Description:

In a society dominated by religion and bound by ties of strict family loyalty, two teenagers are trapped by their secret love. As a dangerous vendetta spills onto the streets, the young lovers are forced to risk all to be together in Shakespeare’s fast-paced tragedy of thwarted love. Under the editorial supervision of Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, two of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, this Modern Library series incorporates definitive texts and authoritative notes from William Shakespeare: Complete Works. Each play includes an Introduction as well as an overview of Shakespeare’s theatrical career; commentary on past and current productions based on interviews with leading directors, actors, and designers; scene-by-scene analysis; key facts about the work; a chronology of Shakespeare’s life and times; and black-and-white illustrations. Ideal for students, theater professionals, and general readers, these modern and accessible editions from the Royal Shakespeare Company set a new standard in Shakespearean literature for the twenty-first century.

Review

The conventional wisdom has frozen Romeo and Juliet into the shape of a love story, the kind whose title becomes shorthand for passion so overwhelming it cancels the world. That is not, on a careful reading, what the play actually does. Shakespeare’s tragedy is far more interested in the machinery by which private feeling is crushed by public categories—names, households, laws—than it is in celebrating the feeling itself. The lovers are not martyrs to love; they are exhibits in a demonstration of institutional failure. The Chorus tells us before a line of dialogue has been spoken that these “star-cross’d lovers” will die and that their deaths will “bury their parents’ strife.” The play that follows is not a suspense about whether they will live but an anatomy of how every mediating structure—the church, the state, the family, even the friendly counsel of the Nurse—collapses under the pressure of a feud it cannot end. To read Romeo and Juliet as romance is to miss the coldness at its centre.

From its opening brawl between servingmen who cannot even coherently explain why they are fighting, the play establishes that the “ancient grudge” is an inheritance emptied of content, an “airy word” that kills anyway. Sampson and Gregory bite their thumbs, Abram and Balthasar bristle, Benvolio tries to keep the peace and is himself drawn into the violence by Tybalt, who “hates the word” peace “as I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee.” None of these men can articulate the origin of the quarrel; the feud has become a self-perpetuating ritual, a set of reflexes. The Prince’s intervention is the first of the institutional failures the play will catalogue: he can threaten death for further breach, but the threat does not prevent Tybalt from challenging Romeo the moment he sees him at the Capulet ball. Law can suppress brawls; it cannot suppress hatred. That distinction—between what force can stop and what force cannot touch—is the play’s real subject.

The lovers’ own encounter is framed as an escape from the categories the feud imposes, and the dramatic form of that escape is the shared sonnet. When Romeo first sees Juliet, he does not know her name; what he sees is light—

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear; Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!

The imagery is Neoplatonic and Petrarchan, the beloved as celestial radiance, but Shakespeare immediately converts the convention into something reciprocal. The sonnet the lovers then construct between them—

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this; For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

—is a closed form, traditionally the vehicle of unrequitable longing, that here becomes a mutual contract, completed line for line on first touch. The device is extraordinary: the sonnet, a genre of solitary desire, is turned into a dialogue, a marriage. And then, immediately, the Nurse enters to reveal the name: “His name is Romeo, and a Montague, / The only son of your great enemy.” The poetry has given them a world in which names do not matter; the social world answers that names are everything. The entire remainder of the play is the collision between those two claims.

Juliet’s balcony speech—

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, Retain that dear perfection which he owes.

—is often quoted as the play’s philosophical centre, and it is, but not in the way admirers of the romance suppose. The argument that the name is separable from the thing is the argument the play systematically tests and, in practical terms, refutes. Romeo can agree to be “new baptis’d”; he can take “thee” as his name. But when he kills Tybalt hours after the secret wedding, it is as a Montague avenging a friend, and the Prince sentences him not as Juliet’s husband but as a murderer under Veronan law. The banishment, which Romeo calls worse than death—

“Banished”? O friar, the damned use that word in hell.

—is the moment the name reasserts its grip. The lovers have refused the categories in speech; the city refuses to let them refuse. That gap is the tragedy.

