how is capulet presented in romeo and juliet essay

Exemplar Essay: Lord Capulet

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is about how strong emotions can have tragic consequences. Through the character of Lord Capulet, Shakespeare challenges traditional attitudes to arranged marriage, implying that, if strong feelings of love are ignored by families who force their families into arranged marriages, there can be tragic consequences.

In the extract, taken from Act One Scene Two of the play, Lord Capulet is portrayed by Shakespeare as a good, loving father. Shakespeare has Lord Capulet describe Juliet as a ‘stranger to the world’, which demonstrates that he is hesitant in arranging the marriage too quickly, aware of the damage this may cause to Juliet’s youth and innocence. In fact, during the sixteenth century, the legal age for marriage was twelve years old and the fact that Juliet is unmarried at thirteen years old shows that Capulet sincerely cares for her wellbeing. In Elizabethan society, the father would always arrange the marriage of the daughter for practical reasons, in a way that suits the family and provides the daughter with a secure future. The Elizabethan audience would therefore have recognised that Lord Capulet was trying to fulfil his role as a good father and would have perceived his decision to delay the marriage for two years as very protective. Shakespeare’s choice to present Lord Capulet in this way makes his actions all the more shocking later in the play, when Juliet refuses to marry Paris.

In the extract Shakespeare makes clear that Juliet is the most important thing left to Juliet. Shakespeare has Lord Capulet describe Juliet as ‘the hopeful lady of my earth’. Shakespeare’s use of the word ‘hopeful’ conveys to the audience that Capulet has high ambitions for Juliet, which, ultimately, for a woman of Juliet’s status, would be a good marriage. Lord Capulet states that the ‘earth has swallowed all my hopes but she’. Shakespeare’s use of a metaphor in these words refers to the fact that the Capulets have experienced several miscarriages, thus their only hope of the family name being continued by a child of theirs is placed in Juliet. Perhaps this explains why Lord Capulet is so concerned with ensuring that this is a good match for Juliet, and one that she is happy with. An Elizabethan audience, familiar with the concept of arranged marriage, would have recognised that Lord Capulet’s actions in choosing Paris as a suitor were beneficial for Juliet.

In the extract, Shakespeare demonstrates that Lord Capulet seems willing to seek Juliet’s consent in the marriage . Shakespeare has him command Paris to ‘woo her’ and ‘get her heart’, which indicates that he wishes for there to be love and happiness within the arrangement. He also refers to the fact that Juliet should be ‘agreed’ to the marriage, although, of course, ‘within her scope of choice’. Again, an Elizabethan audience, familiar with arranged marriage, would have understood that Juliet’s choice of suitor would be limited, and would have respected Lord Capulet for giving Juliet a degree of freedom and independence in the decision. It is clear, therefore, that Shakespeare is presenting Lord Capulet in a way that commands respect from his Elizabethan audience at this point in the play.

Later in the play, the audience sees a different side to Capulet, through his aggressive and threatening behaviour towards Juliet . After Tybalt’s death, Lord Capulet brings the marriage to Paris forward, misunderstanding Juliet’s tears as tears for Tybalt, and believing that a marriage will bring her joy. When Juliet refuses to respect his wishes, Shakespeare has him respond angrily with the words ‘hang, beg, starve, die in the streets’. Shakespeare’s use of violent and cold language within these words contrasts greatly with the protective words Capulet uttered to Paris in act one. This contrast undermines how protective he seemed in act one; it is hard to believe that his willingness to seek Juliet’s ‘consent’ was sincere, as he now threatens homelessness or death if she continues to disobey his orders. An Elizabethan audience may have sympathised with Lord Capulet’s response because his actions reflect the patriarchal attitudes of the time; it was highly unusual for a girl of Juliet’s age and status to disobey her father in this way. In spite of this, it is hard not to hold Lord Capulet partly responsible for Juliet’s death. Perhaps if Lord Capulet had tried to understand his daughter’s wishes, her death could be avoided. Shakespeare could therefore be aiming to educate parents to pay more attention to the feelings of their children, allowing them to marry later and not forcing them to marry young.

In the final scene, Shakespeare reaffirms the love that Lord Capulet has for Juliet. When the characters assemble at the tomb, Lord Capulet is the first to initiate the end of the feud, reaching out a hand to Lord Montague and offering to build a golden statue of Romeo in his memory. These actions demonstrate love and respect for Juliet. It appears that, after her death, he is willing to acknowledge her own choice of husband and build a statue that will remember their love and marriage forever. Perhaps Shakespeare presents Lord Capulet in this way to give his audience hope that, through the tragedy, the parental figures have learned to pay more attention to the feelings of their children.

In conclusion, it is clear that Lord Capulet tries to be a good father, arranging a marriage that he thinks will secure a good future for her. Unfortunately, the fact that is unused to his authority being challenged, and unwillingness to consider her feelings, results in her dying tragically young. Perhaps Shakespeare aimed to challenge traditional ideas of patriarchy and arranged marriage, which forced many young women into difficult situations.

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The Definitive Guide to Analysing Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’: Summary, Context, Themes & Characters

Thinking to yourself, “Notes, o notes, wherefore art my notes?” Well, if you’re struggling with your analysis of Romeo and Juliet for English, we’ve got your back with a summary featuring the key characters, context and themes!

On top of that, we’ve got a free example of an analysis table (also known as a TEE table ) and a sample paragraph on Romeo and Juliet for you to download! 

So, let’s dive into our analysis of Romeo and Juliet! 

Romeo and Juliet Summary Key Characters in Romeo and Juliet Context Themes Explored in Romeo and Juliet Analysis of Romeo and Juliet

Summary of Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet is a tragic love story by Shakespeare about two lovers who are not meant to be together as they come from feuding families.

To summarise it, Romeo of the Montagues and Juliet of the Capulets were born to be sworn enemies due to the life long conflict between their families. Yet, they embarked in a forbidden love together that led to their deaths, which finally reconciles the two families. 

