Romeo and Juliet is the most famous love story in the English literary tradition. Love is naturally the play’s dominant and most important theme. The play focuses on romantic love, specifically the intense passion that springs up at first sight between Romeo and Juliet. In Romeo and Juliet, love is a violent, ecstatic, overpowering force that supersedes all other values, loyalties, and emotions. In the course of the play, the young lovers are driven to defy their entire social world: families, friends, and ruler(ie. The Prince). Love is the overriding theme of the play, but a reader should always remember that Shakespeare is uninterested in portraying a prettied-up, dainty version of the emotion, the kind that bad poets write about, and whose bad poetry Romeo reads while pining for Rosaline, these are known as Petrarchan sonnets.
Romeo and Juliet does not make a specific moral statement about the relationships between love and society, religion, and family; rather, it portrays the chaos and passion of being in love, combining images of love, violence, death, religion, and family in an impressionistic rush leading to the play’s tragic conclusion.
Much of Romeo and Juliet involves the lovers’ struggles against public and social institutions that either explicitly or implicitly oppose the existence of their love. Such structures range from the concrete to the abstract: families and the placement of familial power in the father; law and the desire for public order; religion; and the social importance placed on masculine honor. These institutions often come into conflict with each other. The importance of honor, for example, time and again results in brawls that disturb the public peace.
Though they do not always work in concert, each of these societal institutions in some way present obstacles for Romeo and Juliet. The enmity between their families, coupled with the emphasis placed on loyalty and honor to kin, combine to create a profound conflict for Romeo and Juliet, who must rebel against their heritages. Further, the patriarchal power structure inherent in Renaissance families, wherein the father controls the action of all other family members, particularly women, places Juliet in an extremely vulnerable position. Her heart, in her family’s mind, is not hers to give. The law and the emphasis on social civility demands terms of conduct with which the blind passion of love cannot comply. Religion similarly demands priorities that Romeo and Juliet cannot abide by because of the intensity of their love. Though in most situations the lovers uphold the traditions of Christianity (they wait to marry before consummating their love), their love is so powerful that they begin to think of each other in blasphemous terms. For example, Juliet calls Romeo “the god of my idolatry,” elevating Romeo to level of God (2.1.156). The couple’s final act of suicide is likewise un-Christian. The maintenance of masculine honor forces Romeo to commit actions he would prefer to avoid. But the social emphasis placed on masculine honor is so profound that Romeo cannot simply ignore them.
It is possible to see Romeo and Juliet as a battle between the responsibilities and actions demanded by social institutions and those demanded by the private desires of the individual. Romeo and Juliet’s appreciation of night, with its darkness and privacy, and their renunciation of their names, with its attendant loss of obligation, make sense in the context of individuals who wish to escape the public world. But the lovers cannot stop the night from becoming day. And Romeo cannot cease being a Montague simply because he wants to; the rest of the world will not let him. The lovers’ suicides can be understood as the ultimate night, the ultimate privacy.
Due to the ongoing feud between the Capulets and the Montagues, violence permeates the world of Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare demonstrates how intrinsic violence is to the play’s environment in the first scene. Sampson and Gregory open the play by making jokes about perpetrating violent acts against members of the Montague family. And when Lord Montague’s servant, Abram, appears, their first response is to prepare for a fight. Gregory instructs Sampson, “Draw thy tool!” (I.i.29), and Sampson does so immediately. Tempers among the young men of Verona are clearly short, as further demonstrated when Tybalt spots Romeo at the Capulet ball and spoils for a fight. Lord Capulet succeeds in temporarily calming Tybalt, but the latter’s fury continues to smolder until the top of Act III, when he tries to provoke a duel with Romeo, fatally wounds Mercutio, and ends up slain by Romeo’s hand. Though tragic, this turn of events also seems inevitable. Given how the feud between the two families continuously fans the flames of hatred and thereby maintains a low-burning rage, such flaring outbursts of violence appear inescapable.
