679) moved it to Rome and made a change that lasted nearly two centuries: the girl wakes before the man dies. David Garrick’s Drury Lane version of 1748 developed this into an added tomb scene in which Juliet wakes after Romeo has taken the poison and they have a final exchange in new dialogue, and his text removed Rosaline, whose existence seemed to make Romeo fickle. It ran for nearly a century, until Charlotte Cushman went back to Shakespeare’s text in 1845, at the Haymarket in London. Luhrmann’s film, keeping Shakespeare’s dialogue, still has Juliet wake just as Romeo drinks.

The music is its own history: Berlioz (1839), Gounod’s opera (1867) and Tchaikovsky’s overture (1869). Prokofiev’s ballet was composed in 1935 with a happy ending that Soviet officials found controversial, premiered at Brno on 30 December 1938, and reached the Kirov in revised form in 1940. West Side Story (1957), by Bernstein, Sondheim, Laurents and Robbins, moved the feud to New York gangs and was filmed in 1961 and 2021. On screen, George Cukor’s film of 1936 cast leads with a combined age over 75, and Franco Zeffirelli’s of 1968 cast teenagers, with Olivia Hussey fifteen. Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) sets the original words among rival business empires in Verona Beach, and delivers the Friar’s letter by a courier firm called “Post Haste”, which is the best joke anyone has made about the plot.

How to read it

Keep a calendar. Mark each day named from 3.4 onward and watch Capulet’s change of date in 4.2 take hold.
Read 1.5 aloud with someone. The shared sonnet only shows itself when two voices pass the rhymes across.
Get an edition with notes. Jill Levenson’s Oxford edition (2000) and Brian Gibbons’s Arden (1980) are standard. The Folger text is free online, and Q1 and Q2 can be read side by side at the Internet Shakespeare Editions.

Arthur Brooke, The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562). The long moralising poem Shakespeare turned into this, and the best way to see what he added.
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (about 1595). The play closest in style, where Pyramus and Thisbe die the same death as a farce.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book IV. Pyramus and Thisbe, the old pattern: forbidding parents, a wall and a mistaken death.
William Shakespeare, Sonnets (1609). The form the lovers play with, used in earnest.