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A Modern Perspective: Romeo and Juliet

By Gail Kern Paster

Does Romeo and Juliet need an introduction? Of all Shakespeare’s plays, it has been the most continuously popular since its first performance in the mid-1590s. It would seem, then, the most direct of Shakespeare’s plays in its emotional impact. What could be easier to understand and what could be more moving than the story of two adolescents finding in their sudden love for each other a reason to defy their families’ mutual hatred by marrying secretly? The tragic outcome of their blameless love (their “misadventured piteous overthrows”) seems equally easy to understand: it results first from Tybalt’s hotheaded refusal to obey the Prince’s command and second from accidents of timing beyond any human ability to foresee or control. Simple in its story line, clear in its affirmation of the power of love over hate, Romeo and Juliet seems to provide both a timeless theme and universal appeal. Its immediacy stands in welcome contrast to the distance, even estrangement, evoked by other Shakespeare plays. No wonder it is often the first Shakespeare play taught in schools—on the grounds of its obvious relevance to the emotional and social concerns of young people.

Recent work by social historians on the history of private life in western European culture, however, offers a complicating perspective on the timelessness of Romeo and Juliet. At the core of the play’s evident accessibility is the importance and privilege modern Western culture grants to desire, regarding it as deeply expressive of individual identity and central to the personal fulfillment of women no less than men. But, as these historians have argued, such conceptions of desire reflect cultural changes in human consciousness—in ways of imagining and articulating the nature of desire. 1 In England until the late sixteenth century, individual identity had been imagined not so much as the result of autonomous, personal growth in consciousness but rather as a function of social station, an individual’s place in a network of social and kinship structures. Furthermore, traditional culture distinguished sharply between the nature of identity for men and women. A woman’s identity was conceived almost exclusively in relation to male authority and marital status. She was less an autonomous, desiring self than any male was; she was a daughter, wife, or widow expected to be chaste, silent, and, above all, obedient. It is a profound and necessary act of historical imagination, then, to recognize innovation in the moment when Juliet impatiently invokes the coming of night and the husband she has disobediently married: “Come, gentle night; come, loving black-browed night, / Give me my Romeo” ( 3.2.21 –23).

Recognizing that the nature of desire and identity is subject to historical change and cultural innovation can provide the basis for rereading Romeo and Juliet. Instead of an uncomplicated, if lyrically beautiful, contest between young love and “ancient grudge,” the play becomes a narrative that expresses an historical conflict between old forms of identity and new modes of desire, between authority and freedom, between parental will and romantic individualism. Furthermore, though the Chorus initially sets the lovers as a pair against the background of familial hatred, the reader attentive to social detail will be struck instead by Shakespeare’s care in distinguishing between the circumstances of male and female lovers: “she as much in love, her means much less / To meet her new belovèd anywhere” ( 2. Chorus. 11 –12, italics added). The story of “Juliet and her Romeo” may be a single narrative, but its clear internal division is drawn along the traditionally unequal lines of gender.

Because of such traditional notions of identity and gender, Elizabethan theatergoers might have recognized a paradox in the play’s lyrical celebration of the beauty of awakened sexual desire in the adolescent boy and girl. By causing us to identify with Romeo and Juliet’s desire for one another, the play affirms their love even while presenting it as a problem in social management. This is true not because Romeo and Juliet fall in love with forbidden or otherwise unavailable sexual partners; such is the usual state of affairs at the beginning of Shakespearean comedy, but those comedies end happily. Rather Romeo and Juliet’s love is a social problem, unresolvable except by their deaths, because they dare to marry secretly in an age when legal, consummated marriage was irreversible. Secret marriage is the narrative device by which Shakespeare brings into conflict the new privilege claimed by individual desire and the traditional authority granted fathers to arrange their daughters’ marriages. Secret marriage is the testing ground, in other words, of the new kind of importance being claimed by individual desire. Shakespeare’s representation of the narrative outcome of this desire as tragic—here, as later in the secret marriage that opens Othello —may suggest something of Elizabethan society’s anxiety about the social cost of romantic individualism.

The conflict between traditional authority and individual desire also provides the framework for Shakespeare’s presentation of the Capulet-Montague feud. The feud, like the lovers’ secret marriage, is another problem in social management, another form of socially problematic desire. We are never told what the families are fighting about or fighting for; in this sense the feud is both causeless and goal-less. The Chorus’s first words insist not on the differences between the two families but on their similarity: they are two households “both alike in dignity.” Later, after Prince Escalus has broken up the street brawl, they are “In penalty alike” ( 1.2.2 ). Ironically, then, they are not fighting over differences. Rather it is Shakespeare’s careful insistence on the lack of difference between Montague and Capulet that provides a key to understanding the underlying social dynamic of the feud. Just as desire brings Romeo and Juliet together as lovers, desire in another form brings the Montague and Capulet males out on the street as fighters. The feud perpetuates a close bond of rivalry between these men that even the Prince’s threat of punishment cannot sever: “Montague is bound as well as I,” Capulet tells Paris ( 1.2.1 ). Indeed, the feud seems necessary to the structure of male-male relations in Verona. Feuding reinforces male identity—loyalty to one’s male ancestors—at the same time that it clarifies the social structure: servants fight with servants, young noblemen with young noblemen, old men with old men. 2

That the feud constitutes a relation of desire between Montague and Capulet is clear from the opening, when the servants Gregory and Sampson use bawdy innuendo to draw a causal link between their virility and their eagerness to fight Montagues: “A dog of that house shall move me to stand,” i.e., to be sexually erect ( 1.1.12 ). The Montagues seem essential to Sampson’s masculinity since, by besting Montague men, he can lay claim to Montague women as symbols of conquest. (This, of course, would be a reductive way of describing what Romeo does in secretly marrying a Capulet daughter.) The feud not only establishes a structure of relations between men based on competition and sexual aggression, but it seems to involve a particularly debased attitude toward women. No matter how comic the wordplay of the Capulet servants may be, we should not forget that the sexual triangle they imagine is based on fantasized rape: “I will push Montague’s men from the wall and thrust his maids to the wall” ( 1.1.18 –19). Gregory and Sampson are not interested in the “heads” of the Montague maidens, which might imply awareness of them as individuals. They are interested only in their “maidenheads.” Their coarse view of woman as generic sexual object is reiterated in a wittier vein by Mercutio, who understands Romeo’s experience of awakened desire only as a question of the sexual availability of his mistress: “O Romeo, that she were, O, that she were / An open-arse, thou a pop’rin pear” ( 2.1.40 –41).

