Romeo and Juliet: Love Story and Historical Context
Social and Historical Context
The play was written in the mid-1590s, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. At that time, the sonnet craze was at its peak. Both poets and amateurs were swept off their feet by the sheer power of Petrarch’s love sonnets and tried to follow in his footsteps. Shakespeare masterfully parodies this craze, not only in this play but in many of his works. At the beginning of the play, we see Romeo entranced by the bad love poetry that he reads—in love with the concept of love. Juliet cures him of his ridiculous devotion to Rosaline, the archetypal cold and aloof woman so beloved of Renaissance poets.
Summary
Romeo and Juliet is perhaps the most famous love story in the world. So much so that ‘Romeo’ is almost synonymous with the word ‘lover’. The Montagues (Romeo) and the Capulets (Juliet) are two important families in Verona who are engaged in a bitter feud. The story spans four days—beginning with Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting and ending with their deaths. It tells of an intense, all-consuming love and how that love is powerful enough to hope to exist beyond mortal life. The plot is similar to the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, who fell in love with each other in spite of the feud raging between their families. Shakespeare used the same myth in the play-within-a-play of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but there it is treated as a farce.
Romeo
While being the hero of this play, he is rather flawed. This character is renowned for the great love he showed toward Juliet, but it is presented more like a crush. Romeo’s affection turned swiftly from Rosaline to Juliet. Romeo is likely a young teenager, perhaps 15, although his age is not explicitly mentioned. He is presumably well-dressed since he was the son of a very powerful family in Verona. He is love-struck, determined, and faithful. His personality is not well-established except that he really wants Juliet and will do most anything to get her. He is faithful, not in the sense that he was faithful to Rosaline, but that after he met Juliet, he stayed with her even to death. His function in the play is to fall in love with Juliet and serve as one-half of the couple. He says about Juliet, “Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! / For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.” This shows how he immediately becomes lovestruck with Juliet at first sight.
Balcony Scene
This scene is important because, in addition to initiating one of the play’s most beautiful and famous sequences of poetry, it is a prime example of the light/dark motif that runs throughout the play. Many scenes in Romeo and Juliet are set either late at night or early in the morning, and Shakespeare often uses the contrast between night and day to explore opposing alternatives in a given situation. Here, Romeo imagines Juliet transforming darkness into light; later, after their wedding night, Juliet convinces Romeo momentarily that the daylight is actually night (so that he doesn’t yet have to leave her room).