The play is set out in five acts and we’ll dive into more detail on what happens during each of the acts. 

Access the Romeo and Juliet Downloadable Sample Paragraph and Examples of Analysis PDF here!

Act I of the play starts with a Chorus who introduces two powerful families in the City of Verona, Italy. These are the Montagues and Capulets, who have been on bad terms with one another for a long time.

The Capulets are holding a party for their daughter, Juliet, to meet Count Paris for an arranged marriage. Meanwhile, Romeo, the son of Montague, disguises himself and crashes the party with his friends in hopes of seeing Rosaline, his previous lover.

Instead, Romeo falls in love at first sight when he meets Juliet and the two become very attracted to each other. 

However, Romeo and Juliet soon discover that they come from opposing families and realise their doomed love . At the same time, Tybalt who is Juliet’s cousin, recognises Romeo and drives Romeo and his friends out from the Capulet house. 

In Act II, as Romeo’s friends were leaving the Capulet place, Romeo stays behind to find Juliet. Romeo sees Juliet in her window, and they confess their love for one another and agree to marry the next day .

Romeo runs to Friar Laurence, who agrees to help as he believes Romeo and Juliet’s marriage will end the feud between the Montagues and Capulets. With the help of Juliet’s nurse and Friar Laurence, Romeo and Juliet marry in secret. 

In Act III, Tybalt challenges Romeo to a fight. Romeo declines the fight and remains calm while being disrespected by Tybalt. This angers Romeo’s friend, Mercutio who starts a fight with Tybalt.

Romeo tries to stop the fight, but Mercutio is accidentally killed . Enraged, Romeo chases Tybalt down and kills him.

The Prince of Verona banishes Romeo for his crimes. Before Romeo leaves for Mantua, Friar Laurence helps Romeo and Juliet stay the night together.

Meanwhile, Lord Capulet arranges for Paris and Juliet to wed the next day. Juliet is upset because she does not want to marry Paris, and this angers her parents as they do not know about Juliet’s secret affair with Romeo. 

In Act IV, Juliet asks Friar Lawrence for help and he gives her a sleeping potion that will make her appear dead . The next morning, the Capulet family finds Juliet in her bed and believes that she had died.

Friar Laurence sends a messenger to inform Romeo about Juliet’s plan and instructs Romeo to collect a sleeping Juliet from the Capulet house. 

Act V is the most intense part of the story as the very important message did not reach Romeo in time due to the plague that delayed the messenger’s journey.

Instead, Romeo hears the news of Juliet’s death and buys himself poison. Romeo goes to Juliet’s tomb in the Capulet’s house, kills a grieving Paris, drinks the poison and dies before Juliet wakes up.

Friar Laurence enters but is too late. He tells Juliet what had happened and Juliet stabs herself from heartbreak.

Friar Laurence, the Prince, the Capulets and the Montague father come together and agree to make peace following the children’s death. 

Romeo and Juliet Characters

In case you’ve missed anything, here is a list of the key characters in Romeo and Juliet who are pivotal to the plot. 

Romeo Montague Romeo is the handsome son of the head of Montagues and is 16 years old. He is sensitive, though he can become quite impulsive when his emotions get the better of him. Unlike his friends, Romeo is not interested in violence but passionate about love. At the beginning of the play, Romeo was madly in love with Rosaline before falling in love with Juliet. Furthermore, Romeo shares his love for his own friends and family too, including Mercutio and Friar Laurence. 

Juliet Capulet Juliet is the beautiful 13 year old daughter of the Capulet family. Juliet starts off as a naive girl who knows little about love but soon gains the courage to go against her father’s wishes to marry Romeo in secret instead of marrying Paris like her father wanted. She’s loyal and trusts Romeo wholeheartedly, choosing to support Romeo despite him killing off her cousin, Tybalt. 

Friar Laurence  Friar Laurence is a Franciscan friar who helps Romeo and Juliet. He is a nice man who is also skilled in herbs and potion making. He always has a plan to help Romeo and Juliet in hopes that their relationship will calm the tension between two families and bring peace. 

Mercutio Mercutio is Romeo’s best friend and he is quite the character. He is loud, opinionated, and charismatic with a bombastic attitude that’s flowing in wit and sarcasm. He also has quite a hot temper. Unlike Romeo, Mercutio is highly hedonistic as he tries to convince Romeo to see love as a sexual pursuit. 

Tybalt Tybalt is Juliet’s cousin from her mother’s side. He is often protective over his family and he acts aggressive and violent whenever he feels offended. He absolutely hates the Montagues. 

Context of Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeare had written Romeo and Juliet based on the true love story from the 3rd century about two Italian lovers who come from the families Cappelletti and Montecchi . The play was written during the Renaissance period where there were great changes in religion, politics, science and the arts. 

When the play was written, Europe had just undergone ‘The Reformation’, where it transitioned from being a traditional Catholic nation to a Protestant society. When Europe was a Catholic society, mortal sin such as bigamy (where you marry someone else while being married to one person) was punished severely.

However, as it progressed into a Protestant nation that broke free from the strict rules of Catholicism, society gained more freedom and less oppression . As people exercised more freedom, they explored notions of humanism which is a Renaissance concept of individual power over their own lives. 

Fate and Destiny

Even so, the Elizabethan people still highly believed that their lives were tied to fate and destiny. If you think astrology is popular now, it was actually all the hype during the Elizabethan era!

Elizabethans would plan their whole lives based on astrology readings, including their love lives, travels and more depending on whether the stars favoured them.

As such, Elizabethans valued providentialism, the belief that they have no power in changing their fate as everything in their lives is already ‘predestined’ for them. 

Family Values

Family values were also kept quite traditional, as the Elizabethan society remained patriarchal. This means that the father was always the head of the household while the women were left with no rights, properties or legal authority , though they can influence their husbands’ decisions.

Children were also used as property and often engaged in arranged marriages as part of a political or financial deal to gain wealth.

