romeo and juliet youth and age essay

A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Although it was first performed in the 1590s, the first  documented  performance of Romeo and Juliet is from 1662. The diarist Samuel Pepys was in the audience, and recorded that he ‘saw “Romeo and Juliet,” the first time it was ever acted; but it is a play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life, and the worst acted that ever I saw these people do.’

Despite Pepys’ dislike, the play is one of Shakespeare’s best-loved and most famous, and the story of Romeo and Juliet is well known. However, the play has become so embedded in the popular psyche that Shakespeare’s considerably more complex play has been reduced to a few key aspects: ‘star-cross’d lovers’, a teenage love story, and the suicide of the two protagonists.

In the summary and analysis that follow, we realise that Romeo and Juliet is much more than a tragic love story.

Romeo and Juliet : brief summary

After the Prologue has set the scene – we have two feuding households, Montagues and Capulets, in the city-state of Verona; and young Romeo is a Montague while Juliet, with whom Romeo is destined to fall in love, is from the Capulet family, sworn enemies of the Montagues – the play proper begins with servants of the two feuding households taunting each other in the street.

When Benvolio, a member of house Montague, arrives and clashes with Tybalt of house Capulet, a scuffle breaks out, and it is only when Capulet himself and his wife, Lady Capulet, appear that the fighting stops. Old Montague and his wife then show up, and the Prince of Verona, Escalus, arrives and chastises the people for fighting. Everyone leaves except Old Montague, his wife, and Benvolio, Montague’s nephew. Benvolio tells them that Romeo has locked himself away, but he doesn’t know why.

Romeo appears and Benvolio asks his cousin what is wrong, and Romeo starts speaking in paradoxes, a sure sign that he’s in love. He claims he loves Rosaline, but will not return any man’s love. A servant appears with a note, and Romeo and Benvolio learn that the Capulets are holding a masked ball.

Benvolio tells Romeo he should attend, even though he is a Montague, as he will find more beautiful women than Rosaline to fall in love with. Meanwhile, Lady Capulet asks her daughter Juliet whether she has given any thought to marriage, and tells Juliet that a man named Paris would make an excellent husband for her.

Romeo attends the Capulets’ masked ball, with his friend Mercutio. Mercutio tells Romeo about a fairy named Queen Mab who enters young men’s minds as they dream, and makes them dream of love and romance. At the masked ball, Romeo spies Juliet and instantly falls in love with her; she also falls for him.

They kiss, but then Tybalt, Juliet’s kinsman, spots Romeo and recognising him as a Montague, plans to confront him. Old Capulet tells him not to do so, and Tybalt reluctantly agrees. When Juliet enquires after who Romeo is, she is distraught to learn that he is a Montague and thus a member of the family that is her family’s sworn enemies.

Romeo breaks into the gardens of Juliet’s parents’ house and speaks to her at her bedroom window. The two of them pledge their love for each other, and arrange to be secretly married the following night. Romeo goes to see a churchman, Friar Laurence, who agrees to marry Romeo and Juliet.

After the wedding, the feud between the two families becomes violent again: Tybalt kills Mercutio in a fight, and Romeo kills Tybalt in retaliation. The Prince banishes Romeo from Verona for his crime.

Juliet is told by her father that she will marry Paris, so Juliet goes to seek Friar Laurence’s help in getting out of it. He tells her to take a sleeping potion which will make her appear to be dead for two nights; she will be laid to rest in the family vault, and Romeo (who will be informed of the plan) can secretly come to her there.

However, although that part of the plan goes fine, the message to Romeo doesn’t arrive; instead, he hears that Juliet has actually died. He secretly visits her at the family vault, but his grieving is interrupted by the arrival of Paris, who is there to lay flowers. The two of them fight, and Romeo kills him.

Convinced that Juliet is really dead, Romeo drinks poison in order to join Juliet in death. Juliet wakes from her slumber induced by the sleeping draught to find Romeo dead at her side. She stabs herself.

The play ends with Friar Laurence telling the story to the two feuding families. The Prince tells them to put their rivalry behind them and live in peace.

