Romeo and Juliet, written around 1594–1596, is Shakespeare's tragedy of two young lovers from feuding families in Verona. Their secret marriage, a fatal duel and a plan that goes wrong lead both to their deaths, which finally reconcile the Montagues and the Capulets.
The story
Romeo, a Montague, slips into a Capulet feast and falls in love with Juliet, the daughter of the house. That night, under her balcony, they declare their love, and the next day Friar Laurence marries them in secret.
When Juliet's cousin Tybalt kills Romeo's friend Mercutio, Romeo kills Tybalt and is banished. To escape a forced marriage, Juliet takes a potion that makes her seem dead; Romeo, not warned in time, poisons himself at her tomb, and she stabs herself when she wakes.
Shakespeare drew on Arthur Brooke's long English poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), itself based on Italian novellas by Luigi da Porto and Matteo Bandello.
The play mixes comedy and tragedy, puns and sonnets: the lovers' first exchange is written as a shared sonnet, and the Chorus opens the play with another.
Afterlife
The play was printed in a first quarto in 1597 and has never left the stage. It inspired Berlioz's dramatic symphony, Gounod's opera, Prokofiev's ballet and Tchaikovsky's overture.
Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (1957) moved the story to New York, and films by Franco Zeffirelli (1968) and Baz Luhrmann (1996) brought it to new generations.
Anecdotes
Letters to Juliet
Every year thousands of letters addressed to Juliet arrive in Verona, where volunteers of the Club di Giulietta answer them. A house with a balcony is shown to tourists as hers, though the balcony was added in the twentieth century.
Wherefore
In Juliet's famous question from the balcony, 'wherefore' means 'why', not 'where': she is asking why Romeo has to be a Montague.
Frequently asked questions
Where is Romeo and Juliet set?
In Verona, with one act partly in Mantua, where Romeo is banished.
How old is Juliet?
She is not yet fourteen, as her nurse and her mother point out in the play.
What was Shakespeare's main source?
Arthur Brooke's poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562).