89 pages • 2 hours read
William ShakespeareRomeo and Juliet
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1595A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Beauty and Danger of Love
Content Warning: The source material and guide refer to suicide and violence, including discussions of sexual assault.
Romeo and Juliet is so synonymous with love that the young couple’s names have become bywords for head-over-heels couples. However, this play is as much about love’s illusions, deceptions, and dangers as its beauties.
Every character in the play knows that new love can be “more inconstant than the wind” (I.4.107). Romeo’s rapid flip from believing he will never love anyone the way he loves Rosaline (who wants nothing to do with him) to having eyes for no one but Juliet is emblematic of love’s fickleness. The swiftness with which love can come and go is the least of its dangers, however. Rather, that speed suggests an intensity that borders on violence—something with which the play consistently associates love. Sex can of course be violent, as Sampson and Gregory’s misogynistic boasting about raping the women of the Montague household immediately establishes. However, the opening scene also suggests that love need not be sexual—or even romantic—to be destructive. When Romeo encounters the aftermath of the brawl between Montagues and Capulets, he remarks, “Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love” (I.1.180), implying that clannish devotion is more responsible than anger for perpetuating the conflict.
Romeo and Juliet’s love is in this sense not a counterpoint to the violence that surrounds them but an extension of it. The beauty and the danger of love is that it has a power that goes far deeper than reason. Romeo’s friends never let him forget that he’s being ridiculous, but they can’t hold him back from pursuing Juliet. Lord Montague’s reprimands do not blunt Tybalt’s familial pride and loyalty, and the Prince’s edict fails to stop Romeo from killing Tybalt out of love for Mercutio. Juliet, however, is perhaps the best spokeswoman for this theme. Though she remains aware that the intensity of her feeling is dangerous and likely to vanish as soon as it appears, “too like the lightning” (II.2.26), she doesn’t let that stop her from being carried away by it.
Indeed, perhaps she can’t. The imagery of love in Romeo and Juliet often features huge, impersonal, beautiful, and fateful forces: the sun, the moon, and the stars. If love is like these things, it is not only awe-inspiring but a controller of destinies—impossible to resist. Love is in this sense inherently destructive, subsuming the individual and their will in a way that anticipates the deaths with which the play ends.
The Power of Dreams and Illusions
Romeo and Juliet contains multiple references to dreams, visions, and fantasies. Indeed, illusions of different kinds are so common that characters repeatedly doubt the evidence of their senses. While speaking to Juliet on her balcony, Romeo worries that he may simply be having a pleasant dream; much later, in his anguish over Juliet’s apparent death, he struggles to remember whether Balthazar told him that Juliet was engaged to marry Paris. Balthazar himself recounts a “dream” he had of Paris and Romeo fighting when Friar Lawrence encounters him outside the Capulets’ tomb, not realizing that he is describing real events. Reality and fantasy are thus difficult to distinguish in the play.
Of course, the idea that dreams are necessarily unreal is foreign to the characters’ way of thinking. Rather, dreams and visions hold clues about the future. Juliet, for example, has a premonition of Romeo’s death as he leaves for banishment in Mantua. Likewise, at the outset of the play, Romeo has an ominous dream of death just before he meets Juliet for the first time; at the end, he dreams a beautiful dream of resurrection just before he kills himself in despair. Both of these dreams are, in their way, truthful, but the way they align with reality is not obvious to the characters from their position within the play.
The shifting, elusive relationship between dreams and reality drives the disdain of Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech. Mercutio spins his dream—that “dreamers often lie” (I.4.55)—into a dark fairy tale about the nature of visions. In it, he enumerates how this sinister fairy queen distributes dreams appropriate to their dreamers: Lovers dream of love, lawyers dream of fees, and so on. However, the queen also hands out punishments and suffering, leaving behind sores and blisters, and she drives men to violence and women to unchastity.
Romeo responds to Mercutio’s agitation by saying he “talk’st of nothing” (I.4.102), to which Mercutio readily agrees: “True, I talk of dreams / Which are the children of an idle brain, / begot of nothing but vain fantasy” (I.4.103-05). However, the play itself does not treat dreams as synonymous with “nothing,” though it does find something paradoxical in their apparent insubstantiality. Dreams, Romeo and Juliet suggests, have their own reality, weight, and dangers. Human experience, even the most powerful, has in it an element of fantasy, which can influence behavior in ways that are difficult to pin down or control.
Empty Rivalry and Feud
Romeo and Juliet is famously a story of warring families, and many modern adaptations of the play focus on that rivalry. Within the play, the danger of the feud between the Montagues and Capulets is not that it’s bleak and violent but that it’s silly: It’s only made serious by terrible accidents.
The Prologue introduces the rivalry even before it introduces the love story, but it does not reveal the origin of the vendetta—merely that it is old. This in and of itself is cause for skepticism, particularly when coupled with the arrival of Lord Capulet and Lord Montague at the scene of the opening street fight. Both their wives attempt to hold them back, with Lady Capulet calling particular attention to her husband’s age: “A crutch, a crutch! Why call you for a / sword?” (I.1.77-78). The parallel between the “ancient” conflict and the two aging patriarchs eager to charge into battle lends the former an air of farce, especially because later developments suggest their hearts are not really in the fight. Lord Capulet is willing to overlook Romeo’s presence at his party and reports approvingly that the young man “bears him like a portly gentleman” (I.5.75); he’s even willing, after being scolded by the Prince, to try to keep the peace with Lord Montague.
Moreover, the fact that the feud is so old and rote means that there’s a degree of fun in continuing it. When the Montagues and the Capulets fight in the street, there’s playfulness in their punny sparring. For young men in particular, the conflict invites preening and boasting as they jostle to establish their reputations in society. It’s notable that the feud only breaks into serious violence after Lord Capulet scolds and shames Tybalt; since Tybalt can’t take out his wounded pride on his uncle, he turns against Romeo instead. When Romeo refuses to fight Tybalt, it is Mercutio and not a Montague who leaps to his defense; Mercutio is loyal to Romeo as a friend, not a kinsman, and ashamed of Romeo’s attempts to placate Tybalt, which he calls “dishonourable, vile submission” (III.1.74). Here, violence seems to be the point, as it is for Tybalt when he claims, “I hate the word [‘peace’] / As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee [Benvolio]” (I.1.71-72). Nevertheless, it is worth noting that neither Tybalt nor Mercutio intend to kill one another. Their violence is mock violence, as empty as the feud itself. The tragedy is that, in a world where the boundaries between fantasy and reality are porous and shifting, mock violence can quickly slide into actual violence.
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