letter to romeo and juliet assignment

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: In Class Warm Ups (All Online): Activity 5: Letters to Juliet

Instructions.

• Activity 1: Courtship & Love
• Activity 2: Insults
• Activity 3: Globe Theatre
• Activity 4: Gender
• Activity 5: Letters to Juliet
• Activity 6: Character Traits

Romeo & Juliet:

Letters to juliet, 1) watch the video playlist on letters to juliet., 2) read the letter from juliet, 3) discuss as a group what you think of the letter.  what advice would you have for juliet, 4) write your response to juliet.

Once you finish writing your letters and you have extra time, please listen or read the following:

Http://www.npr.org/2013/04/16/177027206/letters-of-heartbreak-find-some-love-in-verona-italy, write your own letter to juliet.

• Letter from Juliet PDF

As a group, write an advice letter to Juliet as if you were one of the Secretaries of Juliet.

For more information on the secretaries of juliet watch the video or visit their website:   http://www.julietclub.com/en/#rise_project_posts-3 ). .

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• Next: Activity 6: Character Traits >>
• Last Updated: Aug 15, 2024 3:21 PM
• URL: https://lewishs-fcps.libguides.com/romeo-in-class

10 Activities for Teaching Romeo and Juliet

z Romeo and Juliet is one of those classic pieces of literature I think everyone has read. Even students who haven’t read the Shakespeare play have probably heard of the story or will relate to the plot as it has been retold in various films and literature. If you need some fresh ideas before you start this unit, read on. 

Here are 10 activities for teaching Romeo and Juliet

1. teaching romeo and juliet: relatable bell ringers.

If you’re going to focus on a Shakespeare play, you must go all in. Immersing students into a unit from start to finish is such a perfect way to help students understand a topic in-depth. Start off each class with these Shakespeare Bell Ringers . Each one includes a famous Shakespearean quote and a quick writing prompt. Students will explore various writing styles based on the quote.

2. Teaching Romeo and Juliet: Character Focus

The second organizer focuses on tracing emotions and motivations throughout the play. It’s a creative way for students to organize the play’s characters and is also a great resource for ESL students and struggling readers. 

3. Teaching Romeo and Juliet: Get Interactive

I can remember interactive notebooks becoming all the rage. And while the paper notebooks are creative, a motivator for some students, and it’s generally pretty easy to put an interactive spin on old ideas already at hand. Having a digital version is just one more layer to add something unique to the interactive notebook. My digital notebook resource can work as its own unit and includes analysis activities covering characters, symbols, major events, writing tasks, and response questions. Digital notebooks are great for classrooms trying to limit paper use, use more technology, prepare students for tech demands, and for any classes that need to work with mobile options.

4. Teaching Romeo and Juliet: Engaging Writing Tasks

Help students understand and analyze the play by giving them unique writing assignments. Have students explore different writing styles, analyze universal themes, and study character development. My Writing Tasks resource does all this and more. Each act has its own unique writing assignment, and I’ve included brainstorming organizers for each. You’ll be able to use this with differentiated instruction, and there are several additional resources and organizers included. 

5. Read “Cloze”ly

Prep passages for students to summarize to help them understand events from the play. This is an ideal activity for review, comprehension, or even assessment. Cloze reading is an ideal way to help students understand what is happening. Cut your prep time down by using this resource, with 6 passages ready to use AND written in modern-day English. Use as an individual assignment or collaborative activity. 

6. Use Office Supplies

Increase student engagement with hands-on activities using sticky notes. You can use various colors to coordinate different aspects of study (literary elements, major events, character development, etc). It’s an easy and quick way for students to organize thoughts and notes, and the bits of information can be manipulated and moved around for different assignments. Students can gather relevant information for various essays, or can organize their sticky notes in a way that makes sense to them (by topic, or chronologically, as an example). Check out my Sticky Note Literary Analysis activity that includes 12 sticky note organizers. 

7. Make Use of Bookmarks

Consider a foldable version like this one where you can jam-pack a variety of questions, vocabulary, literary analysis and more. These are foldable, interactive, fun, engaging – and it saves you time passing out one activity to be used throughout the play. 

8. Plan an Escape 

Escape rooms live up to the hype. Challenge your students with a fun and engaging review escape challenge. Have students work together in groups to complete collaboratively and spark authentic discussion. This escape room activity includes 40 timeline events to sort from the play correctly.

9. Don’t Forget Vocabulary

Vocabulary is an important aspect of understanding any work, but Shakespeare is on a whole other level. In addition to reading an older version of English in poetic form, students must grasp key vocabulary to understand the play more deeply. Engage your students with hands-on activities to learn vocabulary, whether that be through graphic organizers, visual dictionaries, or word puzzles. Check out my ready-to-print vocabulary packet that includes word lists, puzzles, organizers and quizzes for the entire play. 

10. Practice Annotations

Start at the very beginning with an engaging activity for the prologue. This will allow students to explore the Shakespearean language and the set-up to the drama that is Romeo and Juliet’s tragedy. Using this resource , students will read and annotate the prologue, be introduced to Elizabethan English, and have context and background information before reading the play. Students then will rewrite the prologue in modern-day English following the same sonnet form. I love having students explore language, and this activity fits perfectly into the unit. 

