William Shakespeare · c. 1595
Romeo and Juliet is the most studied of Shakespeare's plays and the most commonly mis-staged. It is, on the surface, a play about teenagers in love and the obstacles their families make. Read more closely, it is a play structured by paradox at every level — verbal, dramatic, philosophical — and it announces its own ending in the first fourteen lines so that the audience has the unusual experience of watching a tragedy whose conclusion they already know. This guide collects the technical vocabulary you need to read the play as Shakespeare wrote it.
Read the play's opening Chorus aloud. It is fourteen lines, in iambic pentameter, rhyming ABABCDCDEFEFGG — a Shakespearean sonnet. The form is doing argumentative work: a sonnet is the classical English love poem, and Shakespeare opens his love tragedy by handing us one. The sonnet form also lets him tell us, in its concluding couplet, exactly how the play ends: "A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life." We know the ending before the play begins. The play is not about what happens; it is about why it happens.
The single most virtuosic moment in the play is the first meeting of Romeo and Juliet (Act 1, Scene 5). Their first exchange — fourteen lines, divided between them, rhyming as a Shakespearean sonnet — is the form being used as a dramatic device. Two characters who have never met before spontaneously co-author a sonnet, completing each other's rhymes. The form is the play's argument that they belong together. The first kiss is the sonnet's concluding couplet.
Romeo's vocabulary is built on oxymoron and paradox. From his first scene:
Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O any thing of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health…
The catalogue of contradictions is not decorative. It is the play's claim about the experience of love itself — love generates oxymoron because love yokes opposites together. Throughout the play, Juliet matches Romeo in this register: "My only love sprung from my only hate." "Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!" The paradoxes register the impossibility of the situation the lovers are inside.
The Chorus's announcement of the ending creates sustained dramatic irony for the rest of the play. When Juliet says "If he be married, my grave is like to be my wedding bed," we hear the literal future the character cannot. When the Friar makes his plan with the sleeping potion, we know which contingencies will fail. The audience's privileged knowledge generates almost all of the play's pathos.
Mercutio's wit is the play's other major irony source — verbal irony so dense it functions as armor. His Queen Mab speech is a sustained personification that becomes, by its end, an attack on dreams themselves. His dying curse — "A plague o' both your houses!" — is the play's moral verdict, delivered by the character furthest from the families' quarrel.
The play is in iambic pentameter (unrhymed blank verse) for most of its length, with deliberate departures:
Hearing the metrical shift is half of hearing the play. When characters drop from verse into prose, they are usually moving from the world of formality and consequence into the world of the body and the joke.
The Chorus calls the lovers "star-cross'd" — fated. Romeo agrees: "I am fortune's fool." The Friar disagrees: he believes his interventions can shape events. The Nurse believes in expedient compromise. The play does not resolve which view is right. Every character whose decisions accelerate the catastrophe — the Friar's plan, the messenger's delay, Romeo's haste, Juliet's stalling — could have decided otherwise. Yet the play opens by telling us they didn't. Whether the play is a tragedy of fate or of choice has been argued for four centuries.
The play opens with two servants making bawdy jokes about the Capulet-Montague feud, then escalating to a brawl. Notice that even the lowest characters are pulled into the family quarrel — the feud is not aristocratic theatre, it is a social fact. The play's deepest political claim: a feud between two powerful houses corrupts an entire city. The deaths of the lovers are the cost the city pays for the feud's continuation.
The Prince's closing speech — "For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo" — is itself a rhymed couplet, the play closing its formal frame. The families reconcile over the bodies. The play asks whether the reconciliation was worth the cost. The Chorus opened with the ending; the Prince closes with the verdict. Between them, Shakespeare has shown us how it happened — and made the question of why unanswerable.
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