Feuding, then, is the form that male bonding takes in Verona, a bonding which seems linked to the derogation of woman. But Romeo, from the very opening of the play, is distanced both physically and emotionally from the feud, not appearing until the combatants and his parents are leaving the stage. His reaction to Benvolio’s news of the fight seems to indicate that he is aware of the mechanisms of desire that are present in the feud: “Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love” ( 1.1.180 ). But it also underscores his sense of alienation: “This love feel I, that feel no love in this” ( 187 ). He is alienated not only from the feud itself, one feels, but more importantly from the idea of sexuality that underlies it. Romeo subscribes to a different, indeed a competing view of woman—the idealizing view of the Petrarchan lover. In his melancholy, his desire for solitude, and his paradox-strewn language, Romeo identifies himself with the style of feeling and address that Renaissance culture named after the fourteenth-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarca or Petrarch, most famous for his sonnets to Laura. By identifying his beloved as perfect and perfectly chaste, the Petrarchan lover opposes the indiscriminate erotic appetite of a Gregory or Sampson. He uses the frustrating experience of intense, unfulfilled, and usually unrequited passion to refine his modes of feeling and to enlarge his experience of self.

It is not coincidental, then, that Shakespeare uses the language and self-involved behaviors of the Petrarchan lover to dramatize Romeo’s experience of love. For Romeo as for Petrarch, love is the formation of an individualistic identity at odds with other kinds of identity: “I have lost myself. I am not here. / This is not Romeo. He’s some other where” ( 1.1.205 –6). Petrarchan desire for solitude explains Romeo’s absence from the opening clash and his lack of interest in the activities of his gang of friends, whom he accompanies only reluctantly to the Capulet feast: “I’ll be a candle holder and look on” ( 1.4.38 ). His physical isolation from his parents—with whom he exchanges no words in the course of the play—further suggests his shift from traditional, clan identity to the romantic individualism prefigured by Petrarch.

Shakespeare’s comic irony is that such enlargement of self is itself a mark of conventionality, since Petrarchism in European literature was by the late sixteenth century very widespread. A more cutting irony is that the Petrarchan lover and his sensual opponent (Sampson or Gregory) have more in common than is first apparent. The Petrarchan lover, in emphasizing the often paralyzing intensity of his passion, is less interested in praising the remote mistress who inspires such devotion than he is in displaying his own poetic virtuosity and his capacity for self-denial. Such a love—like Romeo’s for Rosaline—is founded upon frustration and requires rejection. The lover is interested in affirming the uniqueness of his beloved only in theory. On closer look, she too becomes a generic object and he more interested in self-display. Thus the play’s two languages of heterosexual desire—Petrarchan praise and anti-Petrarchan debasement—appear as opposite ends of a single continuum, as complementary discourses of woman, high and low. Even when Paris and old Capulet, discussing Juliet as prospective bride, vary the discourse to include a conception of woman as wife and mother, she remains an object of verbal and actual exchange.

In lyric poetry, the Petrarchan mistress remains a function of language alone, unheard, seen only as a collection of ideal parts, a center whose very absence promotes desire. Drama is a material medium, however. In drama, the Petrarchan mistress takes on embodiment and finds an answering voice, like Juliet’s gently noting her sonneteer-pilgrim’s conventionality: “You kiss by th’ book” ( 1.5.122 ). In drama, the mistress may come surrounded by relatives and an inconveniently insistent social milieu. As was noted above, Shakespeare distinguishes sharply between the social circumstances of adolescent males and females. Thus one consequence of setting the play’s domestic action solely within the Capulet household is to set Juliet, the “hopeful lady” of Capulet’s “earth” ( 1.2.15 ), firmly into a familial context which, thanks to the Nurse’s fondness for recollection and anecdote, is rich in domestic detail. Juliet’s intense focus upon Romeo’s surname—“What’s Montague? . . . O, be some other name” ( 2.2.43 , 44 )—is a projection onto her lover of her own conflicted sense of tribal loyalty. Unlike Romeo, whose deepest emotional ties are to his gang of friends, and unlike the more mobile daughters of Shakespearean comedy who often come in pairs, Juliet lives isolated and confined, emotionally as well as physically, by her status as daughter. Her own passage into sexual maturity comes first by way of parental invitation to “think of marriage now” ( 1.3.75 ). Her father invites Paris, the man who wishes to marry Juliet, to attend a banquet and feast his eyes on female beauty: “Hear all, all see, / And like her most whose merit most shall be” ( 1.2.30 –31). Juliet, in contrast, is invited to look only where her parents tell her:

I’ll look to like, if looking liking move.

But no more deep will I endart mine eye

Than your consent gives strength to make it fly.