Romeo and Juliet : analysis

How should we analyse Romeo and Juliet , one of Shakespeare’s most famous and frequently studied, performed, and adapted plays? Is Romeo and Juliet the great love story that it’s often interpreted as, and what does it say about the play – if it is a celebration of young love – that it ends with the deaths of both romantic leads?

It’s worth bearing in mind that Romeo and Juliet do not kill themselves specifically because they are forbidden to be together, but rather because a chain of events (of which their families’ ongoing feud with each other is but one) and a message that never arrives lead to a misunderstanding which results in their suicides.

Romeo and Juliet is often read as both a tragedy and a great celebration of romantic love, but it clearly throws out some difficult questions about the nature of love, questions which are rendered even more pressing when we consider the headlong nature of the play’s action and the fact that Romeo and Juliet meet, marry, and die all within the space of a few days.

Below, we offer some notes towards an analysis of this classic Shakespeare play and explore some of the play’s most salient themes.

It’s worth starting with a consideration of just what Shakespeare did with his source material. Interestingly, two families known as the Montagues and Capulets appear to have actually existed in medieval Italy: the first reference to ‘Montagues and Capulets’ is, curiously, in the poetry of Dante (1265-1321), not Shakespeare.

In Dante’s early fourteenth-century epic poem, the  Divine Comedy , he makes reference to two warring Italian families: ‘Come and see, you who are negligent, / Montagues and Capulets, Monaldi and Filippeschi / One lot already grieving, the other in fear’ ( Purgatorio , canto VI). Precisely why the families are in a feud with one another is never revealed in Shakespeare’s play, so we are encouraged to take this at face value.

The play’s most famous line references the feud between the two families, which means Romeo and Juliet cannot be together. And the line, when we stop and consider it, is more than a little baffling. The line is spoken by Juliet: ‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ Of course, ‘wherefore’ doesn’t mean ‘where’ – it means ‘why’.

But that doesn’t exactly clear up the whys and the wherefores. The question still doesn’t appear to make any sense: Romeo’s problem isn’t his first name, but his family name, Montague. Surely, since she fancies him, Juliet is quite pleased with ‘Romeo’ as he is – it’s his family that are the problem. Solutions  have been proposed to this conundrum , but none is completely satisfying.

There are a number of notable things Shakespeare did with his source material. The Italian story ‘Mariotto and Gianozza’, printed in 1476, contained many of the plot elements of Shakespeare’s  Romeo and Juliet . Shakespeare’s source for the play’s story was Arthur Brooke’s  The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet  (1562), an English verse translation of this Italian tale.

The moral of Brooke’s tale is that young love ends in disaster for their elders, and is best reined in; Shakespeare changed that. In Romeo and Juliet , the headlong passion and excitement of young love is celebrated, even though confusion leads to the deaths of the young lovers. But through their deaths, and the example their love set for their parents, the two families vow to be reconciled to each other.

Shakespeare also makes Juliet a thirteen-year-old girl in his play, which is odd for a number of reasons. We know that  Romeo and Juliet  is about young love – the ‘pair of star-cross’d lovers’, who belong to rival families in Verona – but what is odd about Shakespeare’s play is how young he makes Juliet.

In Brooke’s verse rendition of the story, Juliet is sixteen. But when Shakespeare dramatised the story, he made Juliet several years younger, with Romeo’s age unspecified. As Lady Capulet reveals, Juliet is ‘not [yet] fourteen’, and this point is made to us several times, as if Shakespeare wishes to draw attention to it and make sure we don’t forget it.

This makes sense in so far as Juliet represents young love, but what makes it unsettling – particularly for modern audiences – is the fact that this makes Juliet a girl of thirteen when she enjoys her night of wedded bliss with Romeo. As John Sutherland puts it in his (and Cedric Watts’) engaging  Oxford World’s Classics: Henry V, War Criminal?: and Other Shakespeare Puzzles , ‘In a contemporary court of law [Romeo] would receive a longer sentence for what he does to Juliet than for what he does to Tybalt.’

There appears to be no satisfactory answer to this question, but one possible explanation lies in one of the play’s recurring themes: bawdiness and sexual familiarity. Perhaps surprisingly given the youthfulness of its tragic heroine, Romeo and Juliet is shot through with bawdy jokes, double entendres, and allusions to sex, made by a number of the characters.