Friar Lawrence is the play’s most interesting failure because he is the figure who most explicitly names the danger and then walks directly into it. His first speech, gathering herbs at dawn, introduces the play’s governing botanical metaphor: the same plant can be medicine or poison depending on its application. “Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,” he says, “And vice sometime by action dignified.” When Romeo arrives demanding to be married that day, the Friar cautions, “Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.” And yet he agrees, hoping the union will “turn your households’ rancour to pure love.” He then presides over a wedding at which he delivers the play’s most concentrated piece of self-defeating prophecy:

These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, Which as they kiss consume.

The lines name everything that will happen. The Friar speaks them and then marries the lovers anyway, trusting that his own mediation—the “holy church”—can contain what he has just described as an explosion. It cannot. When Juliet arrives in Act IV, cornered by the Paris marriage, the Friar’s scheme is a desperate escalation: a sleeping potion to feign death, a letter to Mantua, a rendezvous at the tomb. Every link in the chain depends on perfect communication in a city whose infrastructure is actively breaking down. The letter is entrusted to Friar John, who is stopped by a plague quarantine he cannot circumvent. The Friar, hearing the news, can only say, “Unhappy fortune! By my brotherhood, / The letter was not nice but full of charge.” The church has been outmanoeuvred by a public health measure. It is a devastating piece of dramatic anti-climax: the institution that was supposed to mediate between private love and public order cannot even deliver a message across a quarantined wall.

The pivot from comedy to tragedy is Mercutio’s death, and it is worth pausing on why this death, rather than the lovers’, is the genuine catastrophe of the play’s structure. Mercutio is the rational sceptic, the anti-Petrarchan who mocks Romeo’s love-sickness and delivers the Queen Mab speech as a rebuke to the very idea of dreams. He belongs to neither house; his relation to the Prince makes him a figure of the civic order, not the domestic feud. When Tybalt challenges Romeo and Romeo—now secretly Tybalt’s kinsman—refuses to fight, Mercutio draws because the indecision offends his sense of honour. He is stabbed under Romeo’s arm as Romeo tries to part the combatants. His dying words are not a lament for himself but a curse on the entire social order:

A plague o’ both your houses! I am sped.

The curse is the play’s true verdict. It converts the private quarrel into a public doom and announces that the feud no longer respects its own boundaries: it is now killing the innocent, the witty, the alive. After this moment, the play cannot return to comedy. Romeo’s “O, I am fortune’s fool!” after he kills Tybalt is the recognition that he has become an instrument of the feud even as he tried to step outside it. The “fortune” he blames is the accumulation of accidents the play will now accelerate toward the tomb.

The second half of the play is an extended experiment in dramatic irony, and the device is so dominant that it becomes the mode of the tragedy itself. From the moment Juliet drinks the potion in Act IV—alone, terrified that it might be poison, that she might wake before Romeo arrives, that she might be trapped with Tybalt’s “festering” corpse—the audience possesses knowledge the characters cannot share. Every word Romeo speaks at the tomb is addressed to a woman we know will wake. “Death, that hath suck’d the honey of thy breath, / Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty,” he says, and the gap between his belief and the audience’s knowledge is pure pain. Shakespeare compounds the agony by bringing Paris to the tomb at the same moment, having Romeo kill a man he does not even recognise, and then drinking the poison with a kiss:

O true apothecary! Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.

The Friar arrives too late. Juliet wakes, finds Romeo dead, refuses the Friar’s frantic offer of a convent—the last institutional refuge—and takes the dagger. The lovers who began by sharing a sonnet end by sharing a tomb. The form has completed itself, but as tragedy, not fulfilment.

What, then, does the ending mean? Prince Escalus arrives to survey the wreckage and delivers the play’s homiletic conclusion:

See what a scourge is laid upon your hate, That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love!

The lines are Senecan in their moralising, a Tudor tragedy’s instruction to its survivors: hatred has killed what you loved. Capulet and Montague, shaken, agree to raise golden statues of each other’s dead child. The gesture is civic and public—statues, not private grief—and it converts the lovers into monuments. But it is impossible not to notice that the reconciliation is bought at the cost of the lovers’ lives, and that the statues are a form of reification that does nothing to address the original problem: the feud died with its children, which is not so much a solution as an extinction. The Prince’s closing couplet—“For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo”—deliberately reverses the lovers’ names, placing Juliet first, as if the play itself is making a final, tiny assertion of her agency even in the epitaph. But agency to do what? To die last, to choose the dagger over Paris’s bed? That is the play’s most uncomfortable question, and it is left hanging.