( 1.3.103 –5)

The logic of Juliet’s almost instant disobedience in looking at, and liking, Romeo (rather than Paris) can be understood as the ironic fulfillment of the fears in traditional patriarchal culture about the uncontrollability of female desire, the alleged tendency of the female gaze to wander. Petrarchism managed the vexed question of female desire largely by wishing it out of existence, describing the mistress as one who, like the invisible Rosaline of this play, “will not stay the siege of loving terms, / Nor bide th’ encounter of assailing eyes” ( 1.1.220 –21). Once Romeo, in the Capulet garden, overhears Juliet’s expression of desire, however, Juliet abandons the conventional denial of desire—“Fain would I dwell on form; fain, fain deny / What I have spoke. But farewell compliment” ( 2.2.93 –94). She rejects the “strength” implied by parental sanction and the protection afforded by the Petrarchan celebration of chastity for a risk-taking experiment in desire that Shakespeare affirms by the beauty of the lovers’ language in their four scenes together. Juliet herself asks Romeo the serious questions that Elizabethan society wanted only fathers to ask. She challenges social prescriptions, designed to contain erotic desire in marriage, by taking responsibility for her own marriage:

If that thy bent of love be honorable,

Thy purpose marriage, send me word tomorrow,

By one that I’ll procure to come to thee,

Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite,

And all my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay

And follow thee my lord throughout the world.

( 2.2.150 –55)

The irony in her pledge—an irony perhaps most obvious to a modern, sexually egalitarian audience—is that Romeo here is following Juliet on an uncharted narrative path to sexual fulfillment in unsanctioned marriage. Allowing her husband access to a bedchamber in her father’s house, Juliet leads him into a sexual territory beyond the reach of dramatic representation. Breaking through the narrow oppositions of the play’s two discourses of woman—as either anonymous sexual object (for Sampson and Gregory) or beloved woman exalted beyond knowing or possessing (for Petrarch)—she affirms her imaginative commitment to the cultural significance of desire as an individualizing force:

                          Come, civil night,

Thou sober-suited matron all in black,

And learn me how to lose a winning match

Played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods.

Hood my unmanned blood, bating in my cheeks,

With thy black mantle till strange love grow bold,

Think true love acted simple modesty.

( 3.2.10 –16)

Romeo, when he is not drawn by desire deeper and deeper into Capulet territory, wanders into the open square where the destinies of the play’s other young men—and in part his own too—are enacted. Because the young man’s deepest loyalty is to his friends, Romeo is not really asked to choose between Juliet and his family but between Juliet and Mercutio, who are opposed in the play’s thematic structure. Thus one function of Mercutio’s anti-Petrarchan skepticism about the idealization of woman is to offer resistance to the adult heterosexuality heralded by Romeo’s union with Juliet, resistance on behalf of the regressive pull of adolescent male bonding—being “one of the guys.” This distinction, as we have seen, is in part a question of speaking different discourses. Romeo easily picks up Mercutio’s banter, even its sly innuendo against women. Mercutio himself regards Romeo’s quickness at repartee as the hopeful sign of a return to a “normal” manly identity incompatible with his ridiculous role as lover:

Why, is not this better now than groaning for love? Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo, now art thou what thou art, by art as well as by nature. For this driveling love is like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole.

( 2.4.90 –95)

Implicit here is a central tenet of traditional misogyny that excessive desire for a woman is effeminizing. For Mercutio it is the effeminate lover in Romeo who refuses shamefully to answer Tybalt’s challenge: “O calm, dishonorable, vile submission!” he exclaims furiously ( 3.1.74 ). Mercutio’s death at Tybalt’s hands causes Romeo temporarily to agree, obeying the regressive emotional pull of grief and guilt over his own part in Mercutio’s defeat. “Why the devil came you between us?” Mercutio asks. “I was hurt under your arm” ( 3.1.106 –8). Why, we might ask instead, should Mercutio have insisted on answering a challenge addressed only to Romeo? Romeo, however, displaces blame onto Juliet: “Thy beauty hath made me effeminate / And in my temper softened valor’s steel” ( 3.1.119 –20).

In terms of narrative structure, the death of Mercutio and Romeo’s slaying of Tybalt interrupt the lovers’ progress from secret marriage to its consummation, suggesting the incompatibility between romantic individualism and adolescent male bonding. The audience experiences this incompatibility as a sudden movement from comedy to tragedy. Suddenly Friar Lawrence must abandon hopes of using the love of Capulet and Montague as a force for social reintegration. Instead, he must desperately stave off Juliet’s marriage to Paris, upon which her father insists, by making her counterfeit death and by subjecting her to entombment. The legal finality of consummated marriage—which was the basis for Friar Lawrence’s hopes “to turn your households’ rancor to pure love” ( 2.3.99 )—becomes the instrument of tragic design. It is only the Nurse who would allow Juliet to accept Paris as husband; we are asked to judge such a prospect so unthinkable that we then agree imaginatively to Friar Lawrence’s ghoulish device.

In terms of the play’s symbolic vocabulary, Juliet’s preparations to imitate death on the very bed where her sexual maturation from girl- to womanhood occurred confirms ironically her earlier premonition about Romeo: “If he be marrièd, / My grave is like to be my wedding bed” ( 1.5.148 –49). Her brief journey contrasts sharply with those of Shakespeare’s comic heroines who move out from the social confinement of daughterhood into a freer, less socially defined space (the woods outside Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream , the Forest of Arden in As You Like It ). There they can exercise a sanctioned, limited freedom in the romantic experimentation of courtship. Juliet is punished for such experimentation in part because hers is more radical; secret marriage symbolically is as irreversible as “real” death. Her journey thus becomes an internal journey in which her commitment to union with Romeo must face the imaginative challenge of complete, claustrophobic isolation and finally death in the Capulet tomb.

It is possible to see the lovers’ story, as some critics have done, as Shakespeare’s dramatic realization of the ruling metaphors of Petrarchan love poetry—particularly its fascination with “death-marked love” ( Prologue. 9 ). 3 But, in pondering the implications of Shakespeare’s moving his audience to identify with this narrative of initiative, desire, and power, we also do well to remember the psychosocial dynamics of drama. By heightening their powers of identification, drama gives the members of an audience an embodied image of the possible scope and form of their fears and desires. Here we have seen how tragic form operates to contain the complex play of desire/identification. The metaphors of Petrarchan idealization work as part of a complex, ambivalent discourse of woman whose ultimate social function is to encode the felt differences between men and women on which a dominant male power structure is based. Romeo and Juliet find a new discourse of romantic individualism in which Petrarchan idealization conjoins with the mutual avowal of sexual desire. But their union, as we have seen, imperils the traditional relations between males that is founded upon the exchange of women, whether the violent exchange Gregory and Sampson crudely imagine or the normative exchange planned by Capulet and Paris. Juliet, as the daughter whose erotic willfulness activates her father’s transformation from concerned to tyrannical parent, is the greater rebel. Thus the secret marriage in which this new language of feeling is contained cannot here be granted the sanction of a comic outcome. When Romeo and Juliet reunite, it is only to see each other, dead, in the dim confines of the Capulet crypt. In this play the autonomy of romantic individualism remains “star-crossed.”