Romeo and Juliet may seem too young to be married but in the Elizabethan years, it was considered normal for people to marry young.

As such, love was perceived to be a dream for Elizabethans who often enter into arranged marriages. It is often restrained with little contact between “lovers”, and the only expressions of love come in gifts, letters and poems.

This is perhaps why the Elizabethan audience were so enticed by Romeo and Juliet’s passionate love for one another , as this was rarely seen in their society. 

Appreciation for Theatre

That being said, plays were highly popular in the Elizabethan theatres. Here is where the rich and poor gather in rowdy crowds to watch plays.

Poorer people stood near the stages while richer people watched from stands above. As such, Shakespearean plays became really popular in this era , as there was a great appreciation for the arts across all groups from all backgrounds.  

Romeo and Juliet Themes

Here are three key themes from Romeo and Juliet. Feel free to look to these for inspiration when you’re planning to write your thesis and topic sentences in your essay . 

Fate VS Free Will

Shakespeare lived in a transition period where people were starting to gain their own freedom to live their lives, yet were still tied to the notions of fate and destiny. You can see this with his characters, Romeo and Juliet, who try to exercise their free will by choosing to be with one another despite their opposing family history.

Yet, it is Romeo and Juliet’s own actions and decisions that ultimately led to their doomed fate. This reinforces the Elizabethan belief that fate and destiny govern our lives, even when we try to control it ourselves. 

Some key quotes that explore this idea include: 

Love VS Conflict

It would be nice to say that “love conquers all” in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but it’s not as simple as that. 

Love and conflict coexist within this text. The love between Romeo and Juliet is seen as a sign of hope to bring peace to the ongoing feud between the Montagues and Capulets.

However, the conflict between families grew so violent that it had caused the deaths of their beloved children and the love between them. Ultimately, Shakespeare shows us that love affects conflict, and conflict affects love. 

Here are some quotes that allow you to explore this a bit deeper: 

The Freedom of Youth Rebellion

Have you ever wanted to do whatever you felt like, without your parents butting in?

If that’s a yes from you, you’ll probably be able to relate to Romeo and Juliet. These two are also young teenagers who rebel against their parents’ wishes and express their individuality through their love for one another.

However, an excess of youthful spirit can also lead to dire consequences, as Romeo and Juliet’s unbridled passion for one another led to their unfortunate end. 

Here are some key quotes that relate to this theme:

If none of these themes resonate with you, here are some other ideas that you may find interesting: 

• External conflict VS internal conflict 
• The conflict between independence VS family obligation 
• The consequences of unbridled emotions 

How to Analyse Romeo and Juliet in 3 Steps

Students often jump right into answering the question when writing their thesis for their essays. Many don’t realise that it is only after you’ve analysed your text that you can write an amazing thesis that not only answers the question, but proves that you really do know the text inside out. 

Let’s go through the three simple steps you can take to analyse Romeo and Juliet and ace that essay!

Step 1: Select your example(s)

You may be thinking to yourself, “There’s lots happening in Romeo and Juliet so where do I even start?”

A great place to start is to look for an example with a technique . This technique can offer a deeper insight into the text, which will help you form an in-depth analysis. 

Here are two quotes we have selected to focus on the theme of fate VS free will: 

“It is the east, and Juliet is the sun” 

“I defy you, stars!” 

Step 2: Identify your technique(s) 

Students often fall into the trap of listing every technique they can find or using highly complicated techniques in hopes of getting a good mark. This is not true! 

It is better to find a technique which allows you to talk about your theme in more depth and build your argument throughout your essay. 

Techniques that provide a deeper understanding of the text include symbols, metaphors, recurring motifs, allegories, connotations and similes. Try to avoid using surface level techniques such as alliteration or repetition. 

The three techniques found in the quotes above include simile, symbolism and allusion to astrology. 

If you can, try to find a few techniques within one quote to help you kill two birds with one stone! 

Step 3: Write the analysis 

When you’re writing an analysis, try not to list out every technique you can find in the quote. It is very important to explain what the effect of the technique is and how that relates to your argument.

An example of listing out techniques looks like this:

Simile is used as Romeo refers to Juliet as the metaphorical “Sun” and uses the symbolism of astrology as he “def(ies) you, stars” to allude to fate versus free will.  

To avoid this, we need to go into how each of these techniques support our argument.

First of all, the simile of Juliet being like the “Sun” reveals Romeo’s love for Juliet that transcends beyond their families’ feud. The symbol of the “Sun” is also important to emphasise the fated doom between the two star crossed lovers.

The allusion to astrology in “I defy you, stars!” shows how fate governs Romeo and Juliet’s relationship. Once we put these techniques together, our analysis will look like: 

Shakespeare’s simile in Romeo’s description of Juliet as the “Sun” reveals their perception that their love can transcend beyond the boundaries of their families’ strife. Yet, the symbolism of the “Sun” reminds the audience that Romeo and Juliet still remain as “star crossed lovers” who are destined to die despite their efforts to overcome their fated doom. As Romeo proclaims “I defy you, stars” before submitting to his fate, the astrological allusion reinforces how destiny continues to govern their lives, reinstating the Elizabethan belief that fate will always overpower free will.  

You’ve made it to the end! Find another sample analysis paragraph of Romeo and Juliet here !

Need some help with your essay analysis of other texts aside from Romeo and Juliet?

Check out other texts we’ve created guides for below:

• Lord of the Flies
• Photograph 51
• In Cold Blood
• The Meursault Investigation
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• The Book Thief
• Away by Michael Gow
• Blade Runner
• Fahrenheit 451

We’ve also got a bunch of articles specifically on plays by Shakespeare  which you can have a read through below:

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• The Merchant of Venice
• Much Ado About Nothing
• King Richard III
• The Tempest

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A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Although it was first performed in the 1590s, the first  documented  performance of Romeo and Juliet is from 1662. The diarist Samuel Pepys was in the audience, and recorded that he ‘saw “Romeo and Juliet,” the first time it was ever acted; but it is a play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life, and the worst acted that ever I saw these people do.’