If you’re starting fresh with activities to fill a unit, or you’re looking to refresh your tried-and-true activities, check out my 5-week unit plan for Romeo and Juliet here . It’s full of goodies including a pacing guide, pre-reading activities, bookmarks, vocabulary, passages, writing tasks, essays, review activities, and more. 

Put a new spin on the classic tragedy by refreshing your activities and finding new ways to present to students. Just a few simple updates and changes can keep students engaged and help them relate to the material. I love seeing what others do in their classrooms, so please share your favorite ideas in the comments below. 

Is Teaching Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet Still Revelant?

In an earlier blog post , I discuss if teaching Shakespeare is still relevant.

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Romeo and Juliet

William shakespeare.

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Romeo and Juliet: Introduction

Romeo and juliet: plot summary, romeo and juliet: detailed summary & analysis, romeo and juliet: themes, romeo and juliet: quotes, romeo and juliet: characters, romeo and juliet: symbols, romeo and juliet: literary devices, romeo and juliet: quizzes, romeo and juliet: theme wheel, brief biography of william shakespeare.

Historical Context of Romeo and Juliet

Other books related to romeo and juliet.

• Full Title: Romeo and Juliet
• When Written: Likely 1591-1595
• Where Written: London, England
• When Published: “Bad quarto” (incomplete manuscript) printed in 1597; Second, more complete quarto printed in 1599; First folio, with clarifications and corrections, printed in 1623
• Literary Period: Renaissance
• Genre: Tragic play
• Setting: Verona, Italy
• Climax: Mistakenly believing that Juliet is dead, Romeo kills himself on her funeral bier by drinking poison. Juliet wakes up, finds Romeo dead, and fatally stabs herself with his dagger.
• Antagonist: Capulet, Lady Capulet, Montague, Lady Montague, Tybalt

Extra Credit for Romeo and Juliet

Tourist Trap. Casa di Giulietta, a 12-century villa in Verona, is located just off the Via Capello (the possible origin of the anglicized surname “Capulet”) and has become a major tourist attraction over the years because of its distinctive balcony. The house, purchased by the city of Verona in 1905 from private holdings, has been transformed into a kind of museum dedicated to the history of Romeo and Juliet , where tourists can view set pieces from some of the major film adaptations of the play and even leave letters to their loved ones. Never mind that “the balcony scene,” one of the most famous scenes in English literature, may never have existed—the word “balcony” never appears in the play, and balconies were not an architectural feature of Shakespeare’s England—tourists flock from all over to glimpse Juliet’s famous veranda.

Love Language. While much of Shakespeare’s later work is written in a combination of verse and prose (used mostly to offer distinction between social classes, with nobility speaking in verse and commoners speaking in prose), Romeo and Juliet is notable for its heady blend of poetic forms. The play’s prologue is written in the form of a sonnet, while most of the dialogue adheres strictly to the rhythm of iambic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet alter their cadences when speaking to each another, using more casual, naturalistic speech. When they talk about other potential lovers, such as Rosaline and Paris, their speech is much more formal (to reflect the emotional falsity of those dalliances.) Friar Laurence speaks largely in sermons and aphorisms, while the nurse speaks in blank verse.

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• Jul 11, 2022

Free Resources for Romeo & Juliet

Updated: Jul 27, 2022

I have always been very lucky to work with smart and caring coworkers. On this blog, I only share materials that I created individually, so I don't have a ton of my own materials to share for Romeo & Juliet. This is because when I taught Romeo & Juliet , my best lessons came from my coworkers and the book Shakespeare Set Free. If you are teaching Romeo & Juliet for the first time, drop everything and go buy this book. Someone who had taught in my classroom before me had left it on the bookshelf, and I opened it in a planning panic. Besides my coworkers (both of whom had theater experience), this book was the most helpful in helping me enact active and fun lessons during my Romeo & Juliet unit.

SO, what this all means is that I cannot share my whole Romeo & Juliet unit, but below are some activities that I created that may be helpful to you.

Pre-Reading Activities for Romeo & Juliet

Action Ranking-Rank actions based on how serious of an offense they are

Agree/Disagree Discussion (You can also turn this into a more active activity by having kids move to one side of the room or other other based on whether they "agree" or "disagree" with the statement)

Character Cut-Outs (paid product) : Introduce the plot of Romeo & Juliet and the main characters by having students complete this "Character Cut-Out Activity." Basically, students cut representations of each character out of old magazines to help them start learning the characters. The TpT product has a PowerPoint and graphic organizers to walk you through the activity.

Romeo & Juliet Reader's Theater

One of the main pieces of feedback from my coworkers was to have the kids act out Romeo & Juliet using Reader's Theater. I was not comfortable with this at all at first since I have no theater background, but eventually, even I figured it out. Also, there are a million variations on Reader's Theater (ie: changing the scene and language, etc.), but I have stuck with the basics.