• The story of these massive shifts in European sensibility is told in a five-volume study titled A History of Private Life , gen. eds. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987–91). The study covers over three millennia in the history of western Europe. For the period most relevant to Romeo and Juliet, see vol. 3, Passions of the Renaissance (1989), ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, pp. 399–607.
• The best extended discussion of the dynamic of the feud is Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 83ff.
• Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (London: Methuen, 1968), pp. 82ff.

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Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 6 )

Shakespeare, more than any other author, has instructed the West in the catastrophes of sexuality, and has invented the formula that the sexual becomes the erotic when crossed by the shadow of death. There had to be one high song of the erotic by Shakespeare, one lyrical and tragi-comical paean celebrating an unmixed love and lamenting its inevitable destruction. Romeo and Juliet is unmatched, in Shakespeare and in the world’s literature, as a vision of an uncompromising mutual love that perishes of its own idealism and intensity.

—Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

Romeo and Juliet, regarded by many as William Shakespeare’s first great play, is generally thought to have been written around 1595. Shakespeare was then 31 years old, married for 12 years and the father of three children. He had been acting and writing in London for five years. His stage credits included mainly histories—the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III —and comedies— The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, and Love’s Labour’s Lost. Shakespeare’s first tragedy, modeled on Seneca, Titus Andronicus , was written around 1592. From that year through 1595 Shakespeare had also composed 154 sonnets and two long narrative poems in the erotic tradition— Venus  and  Adonis   and  The  Rape  of  Lucrece.  Both  his  dramatic  and  nondramatic  writing  show  Shakespeare  mastering  Elizabethan  literary  conventions.  Then,  around 1595, Shakespeare composed three extraordinary plays—R ichard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet —in three different genres—history, comedy, and tragedy—signalling a new mastery, originality, and excellence.  With  these  three  plays  Shakespeare  emerged  from  the  shadows  of  his  influences and initiated a period of unexcelled accomplishment. The two parts of Henry IV and Julius Caesar would follow, along with the romantic comedies The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night and the great tragedies Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra . The three plays  of  1595,  therefore,  serve  as  an  important  bridge  between  Shakespeare’s  apprenticeship and his mature achievements. Romeo and Juliet, in particular, is a crucial play in the evolution of Shakespeare’s tragic vision, in his integration of poetry and drama, and in his initial exploration of the connection between love and tragedy that he would continue in Troilus and Cressida, Othello, and Antony  and  Cleopatra.  Romeo  and  Juliet   is  not  only  one  of  the  greatest  love  stories in all literature, considering its stage history and the musicals, opera, music, ballet, literary works, and films that it has inspired; it is quite possibly the most popular play of all time. There is simply no more famous pair of lovers than Romeo and Juliet, and their story has become an inescapable central myth in our understanding of romantic love.

Despite  the  play’s  persistence,  cultural  saturation,  and  popular  appeal,  Romeo and Juliet has fared less well with scholars and critics, who have generally judged it inferior to the great tragedies that followed. Instead of the later tragedies of character Romeo and Juliet has been downgraded as a tragedy of chance, and, in the words of critic James Calderwood, the star-crossed lovers are “insufficiently endowed with complexity” to become tragic heroes. Instead “they  become  a  study  of  victimage  and  sacrifice,  not  tragedy.”  What  is  too  often missing in a consideration of the shortcomings of Romeo and Juliet by contrast with the later tragedies is the radical departure the play represented when compared to what preceded it. Having relied on Senecan horror for his first tragedy, Titus  Andronicus,  Shakespeare  located  his  next  in  the  world  of  comedy and romance. Romeo and Juliet is set not in antiquity, as Elizabethan convention dictated for a tragic subject, but in 16th-century Verona, Italy. His tragic protagonists are neither royal nor noble, as Aristotle advised, but two teenagers caught up in the petty disputes of their families. The plight of young lovers pitted against parental or societal opposition was the expected subject, since  Roman  times,  of  comedy,  not  tragedy.  By  showing  not  the  eventual  triumph  but  the  death  of  the  two  young  lovers  Shakespeare  violated  comic  conventions,  while  making  a  case  that  love  and  its  consequences  could  be  treated with an unprecedented tragic seriousness. As critic Harry Levin has observed, Shakespeare’s contemporaries “would have been surprised, and possibly shocked at seeing lovers taken so seriously. Legend, it had been hereto-fore taken for granted, was the proper matter for serious drama; romance was the stuff of the comic stage.”

Shakespeare’s innovations are further evident in comparison to his source material.  The  plot  was  a  well-known  story  in  Italian,  French,  and  English  versions. Shakespeare’s direct source was Arthur Brooke’s poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562). This moralistic work was intended as  a  warning  to  youth  against  “dishonest  desire”  and  disobeying  parental  authority. Shakespeare, by contrast, purifies and ennobles the lovers’ passion, intensifies  the  pathos,  and  underscores  the  injustice  of  the  lovers’  destruction.  Compressing  the  action  from  Brooke’s  many  months  into  a  five-day crescendo, Shakespeare also expands the roles of secondary characters such as  Mercutio  and  Juliet’s  nurse  into  vivid  portraits  that  contrast  the  lovers’ elevated lyricism with a bawdy earthiness and worldly cynicism. Shakespeare transforms Brooke’s plodding verse into a tour de force verbal display that is supremely witty, if at times over elaborate, and, at its best, movingly expressive. If the poet and the dramatist are not yet seamlessly joined in Romeo and Juliet, the play still displays a considerable advance in Shakespeare’s orchestration of verse, image, and incident that would become the hallmark of his greatest achievements.