Despite Pepys’ dislike, the play is one of Shakespeare’s best-loved and most famous, and the story of Romeo and Juliet is well known. However, the play has become so embedded in the popular psyche that Shakespeare’s considerably more complex play has been reduced to a few key aspects: ‘star-cross’d lovers’, a teenage love story, and the suicide of the two protagonists.

In the summary and analysis that follow, we realise that Romeo and Juliet is much more than a tragic love story.

Romeo and Juliet : brief summary

After the Prologue has set the scene – we have two feuding households, Montagues and Capulets, in the city-state of Verona; and young Romeo is a Montague while Juliet, with whom Romeo is destined to fall in love, is from the Capulet family, sworn enemies of the Montagues – the play proper begins with servants of the two feuding households taunting each other in the street.

When Benvolio, a member of house Montague, arrives and clashes with Tybalt of house Capulet, a scuffle breaks out, and it is only when Capulet himself and his wife, Lady Capulet, appear that the fighting stops. Old Montague and his wife then show up, and the Prince of Verona, Escalus, arrives and chastises the people for fighting. Everyone leaves except Old Montague, his wife, and Benvolio, Montague’s nephew. Benvolio tells them that Romeo has locked himself away, but he doesn’t know why.

Romeo appears and Benvolio asks his cousin what is wrong, and Romeo starts speaking in paradoxes, a sure sign that he’s in love. He claims he loves Rosaline, but will not return any man’s love. A servant appears with a note, and Romeo and Benvolio learn that the Capulets are holding a masked ball.

Benvolio tells Romeo he should attend, even though he is a Montague, as he will find more beautiful women than Rosaline to fall in love with. Meanwhile, Lady Capulet asks her daughter Juliet whether she has given any thought to marriage, and tells Juliet that a man named Paris would make an excellent husband for her.

Romeo attends the Capulets’ masked ball, with his friend Mercutio. Mercutio tells Romeo about a fairy named Queen Mab who enters young men’s minds as they dream, and makes them dream of love and romance. At the masked ball, Romeo spies Juliet and instantly falls in love with her; she also falls for him.

They kiss, but then Tybalt, Juliet’s kinsman, spots Romeo and recognising him as a Montague, plans to confront him. Old Capulet tells him not to do so, and Tybalt reluctantly agrees. When Juliet enquires after who Romeo is, she is distraught to learn that he is a Montague and thus a member of the family that is her family’s sworn enemies.

Romeo breaks into the gardens of Juliet’s parents’ house and speaks to her at her bedroom window. The two of them pledge their love for each other, and arrange to be secretly married the following night. Romeo goes to see a churchman, Friar Laurence, who agrees to marry Romeo and Juliet.

After the wedding, the feud between the two families becomes violent again: Tybalt kills Mercutio in a fight, and Romeo kills Tybalt in retaliation. The Prince banishes Romeo from Verona for his crime.

Juliet is told by her father that she will marry Paris, so Juliet goes to seek Friar Laurence’s help in getting out of it. He tells her to take a sleeping potion which will make her appear to be dead for two nights; she will be laid to rest in the family vault, and Romeo (who will be informed of the plan) can secretly come to her there.

However, although that part of the plan goes fine, the message to Romeo doesn’t arrive; instead, he hears that Juliet has actually died. He secretly visits her at the family vault, but his grieving is interrupted by the arrival of Paris, who is there to lay flowers. The two of them fight, and Romeo kills him.

Convinced that Juliet is really dead, Romeo drinks poison in order to join Juliet in death. Juliet wakes from her slumber induced by the sleeping draught to find Romeo dead at her side. She stabs herself.

The play ends with Friar Laurence telling the story to the two feuding families. The Prince tells them to put their rivalry behind them and live in peace.

Romeo and Juliet : analysis

How should we analyse Romeo and Juliet , one of Shakespeare’s most famous and frequently studied, performed, and adapted plays? Is Romeo and Juliet the great love story that it’s often interpreted as, and what does it say about the play – if it is a celebration of young love – that it ends with the deaths of both romantic leads?

It’s worth bearing in mind that Romeo and Juliet do not kill themselves specifically because they are forbidden to be together, but rather because a chain of events (of which their families’ ongoing feud with each other is but one) and a message that never arrives lead to a misunderstanding which results in their suicides.

Romeo and Juliet is often read as both a tragedy and a great celebration of romantic love, but it clearly throws out some difficult questions about the nature of love, questions which are rendered even more pressing when we consider the headlong nature of the play’s action and the fact that Romeo and Juliet meet, marry, and die all within the space of a few days.

Below, we offer some notes towards an analysis of this classic Shakespeare play and explore some of the play’s most salient themes.

It’s worth starting with a consideration of just what Shakespeare did with his source material. Interestingly, two families known as the Montagues and Capulets appear to have actually existed in medieval Italy: the first reference to ‘Montagues and Capulets’ is, curiously, in the poetry of Dante (1265-1321), not Shakespeare.

In Dante’s early fourteenth-century epic poem, the  Divine Comedy , he makes reference to two warring Italian families: ‘Come and see, you who are negligent, / Montagues and Capulets, Monaldi and Filippeschi / One lot already grieving, the other in fear’ ( Purgatorio , canto VI). Precisely why the families are in a feud with one another is never revealed in Shakespeare’s play, so we are encouraged to take this at face value.

The play’s most famous line references the feud between the two families, which means Romeo and Juliet cannot be together. And the line, when we stop and consider it, is more than a little baffling. The line is spoken by Juliet: ‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ Of course, ‘wherefore’ doesn’t mean ‘where’ – it means ‘why’.

But that doesn’t exactly clear up the whys and the wherefores. The question still doesn’t appear to make any sense: Romeo’s problem isn’t his first name, but his family name, Montague. Surely, since she fancies him, Juliet is quite pleased with ‘Romeo’ as he is – it’s his family that are the problem. Solutions  have been proposed to this conundrum , but none is completely satisfying.