These references to physical love serve to make Juliet’s innocence, and subsequent passionate romance with Romeo, even more noticeable: the journey both Romeo and Juliet undertake is one from innocence (Romeo pointlessly and naively pursuing Rosaline; Juliet unversed in the ways of love) to experience.

In the last analysis, Romeo and Juliet is a classic depiction of forbidden love, but it is also far more sexually aware, more ‘adult’, than many people realise.

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4 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet”

Modern reading of the play’s opening dialogue among the brawlers fails to parse the ribaldry. Sex scares the bejeepers out of us. Why? Confer “R&J.”

It’s all that damn padre’s fault!

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Youth and Privacy in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>

• Rachel Prusko University of Alberta

Passionate, dramatic, secretive, and misunderstood, Romeo and Juliet represent adolescence in ways that strike a familiar chord for audiences today. My essay suggests, however, that these young characters likely appeared to Shakespeare’s original audiences as troubling, unsettling figures, because Romeo and Juliet dismantles extant understandings of young people in Shakespeare’s England. I argue that the play’s staging evokes the guarded interiority of its young protagonists and establishes private spaces in which they constitute themselves as adolescent subjects. Private space, in turn, makes possible a private language: a kind of teen-speak recognizable today but among its earliest manifestations.

Author Biography

Rachel prusko, university of alberta.

Rachel Prusko ( [email protected] ) is a lecturer in the department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research interests include early modern drama and literatures of childhood and youth, and she has recently completed her dissertation, Becoming Youth: Coming of Age in Shakespeare and Marlowe . Her recent publications appear in Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures and The Merry Wives of Windsor: New Critical Essays . 

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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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Youth and age are in conflict in Romeo and Juliet. This conflict affects all of the characters in some way:

        -  -

Romeo   and   Juliet

Youth and age are in conflict in Romeo and Juliet .  This conflict affects all of the characters in some way: The most deeply affected characters are Romeo and Juliet, who both commit a double suicide because of the failure of their families to accept their love for each other.  The families are consumed with a single-minded hatred of each other that surpasses all reason.  

There is a lot of conflict in Romeo and Juliet including physical conflict Mercutio Vs Tybalt Mental conflict Juliet Vs the Nurse

Psychological conflict Samson and Gregory Vs the Montague’s Emotional conflict Juliet Vs Lord Capulet Hatred conflict Capulet’s Vs Montague’s Anger conflict all fights in the play Frustration conflict Romeo Vs Tybalt Power struggle conflict Romeo Vs Prince Escales

Act three scene five

Mercutio and Benvolio are out in the streets of Verona.  Tybalt appears looking for Romeo to accept his challenge to duel, in response to Romeo gate-chrashing the Capulet’s party.  When he finally encounters his chosen target Romeo he challenges him to a fight, but unfortunately Romeo is married to Juliet now making Tybalt his cousin so he refuses his challenge.  Then Mercutio calling Romeo a coward draws his rapier says to Tybalt “Good king of cats nothing but one of your nine lives that I mean   to make bold”  he then starts to brawl with Tybalt who slays him with Romeo’s unintentional assistance he then dies cursing the feud.

Romeo has been banished to Manuta, exiled from the one he loves, for murdering Tybalt.  Juliet, who is grief-stricken over Tybalt’s death; but more upset at the news of Romeo’s banishment. (And all on their wedding day!), needs reassurance and comfort.  Distraught she goes to her nurse for comfort but she turns the other cheek, telling her that Romeo has been exiled - he is literally dead to her.  Juliet should marry Paris and get on with life, conforming to her father’s threatening demands.

“Romeo is banished and all the world to nothing”

Juliet then flies into a towering uncontrollable rage calling the Nurse an   “ Ancient damnation”

And “O most wicked fiend” .  She then rushes to Friar Lawrence’ cell, possessed with the idea that he can help her to move heaven and the earth so that she can be with her beloved Romeo.  She is deranged and possessed by a driving need to see her true love, like a junkie looking for their fix.  She has lost all sense of reality.