The handouts below are from a few years of trial & error. One page is directions for the kids on how to do Reader's Theater and the other pages are charts that show how I divided up Romeo & Juliet and assigned the scenes to kids. Overall, when we started an act, I would give the kids an overview of the act and then assign them a scene. Sometimes, some scenes were very long and some scenes were very short, so I would divide up the scenes as needed to try and give each group and equal amount of work. Then, students had to get into their groups and create the script for their scene, and lastly, they would have to present their assigned scene to the class. There is a rubric that you can use as a starting point for grading. You may want to add more detail to it, depending on your grading preferences. The charts below still have my student names on them so that you can see how I assigned kids; you just need to delete my kids and add yours and then you'll be good to go.

Basic Acting Techniques PowerPoint

Reader's Theater Directions

Reader's Theater Rubric

Romeo & Juliet Act II Group Assignments (I started with Act 2 for Reader's Theater because we read Act I together as a class to get used to the language. The page numbers were from the textbooks we had that-Holt Elements of Literature )

Romeo & Juliet Act III Group Assignments

Romeo & Juliet Act IV Group Assignments

Romeo & Juliet Act V Group Assignments

Romeo & Juliet Scene Summary Charts

After each group presented their scene, I would give the rest of the class time to summarize the scene on a graphic organizer. The kids who presented the scene had to field any questions from their classmates about plot points that their classmates were confused about. I always warned the presenters that if their classmates had no clue what happened in their scene, then they did not do a good job bringing the scene to life in their presentation. The q & a was also a good time for me to gauge who in the presentation group did all the work, as the kid who stepped up to answer the questions was typically the only one who understood what was going on, overall.

Act I Summary Chart

Act II Summary Chart

Act III Summary Chart

Act IV Summary Chart

Act V Summary Chart

Romeo & Juliet Handouts & Activities

Understanding Syntax

Act 1 Questions

Small Review Activities for the Balcony Scene (paid product)

Close Reading of Friar Lawrence's Soliloquy (Act 2, Scene 3)

Romeo & Juliet Character Review

Romeo & Juliet Act II Quiz

Written Conversations: For this activity, put students into groups of four and give each of them a different "question." This makes it so that when students pass their papers, they are discussing different questions all at once. Give the everyone 5-10 minutes to respond to their given question, and then have students pass their paper clockwise. The next student has to respond to the ideas of the first student. Repeat this one more time, and then have the students pass the "conversations" back to the original owner.

Literary Terms w. Examples from Romeo & Juliet

Intro to Puns

Romeo & Juliet Literary Terms PowerPoint

Romeo and Juliet Multiple Choice Unit Test (no answer key)- The formatting is all crazy and I don't know where the answer key is, but the questions are good. Mix of plot and analysis.

Other Books That Connect to Romeo & Juliet

There are so many great books that you can use in place of Romeo & Juliet OR as an extension of your Romeo & Juliet studies. Below are some of my current favorites.

Romeo & Juliet Movies

Again....there are so many. Here are just a few.

There's almost an endless amount of resources out there for Romeo and Juliet , but hopefully these are still helpful for someone. If you have any resources that you would like to share with others, please post them in the comments below.

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Romeo and Juliet: The Love Letter Assignment

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Description

This is a great creative writing assignment for the end of Act I. Your students gain a deeper understanding of the characters as they write as either Romeo or Juliet.

I've included:

student printable of the assignment

letter aging instructions

step by step lesson presentation

samples photographs of this project

This assignment also appeals to tactile learners because they are creating an object with their creative writing.

If you enjoy this, you will want to check out my Romeo and Juliet Literacy stations. It includes several activities like this that students cycle through as stations.

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Romeo and Juliet Literacy Stations

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Tragic Love: Introducing Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

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• Instructional Plan
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This pre-reading lesson helps students expand their knowledge of Shakespeare and build an understanding of Romeo and Juliet by connecting the summary of the play to their everyday lives as teenagers. Students also explore the definition of tragedy and how "tragic love" is ingrained in the lives of teenagers from all cultures. The lesson helps students build background knowledge of the play, the genre of tragedy, and related terms and concepts, creating a context in which students can better understand and relate to the Shakespearean text.

Featured Resources

Story Map : This interactive is designed to assist students in prewriting and postreading activities by focusing on the key elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution.

From Theory to Practice

In her English Journal column "Taking Time: Beyond Memorization: Using Drama to Promote Thinking," Tonya Perry notes that "students in the classroom can participate in the performance of a dramatic text . . . with little understanding of the literature" (121). Because reading and performing drama is inherently interactive, teachers can mistakenly observe that students understand a play, feeling that "the dramatic text [seems] to explain itself" (121). Perry advocates for building prior knowledge and establishing ground for personal connections in drama through drama, as presented in this lesson. Students engage in "explanatory drama" as they use a skit to deepen their understanding of the central concept of tragic love. Further Reading

Common Core Standards

This resource has been aligned to the Common Core State Standards for states in which they have been adopted. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, CCSS alignments are forthcoming.

State Standards

This lesson has been aligned to standards in the following states. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, standard alignments are not currently available for that state.

