Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet
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William Shakespeare on Romeo and Juliet
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Forbidden feeling under a strict queenShakespeare held a financial stake in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and wrote within a system of royal oversight that made direct political or personal expression dangerous. The lovers of Verona, trapped between their families, were his way of putting that suffocation on stage without naming it.
A lot of the conflicts I wrote about come from my personal experience. During the reign of Elizabeth (the First), it was quite tough to earn a living and the laws were very strict. You could not simply express your feelings so you had to keep everything inside yourself... In Romeo and Juliet I also showed human conflicts. These young people were in love but could not tell that to anybody because they belonged to two different families who hated each other.
Choosing Verona as the setting was a practical solution to a problem of censorship. England’s laws made it hazardous to stage recognizable English people or events, so Italy provided geographic cover for stories that would otherwise have been stopped before opening night.
In England, there were very strict laws and many of my comedies and tragedies would have been censored if I mentioned real people names’ and facts so I chose to set some of my plays in Italy so I could say what I wanted even if indirectly. Verona and Venice are beautiful cities with lots of dramatic and inspiring stories.
Beyond politics and constraint, he singled out this play as the clearest demonstration of what his language could do. The choice of favorites was not sentimental; it was a craftsman’s verdict on his own work.
My absolute favourite ones are ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ because I think they show the best of my poetic style.
How he wrote it
Blank verse, borrowed Latin, and the rhyming coupletShakespeare built his plays around a tension between verse and prose, using different registers to signal status, emotion, and dramatic pressure. The structural device he describes at the end of scenes was a deliberate choice to leave audiences suspended rather than settled.
I used a metrical pattern consisting of lines of unrhymed blank verse. My plays were composed using blank verse, although there are passages in all the plays that are different and are composed of other forms of poetry and simple prose. I often used metaphors. To end many scenes in my plays I used a rhyming couplet to create suspense.
His language was built from collision. Latin, the tongue of the educated, was pressing against the Anglo-Saxon English spoken in taverns and churches, and Shakespeare worked that collision into new words rather than settling on either side of it.
My idea of language came from two main sources. The first source is Latin which was the language of educated people which was mixing with the Anglo-Saxon ‘English’ of the common people. I created new words in English from the Latin words... The second source of linguistic ideas came from my fellow Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights and poets such as Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton. And, of course, I took much from the everyday life around me, in taverns, at the theatre, in church.
Writing for the stage was not simply an artistic preference. It was the most viable economic path available to him, and the Queen’s patronage converted that economic calculation into institutional protection.
With writing alone it was hard to become rich during my time under Elizabeth I’s reign. But writing for theatre was better as people paid for their tickets to go and see comedies or tragedies and it was a much better way to make money writing. The Queen became one of my Patrons which meant that she paid me to write theatre plays so I was one of the lucky playwrights.
He chose tragedy as a form precisely because it disarmed the audience. Where a direct argument about Elizabethan politics or social life would provoke defensiveness, performance bypassed that resistance entirely.
The thing with tragedies is that at the end of the play, people take time to ponder, analyze, and reflect on what they have just watched. This way, I can pass important information to people without them becoming defensive or weighing them down with historical facts. If I approached a group of people and started talking to them about the life of Julius Caesar or Coriolanus, very few would care to listen to what I have to say. However, when people see my plays, they get the same message at their pleasure.
The compression he applied to his source material, Arthur Brooke’s 1562 verse narrative, followed the same logic. Brooke’s story ran over ninety days; Shakespeare collapsed it into a matter of days. The accelerated clock is not melodrama. It is the formal equivalent of that same pressure: no time to reflect, no time to negotiate, only the speed of feeling.
What he wants us to sit with
Love as the argument the ending doesn’t closeThe Montague and Capulet families had built their entire social world around a hatred whose original cause the play never names. Against that structure, the lovers made a different choice and were destroyed by it. Shakespeare’s account of what he meant by that outcome refuses the comfortable reading that their deaths were simply tragic waste.
I believe that love is an empowering force that we are yet to comprehend as human beings. It runs deeper than mere confessions and flirting around driven by lustful desires. I think love is the glue that holds humanity together and that is exactly what I wanted to bring out in Romeo and Juliet. Yes, love is worth dying for and it can be irrational, violent, yet tender and caring at the same time.