The play’s theme and outcome are announced in the Prologue:

Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life; Whose misadventur’d piteous overthrows Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.

Suspense over the lovers’ fate is eliminated at the outset as Shakespeare emphasizes the forces that will destroy them. The initial scene makes this clear as a public brawl between servants of the feuding Montagues and Capulets escalates to involve kinsmen and the patriarchs on both sides, ended only when the Prince of Verona enforces a cease-fire under penalty of death for future offenders of the peace. Romeo, Montague’s young son, does not participate in the scuffle since he is totally absorbed by a hopeless passion for a young, unresponsive beauty named Rosaline. Initially Romeo appears as a figure of mockery, the embodiment of the hypersensitive, melancholy adolescent lover, who  is  urged  by  his  kinsman  Benvolio  to  resist  sinking  “under  love’s  heavy  burden”  and  seek  another  more  worthy  of  his  affection.  Another  kinsman,  Mercutio, for whom love is more a game of easy conquest, urges Romeo to “be  rough  with  love”  and  master  his  circumstances.  When  by  chance  it  is  learned that Rosaline is to attend a party at the Capulets, Benvolio suggests that they should go as well for Romeo to compare Rosaline’s charms with the other beauties at the party and thereby cure his infatuation. There Romeo sees Juliet, Capulet’s not-yet 14-year-old daughter. Her parents are encouraging her  to  accept  a  match  with  Count  Paris  for  the  social  benefit  of  the  family.  Love  as  affectation  and  love  as  advantage  are  transformed  into  love  as  all-consuming, mutual passion at first sight. Romeo claims that he “ne’er saw true beauty till this night,” and by the force of that beauty, he casts off his former melancholic  self-absorption.  Juliet is  no  less  smitten.  Sending her nurse  to  learn the stranger’s identity, she worries, “If he be married, / My grave is like to be my wedding bed.” Both are shocked to learn that they are on either side of the family feud, and their risk is underscored when the Capulet kinsman, Tybalt, recognizes Romeo and, though prevented by Capulet from violence at the party, swears future vengeance. Tybalt’s threat underscores that this is a play as much about hate as about love, in which Romeo and Juliet’s passion is  increasingly  challenged  by  the  public  and  family  forces  that  deny  love’s  authority.

The  first  of  the  couple’s  two  great  private  moments  in  which  love’s  redemptive and transformative power works its magic follows in possibly the most famous single scene in all of drama, set in the Capulets’ orchard, over-looked by Juliet’s bedroom window. In some of the most impassioned, lyrical, and famous verses Shakespeare ever wrote, the lovers’ dialogue perfectly captures the ecstasy of love and love’s capacity to remake the world. Seeing Juliet above at her window, Romeo says:

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun! Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief That thou her maid art far more fair than she.

He overhears Juliet’s declaration of her love for him and the rejection of what is implied if a Capulet should love a Montague:

O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name! Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be a Capulet. . . . ’Tis but thy name that is my enemy. Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet .So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name; And for that name, which is no part of thee, Take all myself.

In  a  beautifully  modulated  scene  the  lovers  freely  admit  their  passion  and  exchange vows of love that become a marriage proposal. As Juliet continues to be called back to her room and all that is implied as Capulet’s daughter, time and space become the barriers to love’s transcendent power to unite.

With the assistance of Friar Lawrence, who regards the union of a Montague and a Capulet as an opportunity “To turn your households’ rancour to pure  love,”  Romeo  and  Juliet  are  secretly  married.  Before  nightfall  and  the  anticipated consummation of their union Romeo is set upon by Tybalt, who is by Romeo’s marriage, his new kinsman. Romeo accordingly refuses his challenge, but it is answered by Mercutio. Romeo tries to separate the two, but in the  process  Mercutio  is  mortally  wounded.  This  is  the  tragic  turn  of  the  play  as  Romeo,  enraged,  rejects  the  principle  of  love  forged  with  Juliet  for  the claims of reputation, the demand for vengeance, and an identifi cation of masculinity with violent retribution:

My very friend, hath got this mortal hurt In my behalf; my reputation stain’d With Tybalt’s slander—Tybalt, that an hour Hath been my kinsman. O sweet Juliet, Thy beauty hath made me effeminate And in my temper soft’ned valour’s steel!

After killing Tybalt, Romeo declares, “O, I am fortune’s fool!” He may blame circumstances for his predicament, but he is clearly culpable in capitulating to the values of society he had challenged in his love for Juliet.

The lovers are given one final moment of privacy before the catastrophe. Juliet, awaiting Romeo’s return, gives one of the play’s most moving speeches, balancing sublimity with an intimation of mortality that increasingly accompanies the lovers:

Come, gentle night; come, loving, black-brow’d night; Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun.

Learning the terrible news of Tybalt’s death and Romeo’s banishment, Juliet wins her own battle between hate and love and sends word to Romeo to keep their appointed night together before they are parted.

As Romeo is away in Mantua Juliet’s parents push ahead with her wedding to Paris. The solution to Juliet’s predicament is offered by Friar Lawrence who gives her a drug that will make it appear she has died. The Friar is to summon Romeo,  who  will  rescue  her  when  she  awakes  in  the  Capulet  family  tomb.  The Friar’s message to Romeo fails to reach him, and Romeo learns of Juliet’s death. Reversing his earlier claim of being “fortune’s fool,” Romeo reacts by declaring, “Then I defy you, stars,” rushing to his wife and breaking society’s rules by acquiring the poison to join her in death. Reaching the tomb Romeo is surprised to find Paris on hand, weeping for his lost bride. Outraged by the intrusion  on  his  grief  Paris  confronts  Romeo.  They  fight,  and  after  killing  Paris, Romeo fi nally recognizes him and mourns him as “Mercutio’s kinsman.” Inside the tomb Romeo sees Tybalt’s corpse and asks forgiveness before taking leave of Juliet with a kiss:

. . . O, here Will I set up my everlasting rest And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-wearied flesh.