Act one scene one

This conflict is at the start of the play.  When the two Capulet servants, Samson and Gregory, are in the street boasting of their effortless perfection and relentless superiority over all Montagues, two of Montague’s servants, Abram and Peter, approach the arrogant duo.  They then begin to heckling the Montague’s with

“Do you bite your bite your thumb at us Sir?)

This is a preview of the whole essay

(This style of warfare has never really changed and is still used today with more modern insults.)  Then the tensions are rising as the mind games continue between the two houses.  When Benvolio, a Montague, tries to make peace and prevent another street brawl; Tybalt, a Capulet, interferes.  Then the brawl breaks out and the entire town joins in with the meleé, just using it as an excuse to beat the stuffing out of each-other.

Act three scene one

Mercutio and Benvolio are out in the streets of Verona.  Tybalt appears looking for Romeo to accept his challenge to duel, in response to Romeo gate-chrashing the Capulet’s party.  When he finally encounters his chosen target, Romeo, he challenges him to a fight, but unfortunately Romeo is married to Juliet now - making Tybalt his cousin - so he refuses his challenge.  Then Mercutio, calling Romeo a coward, draws his rapier and says to Tybalt “Good king of cats nothing but one of your nine lives that I mean   to make bold”  he then starts to duel with Tybalt, who slays him with Romeo’s unintentional assistance.  It is because of this that an enraged Romeo disillusioned and deranged with anger charges at Tybalt saying “And fiery-eyed fury be my conduct now” .  As his testosterone rises he relentlessly, with no remorse or regret, murders Tybalt.

 The conflict affects all characters young and old in the play especially these characters in the table below:

Age   in   conflict

The   old   Montagues   and   the   old   Capulets

The feud and the entire play are based around the needless stupidity of the quarrel between the old Montagues and the old Capulets and their respective families.  Although Lord Montague and Lord Capulet never actually fight and Lord Montague is not really featured in the play, their presence is felt whenever a fight breaks out and the sinister presence of the two protagonists, Lord Montague and Lord Capulet, like two gladiators waiting for the starting bell, are never that far away from the action.

Friar   Lawrence

The Friar is a Man of God.  He is not bothered with the quarrel but thinks that if he marries Romeo and Juliet then the argument will end for The old Montagues and the old Capulets thus ending the argument without resorting to gang war or mass suicide and bringing peace to fair Verona.

The   Nurse

The nurse’s only job in life is to care for and to nurture young Juliet, through the troubled years of her life, as she had done since Juliet was born.  She serves as a go-between for the lovers and only gets involved in a conflict when she clashes with Juliet over the proposed marriage to Paris.

Prince   Escales

The noble Prince’s job is to keep the peace and enforce law and order in Verona, so naturally he encounters the feud in his daily work.  He is as puzzled as everyone else as to the origins of the conflict but he considers this irrelevant. His only concern is to stop any further conflict before people are killed so he enforces a law which states if any Montague and Capulet brawl in the streets they will be executed.  This law affects Romeo when he kills Tybalt but since Tybalt killed Mercutio under law he would have been executed anyway.  However since enough people have died the Prince lightens Romeo’s sentence to exile under pain of death if he returns; but in those times being exiled was like death anyway.

Youth   in   conflict

Tybalt’s entire existence is based on the row with the Montagues.  This is demonstrated when he says:

“Talk of peace? I hate the word as I hate hell and all Montagues” act1 scene1 line 63

He is a junkie to the feud, and as with many junkies their addiction usually ends their life. This can be seen when Romeo kills Tybalt in pure rage

Benvolio is a peacemaker, but by peer pressure he is drawn into the combat.  He is not interested in this, but his skirmishes against Tybalt prove he can take care of himself if it’s required.

He is a leader among others: he is “one of the lads”.  He is, however, cocky, arrogant and looking for a chance to show up the Capulets.  In trying to achieve this he is killed by Tybalt.

His only goal throughout the entire play is to marry Juliet.  He doesn’t care about the feud; he asks Lord Capulet’s permission for the marriage he agrees.  He only encounters the feud when he is killed by a deranged Romeo, who is angry and on a spree of mass destruction, in his search to find Juliet’s dead body to mourn at her grave.