Violence in the play has a particularly significant relationship with sex. This is true in a general sense, in the way the feud casts a shadow of violence over Romeo and Juliet’s romance. But it also comes up in more localized examples. Sampson sets the stage for this link in the play’s opening scene, when he proclaims his desire to attack the Montague men and sexually assault the Montague women: “I will / push Montague’s men from the wall and thrust / his maids to the wall” (I.i.15–17). Sex and violence are also twinned in the events following Romeo and Juliet’s wedding. These events frame Act III, which opens with the scene in which Romeo ultimately slays Tybalt, and closes with the scene after Romeo stays the night with Juliet, possibly consummating their marriage. Even the language of sex in the play conjures violent imagery. When at the end of Act III Romeo declares, “Let me be put to death” (III.v.17), he’s referring to the real threat of being put to death by the Capulets if he’s found in Juliet’s room, but he’s also making a sexual pun, since “death” is slang for orgasm.
Romeo and Juliet are both very young, and Shakespeare uses the two lovers to spotlight the theme of youth in several ways. Romeo, for instance, is closely linked to the young men with whom he roves the streets of Verona. These young men are short-tempered and quick to violence, and their rivalries with opposing groups of young men indicates a phenomenon not unlike modern gang culture (though we should remember that Romeo and his friends are also the privileged elite of the city). In addition to this association with gangs of youthful men, Shakespeare also depicts Romeo as somewhat immature. Romeo’s speech about Rosaline in the play’s first scene is full of clichéd phrases from love poetry, and Benvolio and Mercutio take turns poking fun at him for this. They also mock Romeo for being so hung up on one woman. Benvolio in particular implies that Romeo’s seriousness prevents him from acting his age. He’s still young, and he should therefore take his time and explore relations with other women: “Compare [Rosaline’s] face with some that I shall show, / And I will make thee think thy swan a crow” (I.ii.87–88).
Whereas we never learn Romeo’s precise age, we know that Juliet is thirteen. Her age comes up early in the play, during conversations about whether or not she’s too young to get married. Juliet’s mother insists that she’s reached “a pretty age” (I.iii.11), but her father describes her as “yet a stranger in the world” (I.ii.8) and hence not yet ready to marry. Although Juliet does not want to marry Paris, she certainly believes herself old enough for marriage. In fact, she yearns for marriage and for sexual experience, and she often uses explicitly erotic language that indicates a maturity beyond her actual years. Yet in spite of this apparent maturity, Juliet also tacitly acknowledges her own youthfulness. When she looks forward to her wedding night, for example, she compares herself to “an impatient child” (III.ii.30), reminding the audience that in fact, this is what she is. Such acknowledgments of the lovers’ youth ultimately serve to amplify the tragedy of their premature death. Indeed, one of the saddest aspects of the play is that the lovers die so young, cutting their lives (and their relationship) so tragically short.
The theme of ill-fated love frames the story of Romeo and Juliet from the beginning. During the Prologue, before the play officially commences, the Chorus makes several allusions to fate, including the famous reference to Romeo and Juliet as a “pair of star-crossed lovers.” Shakespeare coined the term “star-crossed,” which means “not favored by the stars,” or “ill-fated.” Although the term may seem primarily metaphorical today, the science of astrology occupied a place of privilege in Renaissance society. Thus, the notion that one’s fate was written in the stars had a more immediate, literal meaning than it does today. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, then, their fates are cosmically misaligned. Later in the Prologue, the Chorus reiterates the idea of fate in referring to Romeo and Juliet’s love as “death-marked,” which once again indicates that, from the very beginning, their desire for one another carry a sign or omen of inevitable death. Shakespeare’s use of the word “marked” here also suggests a physical inscription, alluding to the notion that their fate has been pre-written.
It may seem counterintuitive for Shakespeare to open his play by spoiling its ending, but this choice about how to tell the story allows Shakespeare to incorporate the theme of predetermined fate into the play’s very structure. Uniting the theme of fate with the play’s structure in this way introduces a sense of dramatic irony, such that the audience will have more insight into the unfolding events than the characters. Watching the characters struggle against an invisible and unbeatable force such as fate heightens the sense of tension throughout the play. It also amplifies the sense of tragedy at the play’s conclusion. For instance, when Romeo cries out, “I defy you, stars!” (V.i.), the audience knows that his headstrong resistance is no match for fate, and acknowledging this impotence only makes Romeo’s agony that much more painful. In the end, then, mentioning Romeo and Juliet’s fate at the beginning of the play doesn’t spoil the ending. Instead, it locks the audience into a sense of tense anticipation of inescapable tragedy.