Juliet  awakes  to  see  Romeo  dead  beside  her.  Realizing  what  has  happened,  she responds by taking his dagger and plunges it into her breast: “This is thy sheath; there rest, and let me die.”

Montagues, Capulets, and the Prince arrive, and the Friar explains what has happened and why. His account of Romeo and Juliet’s tender passion and devotion shames the two families into ending their feud. The Prince provides the final eulogy:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings. The sun for sorrow will not show his head. Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things; Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished; For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

The  sense  of  loss  Verona  and  the  audience  feels  at  the  lovers’  deaths  is  a  direct  result  of  Shakespeare’s  remarkable  ability  to  conjure  love  in  all  its  transcendent power, along with its lethal risks. Set on a collision course with the values bent on denying love’s sway, Romeo and Juliet manage to create a dreamlike, alternative, private world that is so touching because it is so brief and perishable. Shakespeare’s triumph here is to make us care that adolescent romance matters—emotionally,  psychologically,  and  socially—and  that  the  premature and unjust death of lovers rival in profundity and significance the fall of kings.

Romeo and Juliet Oxford Lecture by Emma Smith

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Romeo and Juliet — Miscommunication in Romeo and Juliet

Miscommunication in Romeo and Juliet

• Categories: Romeo and Juliet

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Published: Jun 13, 2024

Words: 706 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Table of contents

The balcony scene: a misinterpreted declaration of love, the letter: a fatal delay, the role of miscommunication in tragedy, bibliography.

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Romeo and Juliet lack communication and bad advice Essay

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In Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” poor communication and bad advice do often lead to misunderstanding and disaster. I am going write about three occasions, all of which contribute, to the tragic ending of the play, one for each Romeo and Juliet and one, which affects both and leads to the tragic ending of the play.

Shakespeare used dramatic tension often in “Romeo and Juliet”. He created it by using dramatic irony. This is where the reader/audience knows something the characters do not and this causes them to have a different understanding of the situation. Hence the dramatic tension between the reader/audience and the characters, who do not possess all the facts.

An example of dramatic tension in the play is the first meeting of Romeo and Juliet at the masquers ball neither of them realises who the other is. Juliet sends the Nurse to find out who he is. In the Nurses absence she says to herself if he is married her wedding bed is going to be her deathbed.

“My grave is like to be my wedding bed.”

This shows that she was already in love with him. (Love at first sight).

When the Nurse returns and tells her who he is, she says to herself

“My only love sprung from my only hate”.

Tragedy is a literary term and is not linked to real people; though in reality a tragedy is a tragic occurrence.

Sophocles, a literacy critic, said:

“We are not interested in what happens but how it happens. The drama comes from watching someone fighting against fate.”

In this quote the key word is FATE, fate is something that is meant to be and cannot be changed no matter how hard you try.

From the beginning, by the chorus, we know Romeo and Juliet is destined to be a tragedy. The play is about ” a pair of star crossed lovers” whose tragic deaths are caused by fate and misunderstandings.

Therefore by the end of the play we feel a great sense of loss and pity.

The first scene where poor communication and bad advice lead to misunderstandings, which I am going to write about is Act three Scene One, for Romeo. Act three Scene one is a big turning point in the play, where it all begins to go wrong for Romeo and Juliet. In this scene the fight between Romeo and Tybalt takes place. It begins with Benvolio and Mercutio joking, when Benvolio says

” I pray thee, good Mercutio, lets retire: The day is hot, the Capels are abroad, And if we meet we shall not scrape a brawl For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring”

Tybalt is out looking for a quarrel with Romeo, to get revenge for the masquers ball.

“I will withdraw but this intrusion shall now seeming sweet, covert to the bitterest gall.”

When he meets Mercutio and Benvoilio, they begin to quarrel. Romeo then arrives and Tybalt says,

“Romeo, the love I bear thee can afford No better term than this; thou art a villain.”

Then, to Tybalt and Mercutio’s amazement, Romeo replies,

“Tybalt, the reason that I have to love thee Doth much excuse the appertaining rage To such a greeting, villain I am none; Therefore, farewell, I see thou know’st me not.”

Dramatic tension is created here because, we, the audience, know that Romeo and Juliet have just got married, whereas Mercutio, Benvolio and Tybalt do not, so it is created by dramatic irony.

Mercutio thinks Romeo is being a coward by letting Tybalt win by refusing to fight, and says he will instead.

“O calm, dishonourable, vile submission! “Alla stoccata” carries it away. Tybalt, you rat catcher, will you walk?”

Mercutio has been spoiling for a fight but the real reasons Romeo will not fight Tybalt is that they are now kinsmen, due to Romeo’s marriage to Juliet.

Romeo steps in between Mercutio and Tybalt to stop the fight. Tybalt lunges under Romeo’s arm and wounds Mercutio badly. Then he runs off. Romeo feels he has to avenge his kinsman’s death, so Romeo goes looking for Tybalt and when he finds him, they duel and Romeo kills him. Benvoili tells Romeo to go quickly, as the prince will arrive soon. Romeo replies, “O, I am fortune’s fool.”

When he says this, he means he is only a toy in the hands of fate. Tybalt’s death is when it all starts in the play. This is where the spiral starts to go down rapidly. The expected outcome is that Romeo will be executed, because we know that the Prince said if any Capulet or Montague were caught “brawling”, they would pay with their life. The Prince is lenient because the law would have sentenced Tybalt to death anyway. Therefore, the Prince can only bring himself to banish Romeo.