NCTE/IRA National Standards for the English Language Arts

• 1. Students read a wide range of print and nonprint texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.
• 2. Students read a wide range of literature from many periods in many genres to build an understanding of the many dimensions (e.g., philosophical, ethical, aesthetic) of human experience.
• 3. Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics).
• 10. Students whose first language is not English make use of their first language to develop competency in the English language arts and to develop understanding of content across the curriculum.
• 11. Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.

Materials and Technology

• Computer and LCD projector  
• Tragic Love: An Introduction to Romeo and Juliet PowerPoint Presentation and notes  
• News articles about a recent tragedy from a print source  
• Examples of tragedy from popular culture (see Session Two )
• Assessment Questionnaire (for use as pre- and post- assessment)  
• Romeo and Juliet Major Character List  
• Tragic Love: An Introduction to Romeo and Juliet Notes (cloze notes to accompany the PowerPoint presentation)  
• Tragic Love Dialogue Assignment  
• Tragic Love Dialogue: A Tale of Litigious Woe

Preparation

• Review a summary of Romeo and Juliet . You can use this basic summary and additional information to enhance students' understanding of the play.  
• Set up the computer and projector for showing a PowerPoint presentation.  
• Preview the Tragic Love: An Introduction to Romeo and Juliet PowerPoint Presentation and plan how you will use the notes and other resources to elaborate on the presentation.  
• Prepare copies of necessary handouts.  
• Test the Story Map interactive on student computers.  
• (Optional) Print copies of news articles about a recent tragedy to use as an example to stimulate further discussion.

Student Objectives

Students will

• define tragedy and give examples from media and popular culture.  
• evaluate the relevance of the theme "tragic love" in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to the lives of teenagers.  
• become familiar with the themes and characters in Romeo and Juliet prior to reading the play.

Session One

• Pre-assess students' knowledge and opinions of Romeo and Juliet using the Assessment Questionnaire .  
• Review the answers students gave for the questionnaire by having two or three students share their responses for each question. Explain that you will discuss the ideas from the questionnaire as you view a PowerPoint presentation about the play.  
• Hand out the cloze notes for the Tragic Love: An Introduction to Romeo and Juliet PowerPoint Presentation and the Romeo and Juliet Major Character List . Students should use the cloze notes handout to take notes during the presentation.   
• View the setting and list of characters on slides 2 and 3.  
• Read aloud the names of the characters, and have the students repeat the names to help them get used to reading and saying the names aloud.  
• View Part I of the PowerPoint: the summary of Romeo and Juliet . Pause frequently to check for understanding and to allow students to ask questions.  
• You may wish to explain that audiences in the Shakespearean era typically came to plays already knowing the plot; knowing the plot ahead of time is not a "spolier" as we consider it today.  
• Have you ever had an experience like Romeo's or Juliet's?  
• Have you ever been in love?  
• Do you think teenagers fall in love easily? Why or why not?  
• What might happen when teenagers fall in love?  
• Have students use the last few minutes of class to write down their individual responses to the questions "Why do we read Romeo and Juliet today?" and "How does the story connect to the lives of teenagers today?" If necessary, have students complete the assignment for homework.

Session Two

• Review and discuss the summary of Romeo and Juliet from the Tragic Love: An Introduction to Romeo and Juliet PowerPoint Presentation .  
• Discuss students' responses to the questions: "Why do we read Romeo and Juliet today?" and "How does the story connect to the lives of teenagers today?"  
• Continue viewing the PowerPoint presentation, starting with Part II: TRAGEDY (slide 9).  
• As you go through the slides in this section, facilitate a short, student-led discussion of everyday tragedies people experience. Examples may include natural disasters such as hurricanes or tornadoes, car accidents, natural deaths, tragic deaths such as that of Latina pop singer Selena, and so on (slide 10). You can also read and discuss the article about a local tragedy that you printed.  
• As a class, discuss the question: How does tragedy affect people's lives?  
• When you come to the final slide (titled: Tragic Love?), have students take a few minutes to define tragic love and write down the responses in their notes.  
• James Cameron's Titanic  
• With Titanic , play Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" to show a "tragic love" song.  
• Robert Zemeckis' Forrest Gump  
• BBC News Article: "Italian dies in ‘Romeo' tragedy"  
• '"The tragic love story of alma reed & Felipe Carrillo" by Ruth Ross-Merrimer