There are a number of notable things Shakespeare did with his source material. The Italian story ‘Mariotto and Gianozza’, printed in 1476, contained many of the plot elements of Shakespeare’s  Romeo and Juliet . Shakespeare’s source for the play’s story was Arthur Brooke’s  The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet  (1562), an English verse translation of this Italian tale.

The moral of Brooke’s tale is that young love ends in disaster for their elders, and is best reined in; Shakespeare changed that. In Romeo and Juliet , the headlong passion and excitement of young love is celebrated, even though confusion leads to the deaths of the young lovers. But through their deaths, and the example their love set for their parents, the two families vow to be reconciled to each other.

Shakespeare also makes Juliet a thirteen-year-old girl in his play, which is odd for a number of reasons. We know that  Romeo and Juliet  is about young love – the ‘pair of star-cross’d lovers’, who belong to rival families in Verona – but what is odd about Shakespeare’s play is how young he makes Juliet.

In Brooke’s verse rendition of the story, Juliet is sixteen. But when Shakespeare dramatised the story, he made Juliet several years younger, with Romeo’s age unspecified. As Lady Capulet reveals, Juliet is ‘not [yet] fourteen’, and this point is made to us several times, as if Shakespeare wishes to draw attention to it and make sure we don’t forget it.

This makes sense in so far as Juliet represents young love, but what makes it unsettling – particularly for modern audiences – is the fact that this makes Juliet a girl of thirteen when she enjoys her night of wedded bliss with Romeo. As John Sutherland puts it in his (and Cedric Watts’) engaging  Oxford World’s Classics: Henry V, War Criminal?: and Other Shakespeare Puzzles , ‘In a contemporary court of law [Romeo] would receive a longer sentence for what he does to Juliet than for what he does to Tybalt.’

There appears to be no satisfactory answer to this question, but one possible explanation lies in one of the play’s recurring themes: bawdiness and sexual familiarity. Perhaps surprisingly given the youthfulness of its tragic heroine, Romeo and Juliet is shot through with bawdy jokes, double entendres, and allusions to sex, made by a number of the characters.

These references to physical love serve to make Juliet’s innocence, and subsequent passionate romance with Romeo, even more noticeable: the journey both Romeo and Juliet undertake is one from innocence (Romeo pointlessly and naively pursuing Rosaline; Juliet unversed in the ways of love) to experience.

In the last analysis, Romeo and Juliet is a classic depiction of forbidden love, but it is also far more sexually aware, more ‘adult’, than many people realise.

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4 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet”

Modern reading of the play’s opening dialogue among the brawlers fails to parse the ribaldry. Sex scares the bejeepers out of us. Why? Confer “R&J.”

It’s all that damn padre’s fault!

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A Modern Perspective: Romeo and Juliet

By Gail Kern Paster

Does Romeo and Juliet need an introduction? Of all Shakespeare’s plays, it has been the most continuously popular since its first performance in the mid-1590s. It would seem, then, the most direct of Shakespeare’s plays in its emotional impact. What could be easier to understand and what could be more moving than the story of two adolescents finding in their sudden love for each other a reason to defy their families’ mutual hatred by marrying secretly? The tragic outcome of their blameless love (their “misadventured piteous overthrows”) seems equally easy to understand: it results first from Tybalt’s hotheaded refusal to obey the Prince’s command and second from accidents of timing beyond any human ability to foresee or control. Simple in its story line, clear in its affirmation of the power of love over hate, Romeo and Juliet seems to provide both a timeless theme and universal appeal. Its immediacy stands in welcome contrast to the distance, even estrangement, evoked by other Shakespeare plays. No wonder it is often the first Shakespeare play taught in schools—on the grounds of its obvious relevance to the emotional and social concerns of young people.

Recent work by social historians on the history of private life in western European culture, however, offers a complicating perspective on the timelessness of Romeo and Juliet. At the core of the play’s evident accessibility is the importance and privilege modern Western culture grants to desire, regarding it as deeply expressive of individual identity and central to the personal fulfillment of women no less than men. But, as these historians have argued, such conceptions of desire reflect cultural changes in human consciousness—in ways of imagining and articulating the nature of desire. 1 In England until the late sixteenth century, individual identity had been imagined not so much as the result of autonomous, personal growth in consciousness but rather as a function of social station, an individual’s place in a network of social and kinship structures. Furthermore, traditional culture distinguished sharply between the nature of identity for men and women. A woman’s identity was conceived almost exclusively in relation to male authority and marital status. She was less an autonomous, desiring self than any male was; she was a daughter, wife, or widow expected to be chaste, silent, and, above all, obedient. It is a profound and necessary act of historical imagination, then, to recognize innovation in the moment when Juliet impatiently invokes the coming of night and the husband she has disobediently married: “Come, gentle night; come, loving black-browed night, / Give me my Romeo” ( 3.2.21 –23).

Recognizing that the nature of desire and identity is subject to historical change and cultural innovation can provide the basis for rereading Romeo and Juliet. Instead of an uncomplicated, if lyrically beautiful, contest between young love and “ancient grudge,” the play becomes a narrative that expresses an historical conflict between old forms of identity and new modes of desire, between authority and freedom, between parental will and romantic individualism. Furthermore, though the Chorus initially sets the lovers as a pair against the background of familial hatred, the reader attentive to social detail will be struck instead by Shakespeare’s care in distinguishing between the circumstances of male and female lovers: “she as much in love, her means much less / To meet her new belovèd anywhere” ( 2. Chorus. 11 –12, italics added). The story of “Juliet and her Romeo” may be a single narrative, but its clear internal division is drawn along the traditionally unequal lines of gender.