This is a crucial moment in the play because it is where everything seems to go wrong, resulting in the tragic chain of events, leading to the deaths of the lovers.

The breakdowns in communication between Juliet and her parents become obvious in act 3, scene 5. This is a crucial point in the play as Juliet cannot tell her parents why she will not marry Paris.

Romeo and Juliet part after spending their wedding night together. This upsets Juliet, and, when her mother comes to see her, Lady Capulet misunderstands why Juliet is upset. She believes Juliet is grieving for Tybalt.

Juliet’s conversation with her mother is full of double meanings.

“God pardon him; I do with all my heart; and yet no man like he doth grieve my heart.”

Juliet is referring to Romeo. Due to dramatic irony, the audience know that Juliet is grieving for Romeo, not angry at him for murdering Tybalt, as her mother, lady Capulet, thinks. This is a prime example of the breakdowns in communication between Juliet and her parents.

And yet no man like he doth grieve my heart.”

Dramatic tension is created again because we, the audience, know what she really means.

When Juliet refuses to marry Paris on Thursday, her mother doesn’t understand.

“Fie, fie, what, are you mad!”

She thinks Juliet is still upset about Tybalt and that she’s mad for saying no.

Her mother doesn’t understand that she would be betraying Romeo if she married Paris. Her Father is angry with Juliet because she was disobeying him and it just was not done then, he doesn’t understand why she’s refusing either.

“How, how! How, how! Choplogic! What is this?”

He misjudges the reasons for Juliet’s refusal and she wont reveal the real reason. This also leads to dramatic tension again through dramatic irony.

Juliet pleads with them to delay the wedding.

“O sweet my mother cast me not away Delay this marriage for a month, a week!” Yet her mother refuses to help her. “Talk not to me, for ill not speak a word Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee”

The nurse doesn’t sympathise either she says marry Paris, Romeo is not here and he is a “dishclout” compared to him.

This is a crucial moment in the play, Juliet could either reveal her reasons for her refusal or she has one last option, to go to Friar Lawrence. If she revealed her reasons for refusing this would have made the course of events and the ending of the play very different. Yet she chooses not to, she chooses to go to Friar Lawrence for help, this resulting in the tragic ending of the play. This is where the climax of the play starts.

The final scene I am going to right about is Act five and this is for Romeo and Juliet. Act five is where any hope of it all working out is completely destroyed by Friar Lawrence’s letter not being delivered to Romeo in Mantua.

It all starts to go tragically wrong when, Balthasar, Romeo’s manservant goes to Mantua and tells Romeo of Juliet’s ‘death’. Romeo, without hesitation, goes to see an Apothecary and buys poison, and then sets off to Verona to be with Juliet, defying his banishment. This scene is a very good example of poor communication and bad advice and the consequences.

Meanwhile, Friar John returns and tells Friar Lawrence that he has not delivered the letter. To which the Friar says, “The letter was not nice but full of charge, of dear important and neglecting it may do much danger.

He realises the danger that Romeo may kill himself or Juliet may, when she awakens and finds Romeo is not there,

This is where any hope of a happy ending is destroyed.

The Friar realises how disastrously wrong his plan could go. So he rushes to the vault but he is too late.

Romeo arrives at the Capulet vault and begins to force it open, when Paris comes to lay flowers and challenges Romeo because he thinks Romeo is going to desecrate Juliet’s tomb. Romeo kills Paris but before he dies, he begs to be placed with Juliet. Romeo feels sorry for Paris and lays his body next to Juliet.

He then goes to Juliet and says:

“Death, that hath attacked the honey of thy breath Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty Thou art not conquered; beauty’s ensign yet Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks.”

This means that Juliet’s poison has not made her pale; she looks as though she is still alive. Romeo then turns to Tybalt’s corpse and says he will favour him by killing himself and asks for his forgiveness, he then looks at Juliet one last time and gives her one last kiss, then he takes the poison.

Shortly after, Juliet awakens and looks around for her Romeo. When the Friar enters, he tells her to come quickly as the prince will arrive soon. Juliet, however, refuses to leave with the friar when she sees Romeo dead. She reaches out and tales his dagger and says

“O happy dagger! This is thy sheath; There rust and let me die.”

She then stabs herself in the heart.

Then the watch enters and arrests the Friar and Balthasar, the Prince and the Captain of the watch enter with the Capulets.

Montague and Capulet enter the tomb and Montague tells everyone lady Montague has died if grief due to Romeo’s banishment.

When Montague and Capulet see Romeo, Juliet and Paris all dead, Friar Lawrence explains everything with the help of Balthasar and Paris’ Page.

Capulet and Montague end their feud and decide to put up golden statues of Romeo and Juliet; after the Prince says

“All are punished.”

The Prince sums up the whole play with a rhyming caplet.

“For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo”

There are a lot of misunderstandings in this scene. This is where all of the Friar’s bad advice begins to become apparent and all the misunderstanding that have taken place. Everything that could possibly go wrong in this scene does. Dramatic tension is creates a lot in this scene through dramatic irony.

Shakespeare successfully wrote a tragedy according to Sophocles definition of it; at the end of the play you feel a great sense of loss and pity for all involved. The couple are quite clearly doomed by fate quite early on in the play, and despite their best efforts, they lose their desperate fight against fate.

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Romeo and Juliet lack communication and bad advice Essay. (2017, Oct 29). Retrieved from https://artscolumbia.org/romeo-juliet-poor-communication-bad-advice-25073/

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Romeoand Juliet Essay

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Romeo and Juliet think the grandness of their passion is enough for them to defy their parents will but the fault in their stars is that the environment around them grows so hostile to their passion as a series of events involving the conflict between the two families escalated by the slaying of Mercutio and Tybalt will lead them to take their own lives to escape the violence. It is thus futile for this pair of teenage lovers to defy providence and their parents’ will as it ends in their own destruction. Romeo and Juliet is then a play about idealized metaphysical love that fails to realize itself in the material world because it is fallen and hostile to their desire.