Sessions Three and Four

• Have students take the Tragic Love: An Introduction to Romeo and Juliet Assessment Questionnaire again to assess how much their background knowledge and opinions of the play have improved and changed.  
• Place students in pairs, and hand out the Tragic Love Dialogue Assignment to each pair. Explain that they will work together, following the instructions on the assignment sheet, to create a dialogue that demonstrates their understanding of tragic love. Encourage pairs to be creative with their characters and scenario; in other words, they should not rewrite Romeo and Juliet . Go over the rubric at the bottom of the page so they are aware of the criteria on which they will be assessed. Review the Tragic Love: A Tale of Litigious Woe dialogue sample with students and give them time to ask any questions they may have about the assignment.  
• Allow students to work on their dialogues for the remainder of the session and the beginning of the next session, using the Story Map interactive if you prefer. You may give students additional time if needed.  
• After students have completed their dialogues, have each pair present its dialogue to the class.
• Research "tragic love" stories/legends from cultures around the world. Present the findings in a short play performed for the class.  
• Write a journal entry explaining the effects of tragedy that you have experienced or seen in your life.  
• Draw on the tiered focused/close reading assignments from Chapter 2, "Act 1: Lessons, Handouts, and Assessments," of Teaching Romeo and Juliet: A Differentiated Approach (NCTE 2007).  
• Use these ReadWriteThink lessons to continue study of Romeo and Juliet : Star-Crossed Lovers Online: Romeo and Juliet for a Digital Age , Book Report Alternative: Characters for Hire! Studying Character in Drama , and Happily Ever After? Exploring Character, Conflict, and Plot in Dramatic Tragedy .

Student Assessment / Reflections

• Ask students to compare their knowledge of the play as demonstrated on the pre- and post- assessments.  
• Use the rubric included in the Tragic Love Dialogue Assignment to assess students’ understanding of the concept of tragic love.  
• Throughout the reading of the play, ask students to reflect and reconnect to the work in this lesson to guide and clarify their responses to the text.
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The Story Map interactive is designed to assist students in prewriting and postreading activities by focusing on the key elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution.

Based on grade level, students learn about rhyming structure, experiment with the Shakespearean Insult Kit, or study scenes from Othello and watch an adaptation of that scene from the movie O .

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A Modern Perspective: Romeo and Juliet

By Gail Kern Paster

Does Romeo and Juliet need an introduction? Of all Shakespeare’s plays, it has been the most continuously popular since its first performance in the mid-1590s. It would seem, then, the most direct of Shakespeare’s plays in its emotional impact. What could be easier to understand and what could be more moving than the story of two adolescents finding in their sudden love for each other a reason to defy their families’ mutual hatred by marrying secretly? The tragic outcome of their blameless love (their “misadventured piteous overthrows”) seems equally easy to understand: it results first from Tybalt’s hotheaded refusal to obey the Prince’s command and second from accidents of timing beyond any human ability to foresee or control. Simple in its story line, clear in its affirmation of the power of love over hate, Romeo and Juliet seems to provide both a timeless theme and universal appeal. Its immediacy stands in welcome contrast to the distance, even estrangement, evoked by other Shakespeare plays. No wonder it is often the first Shakespeare play taught in schools—on the grounds of its obvious relevance to the emotional and social concerns of young people.

Recent work by social historians on the history of private life in western European culture, however, offers a complicating perspective on the timelessness of Romeo and Juliet. At the core of the play’s evident accessibility is the importance and privilege modern Western culture grants to desire, regarding it as deeply expressive of individual identity and central to the personal fulfillment of women no less than men. But, as these historians have argued, such conceptions of desire reflect cultural changes in human consciousness—in ways of imagining and articulating the nature of desire. 1 In England until the late sixteenth century, individual identity had been imagined not so much as the result of autonomous, personal growth in consciousness but rather as a function of social station, an individual’s place in a network of social and kinship structures. Furthermore, traditional culture distinguished sharply between the nature of identity for men and women. A woman’s identity was conceived almost exclusively in relation to male authority and marital status. She was less an autonomous, desiring self than any male was; she was a daughter, wife, or widow expected to be chaste, silent, and, above all, obedient. It is a profound and necessary act of historical imagination, then, to recognize innovation in the moment when Juliet impatiently invokes the coming of night and the husband she has disobediently married: “Come, gentle night; come, loving black-browed night, / Give me my Romeo” ( 3.2.21 –23).

Recognizing that the nature of desire and identity is subject to historical change and cultural innovation can provide the basis for rereading Romeo and Juliet. Instead of an uncomplicated, if lyrically beautiful, contest between young love and “ancient grudge,” the play becomes a narrative that expresses an historical conflict between old forms of identity and new modes of desire, between authority and freedom, between parental will and romantic individualism. Furthermore, though the Chorus initially sets the lovers as a pair against the background of familial hatred, the reader attentive to social detail will be struck instead by Shakespeare’s care in distinguishing between the circumstances of male and female lovers: “she as much in love, her means much less / To meet her new belovèd anywhere” ( 2. Chorus. 11 –12, italics added). The story of “Juliet and her Romeo” may be a single narrative, but its clear internal division is drawn along the traditionally unequal lines of gender.

Because of such traditional notions of identity and gender, Elizabethan theatergoers might have recognized a paradox in the play’s lyrical celebration of the beauty of awakened sexual desire in the adolescent boy and girl. By causing us to identify with Romeo and Juliet’s desire for one another, the play affirms their love even while presenting it as a problem in social management. This is true not because Romeo and Juliet fall in love with forbidden or otherwise unavailable sexual partners; such is the usual state of affairs at the beginning of Shakespearean comedy, but those comedies end happily. Rather Romeo and Juliet’s love is a social problem, unresolvable except by their deaths, because they dare to marry secretly in an age when legal, consummated marriage was irreversible. Secret marriage is the narrative device by which Shakespeare brings into conflict the new privilege claimed by individual desire and the traditional authority granted fathers to arrange their daughters’ marriages. Secret marriage is the testing ground, in other words, of the new kind of importance being claimed by individual desire. Shakespeare’s representation of the narrative outcome of this desire as tragic—here, as later in the secret marriage that opens Othello —may suggest something of Elizabethan society’s anxiety about the social cost of romantic individualism.

