Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet Review

Romeo and Juliet is the play that made Shakespeare famous in his own lifetime, and it has never stopped being performed — which tells you something important about how well its mechanism is built. The action covers five days. Within those five days, ten people die, two families are broken, and a city is changed. The formal architecture is so tight that there is no slack in it anywhere: every scene advances the catastrophe, and every apparent comedy — Mercutio’s death is the hinge — becomes retroactively inevitable.

What the play does that its imitators almost never manage is to make the love credible and the catastrophe structural at the same time. Romeo and Juliet are not destroyed by a misunderstanding, or by wickedness, or by weakness of will. They are destroyed by the logic of the world they inhabit, which offers them no safe space in which their love could survive. The feud is not background; it is the play’s true subject. The lovers are its casualties.

Shakespeare’s language here is at its most frankly lyrical. The balcony scene, the aubade after the wedding night, the speeches in the tomb — these are passages where the verse does something that prose simply cannot, compressing feeling and thought into a density that lingers long after the details have blurred. The play is often taught to teenagers, which risks making it feel like an obligation rather than an experience. Read or seen with attention, it remains startling: a love story that is also a precise diagnosis of how societies eat their young.

This Folger Shakespeare Library edition includes authoritative text, full explanatory notes, and performance history that deepens every reading.

Reviewed edition: Folger Shakespeare Library / Simon & Schuster (ISBN 074347712X)

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Romeo and Juliet apart: The compression of the plot — five days from first meeting to double death — gives the play an almost unbearable momentum; The language shifts register with extraordinary precision, from the bawdy comedy of Mercutio to the lyrical intensity of the balcony scene; and Juliet is Shakespeare’s most fully realized young female character — practical, brave, and morally clear-eyed in a way Romeo never is. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Romeo and Juliet give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Fate and free will are not opposed — Shakespeare shows how character itself can function as destiny. The feud is presented as a social pathology that destroys precisely what it claims to protect. Juliet’s development across the play’s short span is a compressed study in the acquisition of tragic maturity. The Prologue’s announcement of the ending transforms every subsequent scene into an elegy for what cannot be saved. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Reading Experience

Romeo and Juliet is the kind of book that changes slightly depending on when you read it. The surface — plot, character, setting — remains constant, but the reader brings different things to it at different points in life, and the book meets them there. This is a property of enduring work, and it distinguishes Romeo and Juliet from titles that are consumed once and not returned to.

Limitations

Romeo’s impetuosity strains credulity even within the play’s accelerated time frame. The friar’s potion plot is a mechanical device that requires a great deal of coincidence to collapse as it does. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Sources, Staging History, and Musical Adaptations

Romeo and Juliet was written c. 1594–1596; the play exists in two early quartos (1597 and 1599) with textual differences that suggest multiple versions in performance. The immediate source is Arthur Brooke’s 1562 narrative poem “The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet,” which was itself based on Matteo Bandello’s 1554 Italian novella, part of a tradition of Romeo and Juliet variants going back to Luigi da Porto’s 1530 story.

Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film — casting the then-unknown Olivia Hussey (15) and Leonard Whiting (17) as the leads, the youngest actors to play the roles in a major film adaptation — became the highest-grossing Shakespeare film of its era; its insistence on age-appropriate casting and lush Italian location shooting set a standard subsequent productions have been judged against. Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 “Romeo + Juliet” relocated the action to a fictional Californian city, Verona Beach, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, using Shakespeare’s original text in a deliberately anachronistic setting.

Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet (1935, first staged 1940) is among the most frequently performed ballets of the 20th century; Kenneth MacMillan’s 1965 choreography for the Royal Ballet, with Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn in the original cast, remains in repertoire. Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957), transplanting the story to rival New York street gangs, is the most successful theatrical adaptation, running 732 performances on Broadway in its initial run; the 1961 film won ten Academy Awards, and Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake received six nominations.

One further detail repays attention: Juliet is thirteen. Romeo’s age is unspecified, but probably not much older. Shakespeare is writing about the specific quality of adolescent love — absolute, without the self-protective irony that experience installs — and the tragedy depends on that absoluteness. Older people would survive this story. Only the young are capable of the kind of love that cannot compromise, which is why only they are destroyed by it.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.8/5 — The most perfectly constructed of Shakespeare’s tragedies — a play in which every choice the lovers make is simultaneously the only choice they could make, and every one of them is fatal.