Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy by William Shakespeare and one of his most popular works. Along with Hamlet and Macbeth, it is among the plays staged most often. It is usually dated to between 1591 and 1595, although some sources place its completion in 1597, the year the first printed edition appeared in a quarto format whose text was of poor quality. Later editions corrected the text to bring it closer to the playwright's original.

The story belongs to a long tradition of tragic romances reaching back to antiquity. Shakespeare drew mainly on an Italian tale by Matteo Bandello, which reached English readers through Arthur Brooke's verse version and William Painter's prose retelling in his collection Palace of Pleasure. Working from these sources, he enlarged the plot with new supporting characters, such as Mercutio and Count Paris, and with subplots that enrich the action.

The play is set in Verona and follows the love between Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet, members of two families locked in an old feud. Despite the hostility dividing them, the young couple fall in love and marry in secret, with the help of Friar Laurence, who hopes to reconcile the households. A chain of deaths, including those of Mercutio and Juliet's cousin Tybalt, sends the lovers toward their fate: Romeo is banished, Juliet is pressed to marry Paris, and a misunderstanding over a sleeping potion leads both to tragedy.

The work is admired for its dramatic technique. It shifts skilfully between comic and tragic moments to heighten tension, gives real weight to minor characters, and assigns different verse forms to different speakers, so that Romeo, for instance, becomes more accomplished at the sonnet as the story moves on. These features are often cited as an early sign of Shakespeare's dramatic mastery.

Since its first staging, the play has been enormously influential. It has been rewritten and adapted countless times for the stage, film, musical theatre and opera, from the revisions of the English Restoration to twentieth- and twenty-first-century films. Its story has become the archetype of the so-called star-crossed lovers.