Romeo and Juliet summary

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-on-Avon in 1564. As a young man, he attended school, and during his early education, he was able to see many plays and drama troupes as they toured the English countryside. This early education probably helped him in his path to become arguably the most famous playwright in history. At the age of eighteen, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who was eight years older than him, and the two of them had three children. Not much is known about certain portions of his life, but Shakespeare is thought to have worked as a teacher for a few years before he surfaced in the London theater scene.

Shakespeare became a shareholder in a theater company called Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and while he was with this company he wrote Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare’s audience would have already been familiar with the story of the two star-crossed lovers, but it is Shakespeare’s adaptation that has survived into the modern age. In the Globe Theater, Shakespeare would not have had the advantages of sophisticated lighting and mise-en-scene; in fact, his stage would have been considerably void of props in comparison to what we think of today when we think of a play. Still, audiences would have delighted at the opportunity to stand in the pit that surrounded the open stage. The audience members who paid one penny to stand on the three sides of the peninsula stage were known as groundlings. Women were not a fixture in the theater scene in Shakespeare’s time, and the roles of women would have been played by young men; that includes the role of Juliet.

Romeo and Juliet takes place in Verona, Italy in the fourteenth century. In Shakespeare’s time, the actors portraying the play would not have tried to recreate the costumes of the time and location. Instead, they would have worn clothes of contemporary English citizens. The prologue at the beginning of the play, written as a Shakespearian sonnet, pretty much gives away the ending. Audience members who paid close attention would have known to expect the tale of two lovers from feuding families, and audience members would have known that the story, in the tradition of tragedy, ends in the death of the young lovers.

The first scene of the play confirms the feud between the Capulets and the Montagues, and although nobody can be sure why the families don’t get along, Prince Escalus decrees that any further disputes between the families would result in the execution of the participating parties. With that in mind, it is important that you know who belongs to which family. For instance, Romeo is a Montague, as is Benvolio, but Tybalt is a Capulet. Although Mercutio and Romeo spend a lot of time together, Mercutio is, in fact, related to the prince.

At the beginning of the play, Romeo is hopelessly in love with Rosaline, but because she has taken steps to become a nun, Romeo cannot be with her. Depressed and down, Romeo avoids his friends and his family, but at last, Benvolio and Mercutio convince Romeo to go to a party at the house of the Capulets. At that party, Romeo lays eyes on and falls in love with the thirteen-year-old Juliet. As we learn from the Nurse, Juliet is not quite fourteen; her birthday would have been within about two weeks of the action of the play.

Once at the party, however, Romeo also catches the eye of Tybalt, and with his fiery temper, Tybalt swears that Romeo’s appearance at the party will not go without punishment. Romeo goes on courting Juliet, however, and late in the evening, the two declare their love for one another. The haste and impetuousness with which they decide to be wed the next day sets the stage for some of the wild decisions that the teenagers make later in the play.

After convincing Friar Laurence to perform the marriage rite, Romeo and Juliet still keep their wedding a secret, and the only people who know of the nuptials are Romeo, Juliet, Friar Laurence, and Nurse. As a priest, Friar Laurence is Romeo’s ghostly father in the sense that he is a spiritual father, and Juliet’s relationship with Nurse goes back for Juliet’s entire life. In Shakespeare’s time, aristocratic families would hire peasants who had recently given birth to breastfeed their children. Nurse was hired around the time of Juliet’s birth; Susan, the daughter of the Nurse, had died as a baby. The Capulets kept Nurse around as a nanny for Juliet, and Juliet has a very close relationship with Nurse.

Later in the day after the wedding, Romeo stumbles upon Tybalt as he is picking a fight with Benvolio and Mercutio. Related to Tybalt through marriage, Romeo does not want to fight, but Tybalt, with his fiery temper, manages to engage Mercutio in a sword fight during which Tybalt slays Mercutio. Moved to vengeance, Romeo then kills Tybalt, and Prince Escalus at first vows to have Romeo executed. After hearing an appeal from Montague, however, Prince Escalus reduces the punishment to banishment.

At first, Romeo is unable to see the mercy in the Prince’s decision, but Friar Laurence manages to convince him of a rational plan. Romeo was to visit Mantua and stay outside the city limits of Verona until Friar Laurence can figure out a way to make the marriage of the teenagers public. In the meantime, however, Capulet determines that Paris should finally marry Juliet. Desperate for a way to avoid that fate, Juliet agrees to take potion that will make her family think she is dead. Friar Laurence gives her a poison that will make her appear dead for forty-two hours, and while she is resting in the Capulet tomb, Friar Laurence planned to have Friar John take word of the new secret plan to Romeo.

On his way to Mantua, however, Friar John gets locked up in a house because he is suspected of coming in contact with a pestilence, or plague. With his delay, Balthasar, Romeo’s servant, manages to bring false news of Juliet’s death to the young lover. Romeo, desperate and hasty, decides to kill himself by means of a poison, but because poison is illegal to sell in Mantua, Romeo has to bribe a poor apothecary to acquire the potion. Romeo returns to Verona, and in the graveyard, Romeo encounters Paris who was there to pay respect to his dead “fiancée.” Romeo and Paris fight, and Romeo slays Paris. In a moment of terrible irony, Romeo enters the tomb and comments that Juliet doesn’t look dead. Impatient and determined to die, Romeo drinks the poison and dies. Juliet wakes up moments later, and despite Friar Laurence’s desperate pleading for her to leave the tomb, Juliet buries Romeo’s knife in her own body; she dies with her lover.

Upon the conclusion of the play, Prince Escalus blames Capulet and Montague for the death of his own cousins, Mercutio and Paris. Capulet and Montague, seeing the evil that came of their feud, agree to put an end to the bad blood between the families, and Montague promises to erect a statue of pure gold in Verona to honor Juliet.

Shakespeare’s version of the play has survived because of his realistic portrayal of the characters and his expert use of language. Writing primarily in Blank Verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter, Shakespeare’s poetic language draws the reader or audience member in with an intoxicating rhythm. In fact, using a poetic technique called “enjambment,” Shakespeare makes the idea of a sentence cross over several lines of poetry. Enjambment uses the natural rhythm of the poem to make the reader move on to the next line. Through monologues and soliloquies, characters deliver speeches that inform the other characters and the audience members, and in Shakespeare’s moving dialogue, the characters interact in engaging and entertaining ways. Although Shakespeare uses minimal stage direction to indicate what the actors should be doing, the action of the play is clear.

Following in the Greek tradition of plays like those by Euripedes, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, Shakespeare is known as a Renaissance writer. He adheres to the ideal drama as outlined by Aristotle in his work Poetics. By including thought, language, character, spectacle, song and dance, and action, Shakespeare makes the play appealing to a wide audience, thus the relationship of script->actor->audience results in a successful performance each time Romeo and Juliet is portrayed on the stage.

In his five acts and scenes, Shakespeare employs puns, jokes that rely on multiple meanings of words, that would have delighted his audience, and Shakespeare’s use of poetic devices such as oxymorons, which are seemingly contradictory combinations of words that result in a new meaning, make the play rich with meaning and double meanings. With the power of language, Shakespeare can personify things like night and day by having Friar Laurence say things like, “The gray eyed morn smiles on the frowning night.” In other examples, Shakespeare has characters speak directly to inanimate objects or abstract concepts in examples of apostrophe. Apostrophe is a specific kind of personification in which a character or speaker personifies an inanimate object or abstract concept by speaking directly to it.