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The present article attempts to trace the elements of change in the early and late Shakespearean tragedies from the viewpoint of style and the writer’s ideological stance. Shakespeare’s tragic writing undergoes certain modification as he moves further in his career. One aspect of this modification is the change in the protagonist’s dynamism. Although Romeo and Juliet both show certain signs of development which separates them from comic characters, they still lack the psychological depth which is witnessed in Shakespeare’s late tragic heroes. It is true they realize their tragic fate, yet they fail in gaining full consciousness of their situation and their contribution to their own destiny. Another aspect is the change of diction toward a more ‘natural’ employment of language and rhetorical devices. In Shakespeare’s mature tragedies, we do not see the experimental lyricism we witness in Romeo and Juliet, as the playwright seems to adopt the classical notion of decorum, according to ...

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Romeo and Juliet

Synopsis and plot overview of shakespeare's romeo and juliet.

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TL;DR (may contain spoilers): The classic story of boy meets girl; girl's family hates boy's family; boy's family hates girl's family; boy kills girl's cousin; boy and girl kill themselves.

Romeo and Juliet Summary

An age-old vendetta between two powerful families erupts into bloodshed. A group of masked Montagues risk further conflict by gatecrashing a Capulet party. A young lovesick Romeo Montague falls instantly in love with Juliet Capulet, who is due to marry her father’s choice, the County Paris. With the help of Juliet’s nurse, the women arrange for the couple to marry the next day, but Romeo’s attempt to halt a street fight leads to the death of Juliet’s own cousin, Tybalt, for which Romeo is banished. In a desperate attempt to be reunited with Romeo, Juliet follows the Friar’s plot and fakes her own death. The message fails to reach Romeo, and believing Juliet dead, he takes his life in her tomb. Juliet wakes to find Romeo’s corpse beside her and kills herself. The grieving family agree to end their feud.

• Read our  Romeo and Juliet Character Summaries . 

More detail: 2 minute read

Romeo and Juliet begins as the Chorus introduces two feuding families of Verona: the Capulets and the Montagues. On a hot summer's day, the young men of each faction fight until the Prince of Verona intercedes and threatens to banish them. Soon after, the head of the Capulet family plans a feast. His goal is to introduce his daughter Juliet to a Count named Paris who seeks to marry Juliet. 

Montague's son Romeo and his friends (Benvolio and Mercutio) hear of the party and resolve to go in disguise. Romeo hopes to see his beloved Rosaline at the party. Instead, while there, he meets Juliet and falls instantly in love with her. Juliet's cousin Tybalt recognises the Montague boys and forces them to leave just as Romeo and Juliet discover one another. 

Romeo lingers near the Capulet house to talk with Juliet when she appears in her window. The pair declare their love for one another and intend to marry the next day. With the help of Juliet's Nurse, the lovers arrange to marry when Juliet goes for confession at the cell of Friar Laurence. There, they are secretly married (talk about a short engagement). 

Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow — Romeo and Juliet, Act 2 Scene 2

Following the secret marriage, Juliet's cousin Tybalt sends a challenge to Romeo. Romeo refuses to fight, which angers his friend Mercutio who then fights with Tybalt. Mercutio is accidentally killed as Romeo intervenes to stop the fight. In anger, Romeo pursues Tybalt, kills him, and is banished by the Prince. 

Juliet is anxious when Romeo is late to meet her and learns of the brawl, Tybalt's death, and Romeo's banishment. Friar Laurence arranges for Romeo to spend the night with Juliet before he leaves for Mantua. Meanwhile, the Capulet family grieves for Tybalt, so Lord Capulet moves Juliet's marriage to Paris to the next day. Juliet’s parents are angry when Juliet doesn't want to marry Paris, but they don't know about her secret marriage to Romeo.

A pair of star-crossed lovers — Romeo and Juliet, Prologue

Friar Laurence helps Juliet by providing a sleeping draught that will make her seem dead. When the wedding party arrives to greet Juliet the next day, they believe she is dead. The Friar sends a messenger to warn Romeo of Juliet's plan and bids him to come to the Capulet family monument to rescue his sleeping wife. 

Ready to test your knowledge? Have a go at our multiple choice Romeo and Juliet Quiz

The vital message to Romeo doesn't arrive in time because the plague is in town (so the messenger cannot leave Verona). Hearing from his servant that Juliet is dead, Romeo buys poison from an Apothecary in Mantua. He returns to Verona and goes to the tomb where he surprises and kills the mourning Paris. Romeo takes his poison and dies, while Juliet awakens from her drugged coma. She learns what has happened from Friar Laurence, but she refuses to leave the tomb and stabs herself. The Friar returns with the Prince, the Capulets, and Romeo's lately widowed father. The deaths of their children lead the families to make peace, and they promise to erect a monument in Romeo and Juliet's memory.

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Romeo and Juliet

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Romeo and Juliet Shakescleare Translation

Romeo and Juliet Translation Table of Contents

The Shakescleare version of Romeo and Juliet contains the complete original play alongisde a line-by-line modern English translation. Now you can easily understand even the most complex and archaic words and phrases word spoken by Romeo, Juliet, Mercutio, Friar Laurence, the Nurse, Tybalt, and all the Capulets and Montagues, throughout the entire play, including famous quotes like "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" and "Parting is such sweet sorrow / That I shall say good night till it be morrow."

Act 1, Scene 1

Act 1, scene 2, act 1, scene 3, act 1, scene 4, act 1, scene 5, act 2, prologue, act 2, scene 1, act 2, scene 2, act 2, scene 3, act 2, scene 4, act 2, scene 5, act 2, scene 6, act 3, scene 1, act 3, scene 2, act 3, scene 3, act 3, scene 4, act 3, scene 5, act 4, scene 1, act 4, scene 2, act 4, scene 3, act 4, scene 4, act 4, scene 5, act 5, scene 1, act 5, scene 2, act 5, scene 3.

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