The   Most   affected   characters

As mentioned in the thesis statement the most affected characters are Romeo and Juliet:

The name Romeo is a name synonymous with love and romance for its usage in this play as the emotionally insecure son of lord and lady Montague who live in Verona.

At the start of the play he does not care for the feud; he is the mellow, depressed, poetic type.  He is more concerned with Rosaline, his first love who wants to become a Nun.  He is distraught at this rejection, and his parents show concern.  So they ask his cousin, Benvolio, to help him.  He learns that Romeo’s love object, Rosaline, will attend the Capulet party that very night.  Romeo wants to see her, but Benvolio pleads with him not to waste his time on Rosaline.  As he thinks seeing other girls will help him recover from his blurry mood and end his pointless depression.

It is at this party that he meets Juliet, they fall in love with each other and are convinced that they are soulmates.  They decide to marry, not caring for the conflict or the consequences of their actions.  They are married by Friar Lawrence who is convinced that a marriage linking the warring houses will end the misery between them. That afternoon they promise to meet later that night for the honeymoon.  During the day before that however Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin, murders Mercutio Romeo’s friend so Romeo slaughters him.  This angers the Prince who exiles Romeo from Verona forever.  This act emotionally crushes Romeo, and he tries to kill him himself but the Friar stops him, and says that if he goes to Mantua he will think of a plan to help them both out.

While Romeo is in exile, he does not learn of the Friar’s plan, to make it appear that Juliet is dead. He is now emotionally dead.  He rushes out buys some poison and goes to Juliet’s grave.  He kills Paris who is guarding the tomb sees the corpse of Juliet, his one, his, love his soulmate, and drinks the poison and dies.  Then Juliet wakes up sees his corpse and stabs herself. Then the families end the quarrelled history and bury Romeo and Juliet together.

Juliet starts out in the play as the sheltered daughter of the rich lord and lady Capulet in Verona.  She has had a very sheltered life so far so knows only very little about the conflict.  Her only friend is her beloved nurse who raised her, at the start of the play she is very conforming to her any of her parent’s wishes, meeting any man they see fit.

At the party she is supposed to meet Paris who is besotted with her but by fate meets Romeo.  They fall in love with each other and are convinced that they are soulmates.  They decide to marry, not caring for the conflict or the consequences of their actions.  Friar Lawrence, who is convinced that a marriage linking the warring houses will end the misery between the two marries them.

That afternoon they promise to meet later that night for the honeymoon.  During the day before that however Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt, murders Mercutio Romeo’s friend so Romeo slaughters him.  This angers the Prince who exiles Romeo from Verona forever.  This devastates Juliet that her new, husband, and her cousin are both out of her life so quickly.  After battling her Father and squabbling with her Nurse, she goes to the Friar for her salvation

.  Using his divine wisdom he concocts an ingenious but devious plan: a serum to make Juliet appear dead, so her family buries her. The serum will wear off, then with Romeo at the tomb, she will wake up and they will survive, run away together and live happily.

Romeo, unaware, of the scheme goes to Juliet’s grave.  He kills Paris who is guarding the tomb; sees the corpse of Juliet, his one, his love, his soulmate, and drinks the poison and dies.  Then Juliet wakes up sees his corpse and stabs herself. Then the families end the quarrelled history and bury Romeo and Juliet together.

This essay proves conclusively that all of the points in the thesis statement are true.

The two most affected characters are Romeo and Juliet as they both die and end the war

Document Details

• Word Count 2049
• Page Count 5
• Subject English

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What is the Romeo and Juliet Law? [2024]

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Romeo and Juliet laws were created to protect young people participating in consensual sexual activities from facing severe legal consequences. These laws, also called “close-in-age exemptions,” consider the ages and age gaps between all parties involved. The most important facts of these cases are the age of the younger participant, the age gap between participants, and whether the sexual acts performed were consensual. Romeo and Juliet laws vary by state, but for parties who qualify, these laws can reduce or sometimes even negate the legal consequences of such actions. 

Which States Have a Romeo and Juliet Law?

Romeo and juliet law by state.