Romeo and Juliet inhabits several intellectual traditions simultaneously, and it is by tracking their operation that the play’s sophistication becomes clearest. The Petrarchan sonnet tradition is the most obvious: Mercutio explicitly compares Romeo to “Petrarch flowed in numbers,” invoking Laura as the unreachable beloved, and the lovers’ first exchange is a sonnet that the play completes rather than leaving suspended. The Ovidian template of Pyramus and Thisbe—lovers divided by a wall, double suicide—is openly alluded to (Mercutio’s “a grey eye or so” glances at Thisbe) but crucially altered: Shakespeare gives his lovers physical consummation before the catastrophe, which makes their deaths not the result of unconsummated longing but of a social order that cannot tolerate the consummation it has inadvertently enabled. The de casibus tradition of falls-of-princes tragedy, with its moral drawn at the end, is the frame the Prince’s speech both invokes and partially subverts: the moral is there, but it feels insufficient to the destruction it follows. And the Renaissance Neoplatonism of the balcony scene—Juliet as “the sun,” Romeo’s desire to be “a glove upon that hand”—is the vocabulary the lovers use to imagine a world outside the feud, a world structured by light and ascent rather than by blood and name. The play does not mock that vocabulary; it stages its collision with the brute facts of Verona and lets the collision produce the tragedy.

The cross-references that litter the text—Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Hero, King Cophetua and the beggar-maid—are almost all delivered by Mercutio, and they function as a running critique of the lovers’ self-mythologising. Mercutio’s catalogue of famous loves is a deflation: Dido is a “dowdy,” Cleopatra a “gypsy,” Helen and Hero “hildings and harlots.” By reducing legendary passion to mockery, Mercutio insists on the ordinariness of desire, its susceptibility to ridicule and time. His assassination removes that critical voice and leaves the lovers’ poetry to stand unironised, but the audience has already heard the critique, and it persists as an undertone. The play is always aware that the grand passion it depicts could, from another angle, be entirely ridiculous; that awareness is what keeps it from sentimentality.

The play’s limitations are real, and they are the limitations of its form and its historical moment. The reliance on coincidence—the plague quarantine that stops Friar John, Balthasar’s arrival in Mantua a moment before the letter, the missed encounter at the tomb—can feel mechanically convenient in a way that strains the tragic dignity the final act requires. The Friar’s plan is so manifestly reckless that one wonders whether Shakespeare intends the audience to question his judgment or simply to accept the exigencies of the plot. The Nurse’s betrayal in Act III, when she counsels Juliet to marry Paris, is psychologically plausible—she is a servant, afraid—but dramatically rushed: her loyalty evaporates in a dozen lines, and Juliet’s “Ancient damnation! O most wicked fiend!” is an epitaph on a relationship the play has not given enough room to die slowly. Juliet’s age, thirteen, is an uncomfortable fact the play offers no way to process; it is simply there, a datum of Capulet’s household management. And the comic subplot—the musicians, Peter’s quibbling—feels, in the shadow of the tomb, like a vestigial organ from a different play.

What the play does, and does with terrifying economy, is to stage the destruction of female agency under a patriarchal order that refuses to see the daughter as a subject. Juliet’s arc is the sharpest thing in the play: she begins as a girl who “dreams not” of marriage and within four days has defied her father, her mother, the Nurse, the Prince’s law, and death itself. When Capulet rages at her refusal of Paris—“I tell thee what: get thee to church o’ Thursday, / Or never after look me in the face”—the threat is disinheritance, social death. Juliet chooses literal death over a life as Paris’s wife. That is not a celebration of love; it is an indictment of a household that has made death preferable to its own arrangements. The Nurse, who had been Juliet’s only confidante, becomes the voice of accommodation: “I think it best you married with the County. / O, he’s a lovely gentleman! / Romeo’s a dishclout to him.” Juliet’s isolation after that moment is total. She has no ally but the Friar, and the Friar’s aid is the potion that puts her in the tomb. The play is an almost clinical demonstration of what happens when a young woman’s will is backed into a corner from which the only exit is a knife.