Because of such traditional notions of identity and gender, Elizabethan theatergoers might have recognized a paradox in the play’s lyrical celebration of the beauty of awakened sexual desire in the adolescent boy and girl. By causing us to identify with Romeo and Juliet’s desire for one another, the play affirms their love even while presenting it as a problem in social management. This is true not because Romeo and Juliet fall in love with forbidden or otherwise unavailable sexual partners; such is the usual state of affairs at the beginning of Shakespearean comedy, but those comedies end happily. Rather Romeo and Juliet’s love is a social problem, unresolvable except by their deaths, because they dare to marry secretly in an age when legal, consummated marriage was irreversible. Secret marriage is the narrative device by which Shakespeare brings into conflict the new privilege claimed by individual desire and the traditional authority granted fathers to arrange their daughters’ marriages. Secret marriage is the testing ground, in other words, of the new kind of importance being claimed by individual desire. Shakespeare’s representation of the narrative outcome of this desire as tragic—here, as later in the secret marriage that opens Othello —may suggest something of Elizabethan society’s anxiety about the social cost of romantic individualism.

The conflict between traditional authority and individual desire also provides the framework for Shakespeare’s presentation of the Capulet-Montague feud. The feud, like the lovers’ secret marriage, is another problem in social management, another form of socially problematic desire. We are never told what the families are fighting about or fighting for; in this sense the feud is both causeless and goal-less. The Chorus’s first words insist not on the differences between the two families but on their similarity: they are two households “both alike in dignity.” Later, after Prince Escalus has broken up the street brawl, they are “In penalty alike” ( 1.2.2 ). Ironically, then, they are not fighting over differences. Rather it is Shakespeare’s careful insistence on the lack of difference between Montague and Capulet that provides a key to understanding the underlying social dynamic of the feud. Just as desire brings Romeo and Juliet together as lovers, desire in another form brings the Montague and Capulet males out on the street as fighters. The feud perpetuates a close bond of rivalry between these men that even the Prince’s threat of punishment cannot sever: “Montague is bound as well as I,” Capulet tells Paris ( 1.2.1 ). Indeed, the feud seems necessary to the structure of male-male relations in Verona. Feuding reinforces male identity—loyalty to one’s male ancestors—at the same time that it clarifies the social structure: servants fight with servants, young noblemen with young noblemen, old men with old men. 2

That the feud constitutes a relation of desire between Montague and Capulet is clear from the opening, when the servants Gregory and Sampson use bawdy innuendo to draw a causal link between their virility and their eagerness to fight Montagues: “A dog of that house shall move me to stand,” i.e., to be sexually erect ( 1.1.12 ). The Montagues seem essential to Sampson’s masculinity since, by besting Montague men, he can lay claim to Montague women as symbols of conquest. (This, of course, would be a reductive way of describing what Romeo does in secretly marrying a Capulet daughter.) The feud not only establishes a structure of relations between men based on competition and sexual aggression, but it seems to involve a particularly debased attitude toward women. No matter how comic the wordplay of the Capulet servants may be, we should not forget that the sexual triangle they imagine is based on fantasized rape: “I will push Montague’s men from the wall and thrust his maids to the wall” ( 1.1.18 –19). Gregory and Sampson are not interested in the “heads” of the Montague maidens, which might imply awareness of them as individuals. They are interested only in their “maidenheads.” Their coarse view of woman as generic sexual object is reiterated in a wittier vein by Mercutio, who understands Romeo’s experience of awakened desire only as a question of the sexual availability of his mistress: “O Romeo, that she were, O, that she were / An open-arse, thou a pop’rin pear” ( 2.1.40 –41).

Feuding, then, is the form that male bonding takes in Verona, a bonding which seems linked to the derogation of woman. But Romeo, from the very opening of the play, is distanced both physically and emotionally from the feud, not appearing until the combatants and his parents are leaving the stage. His reaction to Benvolio’s news of the fight seems to indicate that he is aware of the mechanisms of desire that are present in the feud: “Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love” ( 1.1.180 ). But it also underscores his sense of alienation: “This love feel I, that feel no love in this” ( 187 ). He is alienated not only from the feud itself, one feels, but more importantly from the idea of sexuality that underlies it. Romeo subscribes to a different, indeed a competing view of woman—the idealizing view of the Petrarchan lover. In his melancholy, his desire for solitude, and his paradox-strewn language, Romeo identifies himself with the style of feeling and address that Renaissance culture named after the fourteenth-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarca or Petrarch, most famous for his sonnets to Laura. By identifying his beloved as perfect and perfectly chaste, the Petrarchan lover opposes the indiscriminate erotic appetite of a Gregory or Sampson. He uses the frustrating experience of intense, unfulfilled, and usually unrequited passion to refine his modes of feeling and to enlarge his experience of self.

It is not coincidental, then, that Shakespeare uses the language and self-involved behaviors of the Petrarchan lover to dramatize Romeo’s experience of love. For Romeo as for Petrarch, love is the formation of an individualistic identity at odds with other kinds of identity: “I have lost myself. I am not here. / This is not Romeo. He’s some other where” ( 1.1.205 –6). Petrarchan desire for solitude explains Romeo’s absence from the opening clash and his lack of interest in the activities of his gang of friends, whom he accompanies only reluctantly to the Capulet feast: “I’ll be a candle holder and look on” ( 1.4.38 ). His physical isolation from his parents—with whom he exchanges no words in the course of the play—further suggests his shift from traditional, clan identity to the romantic individualism prefigured by Petrarch.

Shakespeare’s comic irony is that such enlargement of self is itself a mark of conventionality, since Petrarchism in European literature was by the late sixteenth century very widespread. A more cutting irony is that the Petrarchan lover and his sensual opponent (Sampson or Gregory) have more in common than is first apparent. The Petrarchan lover, in emphasizing the often paralyzing intensity of his passion, is less interested in praising the remote mistress who inspires such devotion than he is in displaying his own poetic virtuosity and his capacity for self-denial. Such a love—like Romeo’s for Rosaline—is founded upon frustration and requires rejection. The lover is interested in affirming the uniqueness of his beloved only in theory. On closer look, she too becomes a generic object and he more interested in self-display. Thus the play’s two languages of heterosexual desire—Petrarchan praise and anti-Petrarchan debasement—appear as opposite ends of a single continuum, as complementary discourses of woman, high and low. Even when Paris and old Capulet, discussing Juliet as prospective bride, vary the discourse to include a conception of woman as wife and mother, she remains an object of verbal and actual exchange.