A person who has not reached the “age of consent” is legally considered incapable of consenting to a sexual relationship. A person who has sex with someone below the age of consent is legally liable for the actions. In the US, the legal age of consent is determined by state law. As of 2023, all 50 states have set their legal age of consent somewhere between 16 and 18 years of age. 

However, roughly 66% of states also have a Romeo and Juliet law. It’s important to note the age gap allowed between parties varies by state. Also, no matter the age gap between parties, sexual interactions with a person aged 13 (at a minimum) or younger are illegal in every state. Listed below are the states that have a Romeo and Juliet law. While it is still illegal for anyone under the age of consent to engage in sexual acts, courts will consider each party’s age when prosecuting the offense (if the age gap between parties falls within the legal limit).

Alabama’s Romeo and Juliet law, located in Section 13A-6-62 of the state’s criminal code, offers a defense for consensual sexual activities involving a minor if the victim is at least 12 years old, the defendant is no more than two years older, and the act was consensual.  

In Alaska, the age of consent is set at 16 years old . Individuals younger than this age cannot legally consent to sexual activities. Sexual abuse violations occur when someone over 16 engages in intercourse with a person under the age of consent and is at least three years their junior. 

In Arkansas, although the age of consent is 16, the state’s Romeo and Juliet law provides exceptions for consensual relationships between teenagers who are less than three years apart in age, protecting them from severe criminal penalties. 

In Colorado, it’s generally unlawful for an individual to engage in consensual intercourse with someone under 17 years old, with specific exceptions outlined in the Romeo and Juliet provision. This provision permits consensual relations between a minor under 15 and someone up to four years older.

Connecticut

Connecticut outlines specific parameters regarding statutory rape. Their Romeo and Juliet law specifies that it is deemed statutory rape if an individual engages in sexual activity with someone more than three years younger, provided that the younger individual is between 13 and 16 years old. Additionally, it’s considered statutory rape if the activity involves a minor under 13 years old and the participant is more than two years older. 

In Delaware, the age of consent is set at 18 years old. However, there’s a Romeo and Juliet provision that allows 16 and 17-year-olds to consent to sexual intercourse with partners younger than 30. Furthermore, if the victim is at least 12 years old and the defendant is within a four-year age difference, it can be considered an affirmative defense, provided the victim gave informed consent to the act.

The age of consent in Florida is 18 years old. For the Romeo and Juliet provision to apply, the victim must be at least 14 years old, with the offender being no more than four years older than the victim, and the sexual conduct must have been consensual.

In Georgia, the age of consent is set at 16 years old. Although the state has a Romeo and Juliet law, it offers limited protection against criminal charges for minors. Rather than providing immunity, the offender may be charged with a misdemeanor if the victim is between 14 and 16 and the defendant is under 18 or within a four-year age difference. 

In Hawaii, individuals reach the age of consent at 16, allowing them to engage in legal sexual activity with others who are also of age. The state’s legislation includes a Romeo and Juliet provision, which permits young people between 14 and 16 years of age to engage in consensual sexual activity with someone who is no more than five years their senior without facing any penalties.

The age of consent in Indiana is 16 years old. The state’s Romeo and Juliet provision permits individuals to engage in consensual relations with someone aged 14 or 15, provided that the age difference between them is no greater than four years and they share a dating or ongoing personal relationship.

Iowa’s age of consent is 16 years old. The state’s Romeo and Juliet provision allows for consensual relations between teenagers aged 14 or 15 and their partners who are within a four-year age difference without facing criminal charges. Engaging in sexual activity with anyone under 14 is deemed a severe offense, potentially leading to substantial prison sentences, fines, or both.

In Maine, the age of consent is 16 years old. The state’s Romeo and Juliet provision protects individuals who are within a five-year age difference of their sexual partner, granted the younger individual is either 14 or 15 years old.

In Maryland, individuals reach the age of consent at 16 years old. Maryland’s Romeo and Juliet provision permits 14 or 15-year-olds to engage in consensual sexual relationships with partners up to four years their senior , excluding scenarios where the older individual holds a position of authority over them.

The age of consent in Michigan is set at 16 years old. Michigan’s Romeo and Juliet provision applies to situations involving individuals aged 13 to 15 , allowing consensual relationships even if there’s a five-year age gap between them. 

