Romeo and Juliet themes

Love

Romeo and Juliet is the most famous love story in the English literary tradition. Love is naturally the play’s dominant and most important theme. The play focuses on romantic love, specifically the intense passion that springs up at first sight between Romeo and Juliet. In Romeo and Juliet, love is a violent, ecstatic, overpowering force that supersedes all other values, loyalties, and emotions. In the course of the play, the young lovers are driven to defy their entire social world: families (“Deny thy father and refuse thy name,” Juliet asks, “Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, / And I’ll no longer be a Capulet”); friends (Romeo abandons Mercutio and Benvolio after the feast in order to go to Juliet’s garden); and ruler (Romeo returns to Verona for Juliet’s sake after being exiled by the Prince on pain of death in 2.1.76–78). Love is the overriding theme of the play, but a reader should always remember that Shakespeare is uninterested in portraying a prettied-up, dainty version of the emotion, the kind that bad poets write about, and whose bad poetry Romeo reads while pining for Rosaline. Love in Romeo and Juliet is a brutal, powerful emotion that captures individuals and catapults them against their world, and, at times, against themselves.

The powerful nature of love can be seen in the way it is described, or, more accurately, the way descriptions of it so consistently fail to capture its entirety. At times love is described in the terms of religion, as in the fourteen lines when Romeo and Juliet first meet. At others it is described as a sort of magic: “Alike bewitchèd by the charm of looks” (2.Prologue.6). Juliet, perhaps, most perfectly describes her love for Romeo by refusing to describe it: “But my true love is grown to such excess / I cannot sum up some of half my wealth” (3.1.33–34). Love, in other words, resists any single metaphor because it is too powerful to be so easily contained or understood.

Romeo and Juliet does not make a specific moral statement about the relationships between love and society, religion, and family; rather, it portrays the chaos and passion of being in love, combining images of love, violence, death, religion, and family in an impressionistic rush leading to the play’s tragic conclusion.

Hate

Love and hate are usually thought of as opposites, but in Romeo and Juliet, love and hate are two sides of the same coin, as two children from warring families (the Capulets and the Montagues) turn their hatred of each other into an insatiable passion. Ultimately, the hatred between their two families propels the lovers towards their tragic deaths. When their parents discover Romeo and Juliet dead in each others' arms, they vow to end the feud between their two families. At last, love triumphs over hatred – but the cost of two young lives is too heavy to bear.

Fate

From the opening prologue when the Chorus summarizes Romeo and Juliet and says that the "star-crossed lovers" will die, Romeo and Juliet are trapped by fate. No matter what the lovers do, what plans they make, or how much they love each other, their struggles against fate only help fulfill it. But defeating or escaping fate is not the point. No one escapes fate. It is Romeo and Juliet's determination to struggle against fate in order to be together, whether in life or death, that shows the fiery passion of their love, and which makes that love eternal.

Fate is not just a force felt by the characters in Romeo and Juliet. The audience also senses it through Shakespeare's use of foreshadowing. Time and again, both Romeo and Juliet unknowingly reference their imminent deaths, as when Juliet says after first meeting Romeo: "If he be married / My grave is like to be my wedding bed." She means that if Romeo is already married she'll be miserable. But the audience knows that Juliet's grave actually will be her wedding bed. In Romeo and Juliet, fate is a force that neither the characters nor the audience can escape, and so every word and gesture gains in power, becomes fateful.

The Individual Versus Society

Much of Romeo and Juliet involves the lovers’ struggles against public and social institutions that either explicitly or implicitly oppose the existence of their love. Such structures range from the concrete to the abstract: families and the placement of familial power in the father; law and the desire for public order; religion; and the social importance placed on masculine honor. These institutions often come into conflict with each other. The importance of honor, for example, time and again results in brawls that disturb the public peace.
Though they do not always work in concert, each of these societal institutions in some way present obstacles for Romeo and Juliet. The enmity between their families, coupled with the emphasis placed on loyalty and honor to kin, combine to create a profound conflict for Romeo and Juliet, who must rebel against their heritages. Further, the patriarchal power structure inherent in Renaissance families, wherein the father controls the action of all other family members, particularly women, places Juliet in an extremely vulnerable position. Her heart, in her family’s mind, is not hers to give. The law and the emphasis on social civility demands terms of conduct with which the blind passion of love cannot comply. Religion similarly demands priorities that Romeo and Juliet cannot abide by because of the intensity of their love. Though in most situations the lovers uphold the traditions of Christianity (they wait to marry before consummating their love), their love is so powerful that they begin to think of each other in blasphemous terms. For example, Juliet calls Romeo “the god of my idolatry,” elevating Romeo to level of God (2.1.156). The couple’s final act of suicide is likewise un-Christian. The maintenance of masculine honor forces Romeo to commit actions he would prefer to avoid. But the social emphasis placed on masculine honor is so profound that Romeo cannot simply ignore them.
It is possible to see Romeo and Juliet as a battle between the responsibilities and actions demanded by social institutions and those demanded by the private desires of the individual. Romeo and Juliet’s appreciation of night, with its darkness and privacy, and their renunciation of their names, with its attendant loss of obligation, make sense in the context of individuals who wish to escape the public world. But the lovers cannot stop the night from becoming day. And Romeo cannot cease being a Montague simply because he wants to; the rest of the world will not let him. The lovers’ suicides can be understood as the ultimate night, the ultimate privacy.