In lyric poetry, the Petrarchan mistress remains a function of language alone, unheard, seen only as a collection of ideal parts, a center whose very absence promotes desire. Drama is a material medium, however. In drama, the Petrarchan mistress takes on embodiment and finds an answering voice, like Juliet’s gently noting her sonneteer-pilgrim’s conventionality: “You kiss by th’ book” ( 1.5.122 ). In drama, the mistress may come surrounded by relatives and an inconveniently insistent social milieu. As was noted above, Shakespeare distinguishes sharply between the social circumstances of adolescent males and females. Thus one consequence of setting the play’s domestic action solely within the Capulet household is to set Juliet, the “hopeful lady” of Capulet’s “earth” ( 1.2.15 ), firmly into a familial context which, thanks to the Nurse’s fondness for recollection and anecdote, is rich in domestic detail. Juliet’s intense focus upon Romeo’s surname—“What’s Montague? . . . O, be some other name” ( 2.2.43 , 44 )—is a projection onto her lover of her own conflicted sense of tribal loyalty. Unlike Romeo, whose deepest emotional ties are to his gang of friends, and unlike the more mobile daughters of Shakespearean comedy who often come in pairs, Juliet lives isolated and confined, emotionally as well as physically, by her status as daughter. Her own passage into sexual maturity comes first by way of parental invitation to “think of marriage now” ( 1.3.75 ). Her father invites Paris, the man who wishes to marry Juliet, to attend a banquet and feast his eyes on female beauty: “Hear all, all see, / And like her most whose merit most shall be” ( 1.2.30 –31). Juliet, in contrast, is invited to look only where her parents tell her:

I’ll look to like, if looking liking move.

But no more deep will I endart mine eye

Than your consent gives strength to make it fly.

( 1.3.103 –5)

The logic of Juliet’s almost instant disobedience in looking at, and liking, Romeo (rather than Paris) can be understood as the ironic fulfillment of the fears in traditional patriarchal culture about the uncontrollability of female desire, the alleged tendency of the female gaze to wander. Petrarchism managed the vexed question of female desire largely by wishing it out of existence, describing the mistress as one who, like the invisible Rosaline of this play, “will not stay the siege of loving terms, / Nor bide th’ encounter of assailing eyes” ( 1.1.220 –21). Once Romeo, in the Capulet garden, overhears Juliet’s expression of desire, however, Juliet abandons the conventional denial of desire—“Fain would I dwell on form; fain, fain deny / What I have spoke. But farewell compliment” ( 2.2.93 –94). She rejects the “strength” implied by parental sanction and the protection afforded by the Petrarchan celebration of chastity for a risk-taking experiment in desire that Shakespeare affirms by the beauty of the lovers’ language in their four scenes together. Juliet herself asks Romeo the serious questions that Elizabethan society wanted only fathers to ask. She challenges social prescriptions, designed to contain erotic desire in marriage, by taking responsibility for her own marriage:

If that thy bent of love be honorable,

Thy purpose marriage, send me word tomorrow,

By one that I’ll procure to come to thee,

Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite,

And all my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay

And follow thee my lord throughout the world.

( 2.2.150 –55)

The irony in her pledge—an irony perhaps most obvious to a modern, sexually egalitarian audience—is that Romeo here is following Juliet on an uncharted narrative path to sexual fulfillment in unsanctioned marriage. Allowing her husband access to a bedchamber in her father’s house, Juliet leads him into a sexual territory beyond the reach of dramatic representation. Breaking through the narrow oppositions of the play’s two discourses of woman—as either anonymous sexual object (for Sampson and Gregory) or beloved woman exalted beyond knowing or possessing (for Petrarch)—she affirms her imaginative commitment to the cultural significance of desire as an individualizing force:

                          Come, civil night,

Thou sober-suited matron all in black,

And learn me how to lose a winning match

Played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods.

Hood my unmanned blood, bating in my cheeks,

With thy black mantle till strange love grow bold,

Think true love acted simple modesty.

( 3.2.10 –16)

Romeo, when he is not drawn by desire deeper and deeper into Capulet territory, wanders into the open square where the destinies of the play’s other young men—and in part his own too—are enacted. Because the young man’s deepest loyalty is to his friends, Romeo is not really asked to choose between Juliet and his family but between Juliet and Mercutio, who are opposed in the play’s thematic structure. Thus one function of Mercutio’s anti-Petrarchan skepticism about the idealization of woman is to offer resistance to the adult heterosexuality heralded by Romeo’s union with Juliet, resistance on behalf of the regressive pull of adolescent male bonding—being “one of the guys.” This distinction, as we have seen, is in part a question of speaking different discourses. Romeo easily picks up Mercutio’s banter, even its sly innuendo against women. Mercutio himself regards Romeo’s quickness at repartee as the hopeful sign of a return to a “normal” manly identity incompatible with his ridiculous role as lover:

Why, is not this better now than groaning for love? Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo, now art thou what thou art, by art as well as by nature. For this driveling love is like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole.

( 2.4.90 –95)

Implicit here is a central tenet of traditional misogyny that excessive desire for a woman is effeminizing. For Mercutio it is the effeminate lover in Romeo who refuses shamefully to answer Tybalt’s challenge: “O calm, dishonorable, vile submission!” he exclaims furiously ( 3.1.74 ). Mercutio’s death at Tybalt’s hands causes Romeo temporarily to agree, obeying the regressive emotional pull of grief and guilt over his own part in Mercutio’s defeat. “Why the devil came you between us?” Mercutio asks. “I was hurt under your arm” ( 3.1.106 –8). Why, we might ask instead, should Mercutio have insisted on answering a challenge addressed only to Romeo? Romeo, however, displaces blame onto Juliet: “Thy beauty hath made me effeminate / And in my temper softened valor’s steel” ( 3.1.119 –20).