Mississippi

In Mississippi, the age of consent is 16 years old, making those 15 or younger incapable of legally consenting to sexual activities, potentially leading to statutory rape charges. However, Mississippi does have a Romeo and Juliet exemption , allowing consensual relationships if the age difference between the individuals is less than three years.

Individuals reach the age of consent at 16 years old in Nevada. The state’s Romeo and Juliet law permits consensual relationships between minors aged 14 or older and partners who are within a four-year age difference .

New Hampshire

In New Hampshire, the age of consent is 16 years old. Consensual sexual activities that do not involve penetration with someone over 13 are permissible unless the individual involved is at least five years older. However, consensual penetration with someone over 13 by a person within a four-year age range is categorized as a misdemeanor. 

New Jersey’s age of consent is set at 16 years old. However, the state’s Romeo and Juliet provision permits 13 to 15-year-old minors to have consensual relationships with partners who are no more than four years their senior.

In New Mexico, the age of consent is 17 years old. Instead of a singular Romeo and Juliet law, the state incorporates protective measures within its statutory rape laws, adjusting penalties based on age differences. For instance, engaging in sexual activity with a minor aged 13 to 16 is considered a felony, but if the offender is between 18 and 19 years old, it becomes a misdemeanor. Similarly, while intercourse with a minor aged 13 to 18 is categorized as a felony, exceptions are made for individuals who are within a four-year age range of the minor, starting at age 13. 

North Carolina

The age of consent in North Carolina is 16 years old. The state’s Romeo and Juliet provision permits consensual relationships for individuals aged 13 to 15, provided the age difference with their partner does not exceed four years . Deviations from this age range could result in B1 or C-class felony charges, depending on the ages involved. 

In Ohio, the age of consent is set at 16 years old. Although the state implements a Romeo and Juliet provision, it merely downgrades the offense from a felony to a misdemeanor for partners within a four-year age difference rather than dismissing charges altogether. Engaging in sexual activities with someone under 13 is strictly prohibited. 

The age of consent is 16 in Oklahoma. Through the state’s Romeo and Juliet provision, adolescents aged 14 to 18 can participate in consensual sexual activities without facing statutory rape charges. However, if the defendant is older than 18, charges such as rape or rape by instrumentation may be assigned. 

In Oregon, the age of consent is set at 18 years old, rendering individuals 17 and younger unable to consent to sexual activities legally. However, Oregon’s Romeo and Juliet provision allows consensual relations between 14 to 17-year-olds and partners within a three-year age gap. If the age difference exceeds three years and the younger person is a minor, it can result in felony charges. 

Pennsylvania

In Pennsylvania, individuals aged 16 and above can consent to sexual activities unless the other party holds authority over them. The state’s Romeo and Juliet provision allows 13 to 15-year-olds to engage in consensual relationships with partners who are within a four-year age difference. However, those under 13 are unable to provide legal consent for sexual activity. Individuals who do not meet these criteria are likely to incur felony charges . 

Rhode Island

The age of consent is 16 in Rhode Island. The state’s Romeo and Juliet provision permits individuals over 12 to engage in sexual activities with partners under 18, provided both are close in age. However, once an individual turns 18, they generally cannot legally engage in such activities with someone below the age of consent in Rhode Island. 

South Dakota

In South Dakota, individuals aged 16 or older can legally consent to sexual activities with others in the same age bracket. Yet, the state offers a specific Romeo and Juliet provision allowing consensual relations between minors who are both at least 13 years old and within a three-year age difference. Those within a five-year age difference may be subject to a misdemeanor charge , and situations with a more significant age gap are subject to felony charges. 

While the age of consent is set at 18 in Tennessee, there’s a Romeo and Juliet provision that allows for consensual relationships between minors aged 13 or older and partners within a four-year age difference. Those with a greater age disparity may face felony charges.

In Texas, the age of consent is established at 17 years old. The state provides exceptions for consensual relationships involving individuals over 14 years of age or if the parties are within a three-year age difference and of opposite genders. 