The conflict between traditional authority and individual desire also provides the framework for Shakespeare’s presentation of the Capulet-Montague feud. The feud, like the lovers’ secret marriage, is another problem in social management, another form of socially problematic desire. We are never told what the families are fighting about or fighting for; in this sense the feud is both causeless and goal-less. The Chorus’s first words insist not on the differences between the two families but on their similarity: they are two households “both alike in dignity.” Later, after Prince Escalus has broken up the street brawl, they are “In penalty alike” ( 1.2.2 ). Ironically, then, they are not fighting over differences. Rather it is Shakespeare’s careful insistence on the lack of difference between Montague and Capulet that provides a key to understanding the underlying social dynamic of the feud. Just as desire brings Romeo and Juliet together as lovers, desire in another form brings the Montague and Capulet males out on the street as fighters. The feud perpetuates a close bond of rivalry between these men that even the Prince’s threat of punishment cannot sever: “Montague is bound as well as I,” Capulet tells Paris ( 1.2.1 ). Indeed, the feud seems necessary to the structure of male-male relations in Verona. Feuding reinforces male identity—loyalty to one’s male ancestors—at the same time that it clarifies the social structure: servants fight with servants, young noblemen with young noblemen, old men with old men. 2

That the feud constitutes a relation of desire between Montague and Capulet is clear from the opening, when the servants Gregory and Sampson use bawdy innuendo to draw a causal link between their virility and their eagerness to fight Montagues: “A dog of that house shall move me to stand,” i.e., to be sexually erect ( 1.1.12 ). The Montagues seem essential to Sampson’s masculinity since, by besting Montague men, he can lay claim to Montague women as symbols of conquest. (This, of course, would be a reductive way of describing what Romeo does in secretly marrying a Capulet daughter.) The feud not only establishes a structure of relations between men based on competition and sexual aggression, but it seems to involve a particularly debased attitude toward women. No matter how comic the wordplay of the Capulet servants may be, we should not forget that the sexual triangle they imagine is based on fantasized rape: “I will push Montague’s men from the wall and thrust his maids to the wall” ( 1.1.18 –19). Gregory and Sampson are not interested in the “heads” of the Montague maidens, which might imply awareness of them as individuals. They are interested only in their “maidenheads.” Their coarse view of woman as generic sexual object is reiterated in a wittier vein by Mercutio, who understands Romeo’s experience of awakened desire only as a question of the sexual availability of his mistress: “O Romeo, that she were, O, that she were / An open-arse, thou a pop’rin pear” ( 2.1.40 –41).

Feuding, then, is the form that male bonding takes in Verona, a bonding which seems linked to the derogation of woman. But Romeo, from the very opening of the play, is distanced both physically and emotionally from the feud, not appearing until the combatants and his parents are leaving the stage. His reaction to Benvolio’s news of the fight seems to indicate that he is aware of the mechanisms of desire that are present in the feud: “Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love” ( 1.1.180 ). But it also underscores his sense of alienation: “This love feel I, that feel no love in this” ( 187 ). He is alienated not only from the feud itself, one feels, but more importantly from the idea of sexuality that underlies it. Romeo subscribes to a different, indeed a competing view of woman—the idealizing view of the Petrarchan lover. In his melancholy, his desire for solitude, and his paradox-strewn language, Romeo identifies himself with the style of feeling and address that Renaissance culture named after the fourteenth-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarca or Petrarch, most famous for his sonnets to Laura. By identifying his beloved as perfect and perfectly chaste, the Petrarchan lover opposes the indiscriminate erotic appetite of a Gregory or Sampson. He uses the frustrating experience of intense, unfulfilled, and usually unrequited passion to refine his modes of feeling and to enlarge his experience of self.

It is not coincidental, then, that Shakespeare uses the language and self-involved behaviors of the Petrarchan lover to dramatize Romeo’s experience of love. For Romeo as for Petrarch, love is the formation of an individualistic identity at odds with other kinds of identity: “I have lost myself. I am not here. / This is not Romeo. He’s some other where” ( 1.1.205 –6). Petrarchan desire for solitude explains Romeo’s absence from the opening clash and his lack of interest in the activities of his gang of friends, whom he accompanies only reluctantly to the Capulet feast: “I’ll be a candle holder and look on” ( 1.4.38 ). His physical isolation from his parents—with whom he exchanges no words in the course of the play—further suggests his shift from traditional, clan identity to the romantic individualism prefigured by Petrarch.