Yet to read the play as merely a feminist tragedy would be to miss the other half of the design. Romeo’s trajectory is equally an indictment of a culture of masculine honour that makes violence the only available response to grief. His refusal to fight Tybalt is the right ethical choice—he knows Tybalt is now his kinsman—but the play punishes him for it by killing Mercutio, and then punishes him again when he reverses course and kills Tybalt. There is no correct move in the feud’s logic. Every action, even the refusal to act, produces death. Romeo’s final speech in the tomb is a lover’s apostrophe, but it is also a speech full of the vocabulary of control: he will “shake the yoke of inauspicious stars,” he will “set up my everlasting rest.” The suicide is framed as an act of agency, the last thing he can choose. But the choice is death, and the agency is only the agency to end agency. The play leaves unresolved the question Mercutio’s curse raised: whether the lovers are actors or instruments, whether they have been “star-cross’d” or simply outmanoeuvred by circumstances that look, in retrospect, like fate.

The language of the play is, from first to last, a language of oxymoron and paradox, and this is not ornament but argument. Romeo’s “O brawling love! O loving hate! / O anything of nothing first create!” and Juliet’s “Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical, / Dove-feather’d raven, wolvish-ravening lamb!” are the linguistic form of their existential condition: they are contradictions made flesh, enemies who are lovers, poisoners who are healers, deaths that are marriages. The oxymoron is the rhetoric of being “star-cross’d,” and the play extends it from the characters’ speech into the structure: the wedding becomes a funeral, the sleeping potion creates a living death, the tomb becomes a bridal bed. The lovers cannot speak without collapsing opposites because opposites are what the feud has made of them.

What is a reader to do with a play that announces its ending in the first fourteen lines and then spends two hours’ traffic demonstrating why the ending was unavoidable? For a contemporary audience, raised on narratives that prize surprise, Romeo and Juliet can feel like a puzzle box with no secret compartment. Its pleasures are not the pleasures of plot but of pattern, of watching the machinery tighten. The Chorus’s promise that “what here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend” suggests that the play is self-conscious about its own inadequacy as language to contain the thing it depicts. That self-consciousness is what separates it from the simpler moralities of its time. The Prince’s closing moral is offered, but the audience has just watched Juliet kiss Romeo’s lips for any remaining poison, and the power of that image overwhelms the homily that follows. The play does not preach; it exhibits, and what it exhibits is a world in which love is real, names are real, and the distance between them is measured in bodies.

This edition, drawn from the Project Gutenberg transcript, presents the complete dramatic text without scholarly apparatus, variant readings, or textual notes. Readers seeking the complexities of the Quarto and Folio traditions, the debates over “runaway’s eyes” or the provenance of the Queen Mab speech, will need to look elsewhere. But the bare text, stripped of commentary, has its own value: it forces the encounter with the play as a theatrical artefact, a thing meant to be spoken and seen. The absence of notes makes the language’s difficulty more acute, and for some readers that will be a barrier; for others, it will be an invitation to work through the verse without intermediaries. The play is, after all, its own best gloss: every oxymoron explains itself, every prophecy is fulfilled on stage, and the audience that watches the Friar’s “violent delights” warning knows exactly what it is watching.

Romeo and Juliet is not a play for people in love. It is a play for people who want to understand why love, in certain social orders, is a transgression severe enough to require death. It is a play about what happens when the categories that organise a city—Montague, Capulet, citizen, exile—cannot be softened to accommodate the people who fall between them. It is, finally, a play about the failure of every institution that claims to mediate: the church cannot deliver its letter, the state cannot prevent the brawl, the family cannot hear its daughter without threatening to disown her. The lovers die not because they love too much but because the world has no category for what they have become to each other. That is the “woe” the Prince announces at the end, and it is the reason, four centuries later, that the play still draws blood.