In terms of narrative structure, the death of Mercutio and Romeo’s slaying of Tybalt interrupt the lovers’ progress from secret marriage to its consummation, suggesting the incompatibility between romantic individualism and adolescent male bonding. The audience experiences this incompatibility as a sudden movement from comedy to tragedy. Suddenly Friar Lawrence must abandon hopes of using the love of Capulet and Montague as a force for social reintegration. Instead, he must desperately stave off Juliet’s marriage to Paris, upon which her father insists, by making her counterfeit death and by subjecting her to entombment. The legal finality of consummated marriage—which was the basis for Friar Lawrence’s hopes “to turn your households’ rancor to pure love” ( 2.3.99 )—becomes the instrument of tragic design. It is only the Nurse who would allow Juliet to accept Paris as husband; we are asked to judge such a prospect so unthinkable that we then agree imaginatively to Friar Lawrence’s ghoulish device.

In terms of the play’s symbolic vocabulary, Juliet’s preparations to imitate death on the very bed where her sexual maturation from girl- to womanhood occurred confirms ironically her earlier premonition about Romeo: “If he be marrièd, / My grave is like to be my wedding bed” ( 1.5.148 –49). Her brief journey contrasts sharply with those of Shakespeare’s comic heroines who move out from the social confinement of daughterhood into a freer, less socially defined space (the woods outside Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream , the Forest of Arden in As You Like It ). There they can exercise a sanctioned, limited freedom in the romantic experimentation of courtship. Juliet is punished for such experimentation in part because hers is more radical; secret marriage symbolically is as irreversible as “real” death. Her journey thus becomes an internal journey in which her commitment to union with Romeo must face the imaginative challenge of complete, claustrophobic isolation and finally death in the Capulet tomb.

It is possible to see the lovers’ story, as some critics have done, as Shakespeare’s dramatic realization of the ruling metaphors of Petrarchan love poetry—particularly its fascination with “death-marked love” ( Prologue. 9 ). 3 But, in pondering the implications of Shakespeare’s moving his audience to identify with this narrative of initiative, desire, and power, we also do well to remember the psychosocial dynamics of drama. By heightening their powers of identification, drama gives the members of an audience an embodied image of the possible scope and form of their fears and desires. Here we have seen how tragic form operates to contain the complex play of desire/identification. The metaphors of Petrarchan idealization work as part of a complex, ambivalent discourse of woman whose ultimate social function is to encode the felt differences between men and women on which a dominant male power structure is based. Romeo and Juliet find a new discourse of romantic individualism in which Petrarchan idealization conjoins with the mutual avowal of sexual desire. But their union, as we have seen, imperils the traditional relations between males that is founded upon the exchange of women, whether the violent exchange Gregory and Sampson crudely imagine or the normative exchange planned by Capulet and Paris. Juliet, as the daughter whose erotic willfulness activates her father’s transformation from concerned to tyrannical parent, is the greater rebel. Thus the secret marriage in which this new language of feeling is contained cannot here be granted the sanction of a comic outcome. When Romeo and Juliet reunite, it is only to see each other, dead, in the dim confines of the Capulet crypt. In this play the autonomy of romantic individualism remains “star-crossed.”

• The story of these massive shifts in European sensibility is told in a five-volume study titled A History of Private Life , gen. eds. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987–91). The study covers over three millennia in the history of western Europe. For the period most relevant to Romeo and Juliet, see vol. 3, Passions of the Renaissance (1989), ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, pp. 399–607.
• The best extended discussion of the dynamic of the feud is Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 83ff.
• Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (London: Methuen, 1968), pp. 82ff.

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Grade 9 Romeo and Juliet Essay ( OCR GCSE English Literature )

Revision note.

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Grade 9 Romeo and Juliet Essay

The OCR GCSE English Literature exam paper asks you to write one essay from a choice of two on the Shakespeare play you have studied. 

Question 1 is an essay based on an extract from the play you have studied

Question 2 is what’s known as a “discursive” essay question, which does not give you an extract to work from

Here you will find an annotated model answer for Question 2, the discursive essay question. “Discursive” can be interpreted as a discussion on wider ideas, so examiners are looking for a sustained argument that thoroughly covers a range of points. This means you will need to refer to different parts of the play throughout your answer to explore the development of Shakespeare’s themes or ideas. 

How am I assessed?

You have 50 minutes to answer the question, and the essay is marked out of 40. Here is how the marks are divided:

Grade 9 Romeo and Juliet model answer

Below you will find an example answer for a past OCR GCSE Romeo and Juliet essay question. This Romeo and Juliet model answer includes annotations that show where and how this answer has met the above assessment objectives. It’s a sample answer to the following question:

Top-mark Model Answer

Follow this link to a model answer to a Romeo and Juliet extract question .

Shakespeare, William. Complete Works of William Shakespeare . Edited by Peter Alexander, HarperCollins, 1994. Accessed 26 March 2024

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Author: Sam Evans

Sam is a graduate in English Language and Literature, specialising in journalism and the history and varieties of English. Before teaching, Sam had a career in tourism in South Africa and Europe. After training to become a teacher, Sam taught English Language and Literature and Communication and Culture in three outstanding secondary schools across England. Her teaching experience began in nursery schools, where she achieved a qualification in Early Years Foundation education. Sam went on to train in the SEN department of a secondary school, working closely with visually impaired students. From there, she went on to manage KS3 and GCSE English language and literature, as well as leading the Sixth Form curriculum. During this time, Sam trained as an examiner in AQA and iGCSE and has marked GCSE English examinations across a range of specifications. She went on to tutor Business English, English as a Second Language and international GCSE English to students around the world, as well as tutoring A level, GCSE and KS3 students for educational provisions in England. Sam freelances as a ghostwriter on novels, business articles and reports, academic resources and non-fiction books.