Although the age of consent is 18 in Utah, the state’s Romeo and Juliet provision allows for consensual relationships between minors aged 16 or 17 and partners up to seven years their senior, marking one of the most extensive age differentials permitted nationally.

In Vermont, individuals can legally consent to sexual activities at the age of 16. The state offers a close-in-age exemption , permitting relationships where the older partner is under 19 and the younger individual is at least 15, as long as the interaction is consensual.  

Romeo and Juliet Law as a Trial Defense

Affirmative defense.

Romeo and Juliet laws can be used as an affirmative defense against statutory rape charges. The Legal Information Institute calls an affirmative defense one in which “the defendant introduces evidence, which, if found to be credible, will negate criminal liability or civil liability, even if it is proven that the defendant committed the alleged acts.” During a trial, the defendant may claim that while they did have a sexual relationship with a minor, the sex was consensual, and the age gap between the two parties was within the legal limit.

Mistake of age defense

Some states like Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and California allow defendants to argue a mistake of fact defense, including “mistake of age.” A “reasonable” person would have had no reason to believe their sexual partner was underage. 

It is important to remember that “mistake of age” can be hard to prove, and not all states allow this type of defense (including Utah and Texas).

How the Romeo and Juliet Law impacts sex offender registration

Romeo and Juliet laws are enacted to protect young adults from serious criminal charges, most commonly statutory rape. Under these laws, felonies may be reduced to misdemeanors (or even dismissed), additional charges may be reduced or dismissed, penalties may be reduced or dismissed, and a perpetrator’s record may be expunged after a shortened length of time (determined by the court). 

Additionally, a perpetrator may not be required to register as a sex offender or may be offered a reduced period of time on a sex offender registry. Being listed on a sex offender registry can negatively impact a person for the rest of their life. Securing a job and housing can be difficult, and because registries are available to the public, social prejudice and ostracization are common. To prevent this, courts may exercise leniency for defendants who meet the qualifications of their respective state’s Romeo and Juliet law.

How an Attorney Can Help

Romeo and Juliet law is complex and varies significantly from state to state. An attorney is absolutely necessary if you or someone you know is facing criminal charges. If you’re looking for legal advice or a professional to manage your case, use Expertise.com ’s comprehensive list of legal experts to find an attorney in your area.

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My Midsummer Dream: 7 Plays, 5 Days, 4 Stages, 1 Story

At the Stratford Festival, a remix of genders and genres tells a brand-new, age-old tale of personal freedom.

By Jesse Green

Jesse Green saw seven shows in five days at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario.

Walking the streets of this almost-too-charming town along the I-kid-you-not Avon River, I’ve often had the experience of hearing voices in my head.

I am but mad north-northwest, as Hamlet would have it . After all, at the Stratford Festival, 400 miles in that direction from my usual haunts, internal voices are utterly normal, the result of seeing, cheek by jowl, so many new productions. After you see two or three, they start a conversation, sometimes delighting in what they have in common and sometimes arguing about what they don’t.

During a visit in July, those voices were louder than ever. The five plays and two musicals I caught in five days on four stages were not just conversing but collaborating, seeming to scribble in one another’s scripts. “Twelfth Night” wrote part of “La Cage aux Folles.” “Something Rotten” cribbed “Romeo and Juliet.” “Hedda Gabler” and “The Goat” drank from the same bloody fountain.

And “Cymbeline”? Well, that little-loved Shakespeare once again proved to be mad on its own.

The clash and coupling of such seemingly different works is the great value, and great pleasure, of the repertory system, one so difficult to sustain that few theaters bother anymore. Stratford is by every measure — budget, employment, attendance, production — the largest repertory theater in North America, and likely the largest nonprofit theater, period.

Also the broadest. Where else could you take in so easily a program so diverse, by genre, era, style and origin ? Indeed, if you hit the right part of the season, which this year began on April 16 and runs through Nov. 17, you could theoretically see all 12 shows in one week.

That efficiency wouldn’t matter unless the shows were good; in some years, that’s all they are, and that’s enough. But this year, both in scope and quality, Stratford outdid itself, with a thrilling “Goat” and “Gabler,” a delightful “Cage” and “Rotten” and a scintillating “Twelfth Night.”

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