Romeo and Juliet

Romeo is the only son of Lord and Lady Montague and the play’s male protagonist. His age is never given, but contextual cues throughout the work coupled with the source material Shakespeare used suggest he is probably in his midteens. Like Juliet, he thus embodies youthful passion: After falling madly in love with Juliet, Romeo marries her in secret and then dies by suicide under the mistaken impression that she has died.

Romeo is the very picture of the Renaissance lover: He’s passionate, moody, melancholy, and impulsive. While at the beginning of the play he assures everyone that he’ll pine forever over the inaccessible Rosaline, he falls deeply in love with Juliet the moment he sees her. Romeo’s passion is at once sincere and dangerous. He’s willing to endanger himself for love and happy to agree to an immediate marriage—but as Juliet herself often notes, he’s changeable.

However, his name suggests a religious pilgrim (one on his way to Rome): There’s true devotion in him as well as unmanaged passion. While Romeo is mutable, his feelings are sincere. He truly loves and is loyal to his friends, who tease him relentlessly about his amours, though this devotion too ends tragically when it spurs him to kill Tybalt in revenge for Mercutio’s death. In the end, his love, like Juliet’s, is powerful enough to drive him to his death.

The dramatic, virtuosic, and (as his name suggests) mercurial Mercutio plays a critical role in Romeo and Juliet. Though he initially seems tangential to the main action—he’s neither a Montague nor a Capulet—his death marks the play’s transition from a comedy to a tragedy.

Mercutio is deeply attached to Romeo and spends a lot of time trying to snap his melancholic friend out of his moping. His outward approach to the world is to take nothing seriously; he’s an inveterate punner who loves the slipperiness of language. However, he seems inwardly disturbed by this slipperiness. For instance, his description of Queen Mab moves from sly joking to a fearful account of a “hag” who grants illicit sexual knowledge to sleeping women through actions reminiscent of rape (“press[ing]” on them). This speech, which describes the terrifying power of dreams, points at Mercutio’s importance: He, perhaps more than anyone else in the play, can see The Power of Dreams and Illusions, recognizing that they have real and dangerous consequences.

The Nurse is Juliet’s closest friend and caretaker. While Juliet’s real mother is distant and formal, the Nurse is anything but. Unstoppably talkative and deeply affectionate, she has a taste for ribald jokes and has a lighthearted view of the world. She is thus a source of comic relief, some of which is at her own expense. She also supports and enables Juliet’s impulsive marriage to Romeo because she is a romantic and because she loves Juliet.

This sincere affection, however, doesn’t extend to an understanding of Juliet’s real depth of feeling. For the Nurse, romantic love is mostly just a sexual impulse; she counsels Juliet to give up on Romeo after he flees to Mantua and to marry Paris for his looks. The Nurse exemplifies the limits of many of the characters’ strictly sexual readings of love.

Benvolio, like Mercutio and Romeo, has a significant name: He only has good (ben) wishes (volio). A natural peacekeeper and a gentle soul, he tempers Romeo’s passion and Mercutio’s spontaneity. However, pragmatism and down-to-earth behavior often can’t overcome the sheer power of human passion; his efforts to break up fights often make things worse. At the end of the play, he is apparently the only young man of the Montague family left alive.

Tybalt is Juliet’s hot-blooded cousin. Mercutio heaps scorn on Tybalt’s affected fighting style, but he’s a dangerous opponent, known for his love of quarreling in the street. Tybalt is often referred to as the “prince of cats,” as he shares a name with a legendary archetypal cat character in a popular sequence of fables. Like his feline namesake, he is prideful, solitary, and deadly. His loyalty to his family provides an outlet for his egotism and aggression: When his uncle won’t give in to Tybalt’s desire to fight Romeo at the Capulet feast, Tybalt’s pride spurs him to take the revenge that sets the play’s final tragedies in motion. He is, however, much loved by his household, and the Nurse remembers him as a friend.