Shakespeare’s comic irony is that such enlargement of self is itself a mark of conventionality, since Petrarchism in European literature was by the late sixteenth century very widespread. A more cutting irony is that the Petrarchan lover and his sensual opponent (Sampson or Gregory) have more in common than is first apparent. The Petrarchan lover, in emphasizing the often paralyzing intensity of his passion, is less interested in praising the remote mistress who inspires such devotion than he is in displaying his own poetic virtuosity and his capacity for self-denial. Such a love—like Romeo’s for Rosaline—is founded upon frustration and requires rejection. The lover is interested in affirming the uniqueness of his beloved only in theory. On closer look, she too becomes a generic object and he more interested in self-display. Thus the play’s two languages of heterosexual desire—Petrarchan praise and anti-Petrarchan debasement—appear as opposite ends of a single continuum, as complementary discourses of woman, high and low. Even when Paris and old Capulet, discussing Juliet as prospective bride, vary the discourse to include a conception of woman as wife and mother, she remains an object of verbal and actual exchange.

In lyric poetry, the Petrarchan mistress remains a function of language alone, unheard, seen only as a collection of ideal parts, a center whose very absence promotes desire. Drama is a material medium, however. In drama, the Petrarchan mistress takes on embodiment and finds an answering voice, like Juliet’s gently noting her sonneteer-pilgrim’s conventionality: “You kiss by th’ book” ( 1.5.122 ). In drama, the mistress may come surrounded by relatives and an inconveniently insistent social milieu. As was noted above, Shakespeare distinguishes sharply between the social circumstances of adolescent males and females. Thus one consequence of setting the play’s domestic action solely within the Capulet household is to set Juliet, the “hopeful lady” of Capulet’s “earth” ( 1.2.15 ), firmly into a familial context which, thanks to the Nurse’s fondness for recollection and anecdote, is rich in domestic detail. Juliet’s intense focus upon Romeo’s surname—“What’s Montague? . . . O, be some other name” ( 2.2.43 , 44 )—is a projection onto her lover of her own conflicted sense of tribal loyalty. Unlike Romeo, whose deepest emotional ties are to his gang of friends, and unlike the more mobile daughters of Shakespearean comedy who often come in pairs, Juliet lives isolated and confined, emotionally as well as physically, by her status as daughter. Her own passage into sexual maturity comes first by way of parental invitation to “think of marriage now” ( 1.3.75 ). Her father invites Paris, the man who wishes to marry Juliet, to attend a banquet and feast his eyes on female beauty: “Hear all, all see, / And like her most whose merit most shall be” ( 1.2.30 –31). Juliet, in contrast, is invited to look only where her parents tell her:

I’ll look to like, if looking liking move.

But no more deep will I endart mine eye

Than your consent gives strength to make it fly.

( 1.3.103 –5)

The logic of Juliet’s almost instant disobedience in looking at, and liking, Romeo (rather than Paris) can be understood as the ironic fulfillment of the fears in traditional patriarchal culture about the uncontrollability of female desire, the alleged tendency of the female gaze to wander. Petrarchism managed the vexed question of female desire largely by wishing it out of existence, describing the mistress as one who, like the invisible Rosaline of this play, “will not stay the siege of loving terms, / Nor bide th’ encounter of assailing eyes” ( 1.1.220 –21). Once Romeo, in the Capulet garden, overhears Juliet’s expression of desire, however, Juliet abandons the conventional denial of desire—“Fain would I dwell on form; fain, fain deny / What I have spoke. But farewell compliment” ( 2.2.93 –94). She rejects the “strength” implied by parental sanction and the protection afforded by the Petrarchan celebration of chastity for a risk-taking experiment in desire that Shakespeare affirms by the beauty of the lovers’ language in their four scenes together. Juliet herself asks Romeo the serious questions that Elizabethan society wanted only fathers to ask. She challenges social prescriptions, designed to contain erotic desire in marriage, by taking responsibility for her own marriage:

If that thy bent of love be honorable,

Thy purpose marriage, send me word tomorrow,

By one that I’ll procure to come to thee,

Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite,

And all my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay

And follow thee my lord throughout the world.

( 2.2.150 –55)

The irony in her pledge—an irony perhaps most obvious to a modern, sexually egalitarian audience—is that Romeo here is following Juliet on an uncharted narrative path to sexual fulfillment in unsanctioned marriage. Allowing her husband access to a bedchamber in her father’s house, Juliet leads him into a sexual territory beyond the reach of dramatic representation. Breaking through the narrow oppositions of the play’s two discourses of woman—as either anonymous sexual object (for Sampson and Gregory) or beloved woman exalted beyond knowing or possessing (for Petrarch)—she affirms her imaginative commitment to the cultural significance of desire as an individualizing force:

                          Come, civil night,

Thou sober-suited matron all in black,

And learn me how to lose a winning match

Played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods.

Hood my unmanned blood, bating in my cheeks,

With thy black mantle till strange love grow bold,

Think true love acted simple modesty.

