A term you'll meet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
Star-crossed is one of the first words Shakespeare's audience hears about Romeo and Juliet, and it arrives loaded with a claim about fate that the rest of the play spends two hours testing.
"From forth the fatal loins of these two foes / A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life..."
— Prologue, Romeo and Juliet
The Chorus announces the ending before the play even starts: these two will die, and their deaths will finally end their families' feud. "Star-crossed" tells the audience why, in the play's own terms — not because of bad decisions, but because the stars are against them.
To "cross" something is to oppose or thwart it — the sense survives today in "cross purposes." Elizabethan astrology held that a person's fate was written in the position of the stars at their birth, and could be favorable or unfavorable. To be "star-crossed" is to have stars whose influence runs directly against you: an astrological verdict against your happiness, decided long before you could do anything about it. Much of Shakespeare's original audience took this as a real claim, not a poetic flourish — Romeo and Juliet's fates are sealed by forces entirely outside their control.
Here's what makes the play more interesting than its own Prologue admits: Romeo and Juliet die because of a dense chain of human choices and accidents — Romeo's hasty marriage, Friar Laurence's risky plan, a letter that arrives too late, Romeo's decision not to wait one more hour before drinking poison. "Star-crossed" offers fate as the explanation up front, but the plot is built from contingency and impulsiveness. Critics have long argued about how much weight to put on each: is this a play about cosmic destiny, or about what happens when teenagers make irreversible decisions at speed, with fate as a comforting cover story?
"Star-crossed lovers" now describes any couple whose relationship is doomed by circumstances beyond their control — feuding families, war, distance, timing. The idiom keeps Shakespeare's fatalism intact even when modern speakers don't believe in astrology at all; it has become a way of saying "this was never going to work, and it wasn't really their fault" without needing to invoke the stars literally.
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