Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeare likely wrote Romeo and Juliet sometime around 1595; of the plays traditionally classed as tragedies, it was only Shakespeare’s second (the first being Titus Andronicus, which dates to roughly 1591-1592). In many ways, the play marks a pivotal point in Shakespeare’s career. Although he never entirely abandoned the comedic genre, he turned increasingly to tragedy (Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, etc.) and romance (The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, etc.) after 1600. The narrative structure of Romeo and Juliet itself anticipates this shift, as the play’s early scenes suggest a comedic denouement—i.e., one ending in marriage rather than death.

That Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet relatively early in his career makes its influence all the more notable. However, though it is undoubtedly the most famous example of “star-crossed lovers” (at least in Western literature), it was not the first. In fact, it was not even the first of its name. As he did in many other plays, Shakespeare drew on preexisting literature for Romeo and Juliet’s basic plot—specifically, a work by the poet Arthur Brooke called The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), which itself ultimately derived from an Italian story. These earlier works likely drew inspiration from a different couple entirely: Pyramus and Thisbe, whose story appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and likewise involves feuding families and one lover’s mistaken belief in the other’s death. The names “Capulet” and “Montague,” meanwhile, appear to derive from Dante’s Divine Comedy, where they similarly correspond to rival factions.

Romeo and Juliet has in turn shaped later literature in ways so profound that they are difficult to quantify. The play’s ubiquity in the popular imagination means that virtually any work centered on young or ill-fated lovers will evoke comparisons (intentional or not). It has also given rise to direct adaptations such as the musical play West Side Story (1957), the script for which was written by American playwright Arthur Laurents. Literary critics such as Harold Bloom propose a much broader influence, however. Addressing the play’s treatment of The Beauty and Danger of Love, Bloom argues that Romeo and Juliet provided the pattern for self-destructive romance in Western literature: “Romeo and Juliet is unmatched […] as a vision of an uncompromising mutual love that perishes of its own idealism and intensity” (Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books, 1998). The idea that love tends inevitably toward the death of the self animates a range of later classics, such as the love poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920).