( 3.2.10 –16)

Romeo, when he is not drawn by desire deeper and deeper into Capulet territory, wanders into the open square where the destinies of the play’s other young men—and in part his own too—are enacted. Because the young man’s deepest loyalty is to his friends, Romeo is not really asked to choose between Juliet and his family but between Juliet and Mercutio, who are opposed in the play’s thematic structure. Thus one function of Mercutio’s anti-Petrarchan skepticism about the idealization of woman is to offer resistance to the adult heterosexuality heralded by Romeo’s union with Juliet, resistance on behalf of the regressive pull of adolescent male bonding—being “one of the guys.” This distinction, as we have seen, is in part a question of speaking different discourses. Romeo easily picks up Mercutio’s banter, even its sly innuendo against women. Mercutio himself regards Romeo’s quickness at repartee as the hopeful sign of a return to a “normal” manly identity incompatible with his ridiculous role as lover:

Why, is not this better now than groaning for love? Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo, now art thou what thou art, by art as well as by nature. For this driveling love is like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole.

( 2.4.90 –95)

Implicit here is a central tenet of traditional misogyny that excessive desire for a woman is effeminizing. For Mercutio it is the effeminate lover in Romeo who refuses shamefully to answer Tybalt’s challenge: “O calm, dishonorable, vile submission!” he exclaims furiously ( 3.1.74 ). Mercutio’s death at Tybalt’s hands causes Romeo temporarily to agree, obeying the regressive emotional pull of grief and guilt over his own part in Mercutio’s defeat. “Why the devil came you between us?” Mercutio asks. “I was hurt under your arm” ( 3.1.106 –8). Why, we might ask instead, should Mercutio have insisted on answering a challenge addressed only to Romeo? Romeo, however, displaces blame onto Juliet: “Thy beauty hath made me effeminate / And in my temper softened valor’s steel” ( 3.1.119 –20).

In terms of narrative structure, the death of Mercutio and Romeo’s slaying of Tybalt interrupt the lovers’ progress from secret marriage to its consummation, suggesting the incompatibility between romantic individualism and adolescent male bonding. The audience experiences this incompatibility as a sudden movement from comedy to tragedy. Suddenly Friar Lawrence must abandon hopes of using the love of Capulet and Montague as a force for social reintegration. Instead, he must desperately stave off Juliet’s marriage to Paris, upon which her father insists, by making her counterfeit death and by subjecting her to entombment. The legal finality of consummated marriage—which was the basis for Friar Lawrence’s hopes “to turn your households’ rancor to pure love” ( 2.3.99 )—becomes the instrument of tragic design. It is only the Nurse who would allow Juliet to accept Paris as husband; we are asked to judge such a prospect so unthinkable that we then agree imaginatively to Friar Lawrence’s ghoulish device.

In terms of the play’s symbolic vocabulary, Juliet’s preparations to imitate death on the very bed where her sexual maturation from girl- to womanhood occurred confirms ironically her earlier premonition about Romeo: “If he be marrièd, / My grave is like to be my wedding bed” ( 1.5.148 –49). Her brief journey contrasts sharply with those of Shakespeare’s comic heroines who move out from the social confinement of daughterhood into a freer, less socially defined space (the woods outside Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream , the Forest of Arden in As You Like It ). There they can exercise a sanctioned, limited freedom in the romantic experimentation of courtship. Juliet is punished for such experimentation in part because hers is more radical; secret marriage symbolically is as irreversible as “real” death. Her journey thus becomes an internal journey in which her commitment to union with Romeo must face the imaginative challenge of complete, claustrophobic isolation and finally death in the Capulet tomb.

It is possible to see the lovers’ story, as some critics have done, as Shakespeare’s dramatic realization of the ruling metaphors of Petrarchan love poetry—particularly its fascination with “death-marked love” ( Prologue. 9 ). 3 But, in pondering the implications of Shakespeare’s moving his audience to identify with this narrative of initiative, desire, and power, we also do well to remember the psychosocial dynamics of drama. By heightening their powers of identification, drama gives the members of an audience an embodied image of the possible scope and form of their fears and desires. Here we have seen how tragic form operates to contain the complex play of desire/identification. The metaphors of Petrarchan idealization work as part of a complex, ambivalent discourse of woman whose ultimate social function is to encode the felt differences between men and women on which a dominant male power structure is based. Romeo and Juliet find a new discourse of romantic individualism in which Petrarchan idealization conjoins with the mutual avowal of sexual desire. But their union, as we have seen, imperils the traditional relations between males that is founded upon the exchange of women, whether the violent exchange Gregory and Sampson crudely imagine or the normative exchange planned by Capulet and Paris. Juliet, as the daughter whose erotic willfulness activates her father’s transformation from concerned to tyrannical parent, is the greater rebel. Thus the secret marriage in which this new language of feeling is contained cannot here be granted the sanction of a comic outcome. When Romeo and Juliet reunite, it is only to see each other, dead, in the dim confines of the Capulet crypt. In this play the autonomy of romantic individualism remains “star-crossed.”

• The story of these massive shifts in European sensibility is told in a five-volume study titled A History of Private Life , gen. eds. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987–91). The study covers over three millennia in the history of western Europe. For the period most relevant to Romeo and Juliet, see vol. 3, Passions of the Renaissance (1989), ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, pp. 399–607.
• The best extended discussion of the dynamic of the feud is Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 83ff.
• Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (London: Methuen, 1968), pp. 82ff.

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