Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet
6 chapters
3.74from 2,885,781 ratingson Goodreads
Two families in Verona have been feuding so long that nobody remembers the cause, and their children meet at a party where neither should be. They marry in secret the next day. Four days is all the play covers, and every attempt to help them — by a friar, a nurse, a friend — makes it faster.
About the book
Written in the mid-1590s, Romeo and Juliet compresses its whole action into four days. Two Verona households have been feuding so long that the servants brawl in the street out of habit. Romeo, in love with a woman who will not have him, gate-crashes a Capulet ball and meets Juliet, who is thirteen and already promised to Count Paris; they marry the next afternoon with the help of a friar who hopes the match will end the feud. By the following morning Romeo has killed her cousin and been banished. Everything after that is timing. The friar’s plan requires a letter to arrive, and it does not. The play is Shakespeare’s most performed and most quoted, and it is worth noticing how little of the disaster is the lovers’ doing: the adults are improvising throughout, and the Prince’s last speech says so.
Characters
Romeo — Montague
In love with love, and married to a Capulet within a day of meeting her at a party he was not invited to.
Juliet — Capulet
Thirteen, promised to another man, and the more decisive of the two from the balcony onwards.
Mercutio — Romeo’s friend
Kinsman to the Prince, brilliant and obscene, and killed under Romeo’s arm for somebody else’s quarrel.
Tybalt — Capulet
Juliet’s cousin, who takes the gate-crashing as an insult and will not be talked out of it.
Friar Laurence — Confessor
Who marries them secretly to end the feud, and whose second plan depends on a letter that never arrives.
The Nurse — Juliet’s nurse
Who raised Juliet, carries the messages, and then advises her to forget the marriage and take Paris.
Lord Capulet — Juliet’s father
Indulgent until he is crossed, when he gives his daughter four days to marry or be turned out.
Prince Escalus — Ruler of Verona
Who has banned the brawling on pain of death, and is left counting the cost in the last scene.
About the author
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor, born in Stratford-upon-Avon to a glovemaker and educated no further than the grammar school there. In London he became a sharer — a part-owner — in the Lord Chamberlain's Men and in the Globe theatre, which is what made him money; the plays were the company's stock rather than literature, and he took no part in printing them. Two fellow actors collected thirty-six of them in the First Folio of 1623, seven years after his death, and eighteen plays exist only because they did. He also wrote 154 sonnets.