Romeo and Juliet - Study Guide

The play was written for the Lord Chamberlain's men, perhaps the first of the plays Shakespeare wrote for the company. It was printed in 1597 (Q1) in an abbreviated text, and two years later (Q2) in a version - newly, corrected, augmented, and amended. In that form it was printed 2 additional times before it appeared among the Tragedies in the 1623 Folio. The play is based upon Arthur Brooke's long poem The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), itself based upon a French translation of an Italian novella by Bandello, which was . . .

1. Why does the play begin (after the Chorus) with the scene of the servants' confrontation? How does the scene affect the expectations set by the opening Chorus? Think about how language works here.

2. Indeed, think about language in the play. It is one of the most self-consciously rhetorical plays that Shakespeare wrote, but also one in which the very question of what language can and can do is foregrounded as a theme.

3. How much time takes place in the action covered by the play? In Brooke's poem it is nine months.

4. How do Romeo's and Juliet's understandings of love differ? How old are they? (What was the usual age of marriage for couples in Elizabethan England?)

5. Note that when they are first together alone in 1.5, that thir first shared speech and what introduces their first kiss is a perfect sonnet. This of course could not be heard on stage, but is visible on the page.

5. Think about the language of sight and eyes in the play. How reliable an epistemology is vision here?

6. Mercutio - think about what it is he says and does in the play. How does his skepticism affect the romantic assumptions of the young lovers. Think about the various costs of his death.

7. Nurse: Think about her mediating role. What does it mean that Juliet is more intimate with her than with her own mother? What values does she hold? Why is she so garrulous?

8. Friar Laurence: if he embodies the collective wisdom of the community, how adequate is it? Does he represent or articulate some moral and spiritual norm of the play? Does it matter to an officially Protestant audience that he is a Catholic?

9. What is achieved at the end. The feud has ended, but what has been learned? How mush order is restored? How comforting is the ending?

10. The opening Chorus calls Romeo and Juliet "A pair of star-crossed lovers", but this seems to take from them any responsibility for their fate. No doubt bad luck plays a role in their tragedies, but to what degree are they also responsible?