Romeo and Juliet

Summary

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of two young lovers from feuding families in Verona, compressed by Shakespeare into about four days. A sonnet Prologue announces that a pair of star-crossed lovers will end their parents' strife by their deaths. In Act I servants of the Capulets and Montagues brawl in the street, and Prince Escalus decrees death for anyone who breaks the peace again. Romeo, Montague's son, is moping for love of Rosaline; his cousin Benvolio and his witty friend Mercutio, who mocks dreams in the Queen Mab speech, bring him masked to the Capulets' feast. Meanwhile Count Paris has asked Lord Capulet for his daughter Juliet, not yet fourteen, and her mother and talkative Nurse urge the match. At the feast Romeo and Juliet meet, share a sonnet and two kisses, and only then learn each other's names; Juliet's cousin Tybalt recognizes Romeo and vows revenge. In Act II Romeo climbs into the Capulet orchard and overhears Juliet at her window wishing he had another name; they exchange vows, and the next day Friar Lawrence, an herbalist who warns that virtue misapplied turns to vice, agrees to marry them in hope of ending the feud. The Nurse carries messages, and the couple are secretly wed. In Act III Tybalt challenges Romeo, who refuses to fight his new kinsman; Mercutio fights instead and is killed under Romeo's arm, cursing both houses. Romeo kills Tybalt and is banished to Mantua. After one night with Juliet he leaves at dawn, and her father, thinking grief for Tybalt is the cause of her tears, orders her to marry Paris within days, threatening to disown her when she refuses; the Nurse advises her to forget Romeo. In Act IV Friar Lawrence gives Juliet a potion that will make her seem dead for forty-two hours, while he sends word to Romeo to rescue her from the family vault. She drinks it the night before the wedding and is mourned and entombed. In Act V Friar John is shut in a house suspected of plague and cannot deliver the letter, so Romeo hears only that Juliet is dead. He buys poison from a starving apothecary, goes to the tomb, kills Paris there, and drinks the poison beside Juliet. She wakes, refuses the Friar's plea to flee, and stabs herself with Romeo's dagger. The Friar explains everything to the Prince; Montague and Capulet are reconciled over their children's bodies and promise golden statues of them. The play was printed in a short quarto in 1597 and a fuller, corrected quarto in 1599.

Top Lessons

• Haste and its harvest

  Friar Lawrence warns Romeo that those who run fast stumble, yet he himself hurries the wedding and then a desperate plan. Nearly every disaster in the play comes from speed: a love sworn in one night, a duel in a moment, a wedding moved up a day, a letter delayed. Shakespeare compresses the source story's months into days so that haste becomes the tragedy's engine.

• Stars or choices?

  The Prologue calls the lovers star-crossed, and Romeo defies the stars when he hears Juliet is dead. Yet the plot also turns on human choices: the parents' hatred, Romeo's revenge on Tybalt, Capulet's command, the Friar's scheme. The play holds fate and responsibility in tension rather than settling which is to blame.

• Hatred inherited

  No one in Verona remembers why the Capulets and Montagues are enemies, yet servants bite their thumbs and kinsmen draw swords. Mercutio, who belongs to neither house, dies cursing both. The play shows how a quarrel passed from parents to children consumes the very children it was meant to defend.

• Counsel that fails the young

  Juliet turns in turn to her mother, her father, the Nurse and the Friar, and each fails her in a different way. Her line that if all else fail, herself has power to die, follows the Nurse's advice to marry Paris. The play asks what the young need from the adults who guide them.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The play is a small compendium of Elizabethan ideas about drugs and the passions. Friar Lawrence's herb speech states the period's understanding that one plant may hold both medicine and poison according to dose and use, and his potion, which stops pulse, warmth and breath for forty-two hours, belongs to the folk and literary tradition of death-counterfeiting drugs rather than to any known preparation. Romeo's Mantuan apothecary, with his stuffed alligator, empty boxes and famine in his cheeks, is a famous picture of a poor druggist, and the scene shows that selling poison was a capital offense there. Montague's description of Romeo shutting out daylight in Act I uses the humoral language of love-melancholy, a recognized condition in Renaissance medicine. Friar John's detention by the town's searchers, in a house suspected of plague, reflects real quarantine practice. The two suicides, Juliet's earlier threats of self-destruction, and Lady Montague's death from grief at Romeo's exile give the play a recurring interest for discussions of youth, impulsivity and self-harm; such modern readings are interpretive.

• Act 1, Scene 1

  Montague describes Romeo's sleeplessness, tears and darkened room, calling it a black and portentous humour; Benvolio prescribes looking at other beauties.

• Act 2, Scene 3

  Friar Lawrence gathers herbs and reflects that a single flower contains poison and medicine.

• Act 4, Scenes 1 and 3

  The Friar describes the potion's effects; Juliet, alone with the vial, fears poison, suffocation in the vault and madness among the bones.

• Act 5, Scene 1

  Romeo seeks out the starving apothecary and buys a fast-acting poison against Mantua's law.

• Act 5, Scene 2

  Friar John explains that the searchers sealed him in a house where pestilence was suspected, so the letter never reached Romeo.

• Act 5, Scene 3

  Romeo poisons himself and Juliet stabs herself; Montague reports that his wife has died of grief.