Sex

In the hormone-charged atmosphere of Romeo and Juliet, it seems that pretty much everything is about sex. A boy and girl from warring families fall in love, and their relationship is marked by both intense chemistry and the constant threat of violence. Romeo and Juliet live in Verona, a city where the dirty jokes are constant, violence becomes eroticized, and even asking the time of day acquires a sexual connotation. ("The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon," quips Mercutio.) In this hyper-sexual atmosphere, it can be tempting to interpret the protagonists' young love as primarily physical. Their relationship, however, delineates a relationship between sex and love that eludes the stereotypes other characters try to project on them.

Marriage

Romeo and Juliet marry for love, a choice that is standard today. But in the world of the play, marriage for love, rather than money or social position, was a radical and dangerous choice. Romeo and Juliet, the children of rival families, fall in love against their parents' wishes and marry in secret. Their union reflects a new focus on individual passion and inner conviction – and in the play, it comes dangerously in conflict with social and familial expectations. Romeo and Juliet pay a heavy price for marrying for love – their clandestine union propels the lovers towards their tragic deaths.

Family

The conflict between family and the individual is played out in the most extreme fashion possible in the play, as two children from warring families fall in love and have to choose between their families' expectations and their passion for each other. Romeo and Juliet choose passion. They abandon their loyalty to their parents and kinsman and lie to their relatives in order to protect their love. Ultimately, though, Romeo and Juliet can't escape the conflict that divides their families. Bad luck is partially responsible for Romeo and Juliet's deaths, but so is Romeo's obligation to avenge his friend's murder and defend his masculinity and family name. Juliet's father and mother, who try to push her into an unwanted marriage, are also to blame. Though we often think of family as a refuge and a place of security, in Romeo and Juliet, kinship is more often a source of danger and battle.

Exile

Romeo and Juliet is not necessarily a political work, and so, in the play, exile is a purely personal matter. Romeo and Juliet, the children of warring families, carry out a clandestine love affair. They have just been secretly married when Romeo is banished from Verona, their home city, for violating an order of the Prince. The prospect of Romeo's exile is unbearable to both of the lovers. Exile, for them, is no less than death, simply because exile means separation from each other. "Heaven is here, / Where Juliet lives; and every cat and dog / And little mouse, every unworthy thing, / Live here in heaven and may look on her; / But Romeo may not," Romeo says in frustration. Romeo and Juliet's passionate interpretation of exile as separation from a loved one would make an interesting contrast to political accounts of exile.

Theme of Youth

"Youth in this play is a separate nation," writes literary critic Frank Kermode. In the play, Romeo and Juliet's youthful passion conflicts with the values of their feuding parents and their more mature advisors. Juliet ignores her Nurse, who advises her to marry Paris after Romeo is banished. Romeo and Juliet ignore Friar Laurence's warning to slow down and to stop rushing into love and, consequently, their youthful passion propels them towards their tragic end. Thinking Juliet is dead, Romeo immediately commits suicide. But Juliet has only been feigning death to escape her parents' anger. She, too, commits suicide when she realizes that Romeo is dead. Whether the values of the old or the young (or the tension between them) are most to blame for the lovers' tragic deaths is a question the play poses to audiences and readers.

Theme of Transience

Romeo and Juliet's love gains its power from the play's constant reminders that life, love and beauty are ultimately fleeting. Romeo and thirteen-year-old Juliet fall in love at first sight, marry within twenty-four hours of their first meeting, and die in each others' arms only days later. Their passion for each other is so all-consuming that it seems impossible that it could have been sustained any longer. The lovers' awareness of their own transience is crucial to the intensity of their passion. In one of their early scenes, Juliet confesses she is afraid of the swiftness of their relationship. "It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden," she tells Romeo, "Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be ere one can say, 'It lightens.'" Her words are prescient: their love is just as brilliant, and as brief, as a flash of lightning.

Mortality

Freud argued that human love was propelled by two opposing drives: eros, the desire for love, and thanatos, the desire for death. But centuries before Freud, Romeo and Juliet provided a very different view of the relationship between love and death. Despite – or perhaps because of – the passion and joy of the play's young lovers, death is never far in the background of Romeo and Juliet. Because their families have been feuding for as long as anyone can remember, they believe their "forbidden" relationship puts them in constant danger. Consequently, the seeming threat of death adds a spark of excitement to their secret meetings. Shakespeare links death and sex throughout the play and, to some degree, portrays suicide as an erotic act that both consummates the lovers' passion and (re)unites them in death.

Art and Culture

Romeo and Juliet is chock full of poetry, especially love poetry. The first time the couple meets, their dialogue forms a perfect Shakespearean sonnet. The famous balcony scene? Well, it's full of great lines that have since made their way into Hallmark cards and pop music lyrics. Shakespeare's not just showing off his skills – the play takes a pretty self-conscious look at the conventions of popular sixteenth-century poetry even as it participates in the art form. The clearest example of this is Romeo's role (at the play's beginning) as the kind of cliché lover that frequently appears in Petrarchan sonnets (love poetry inspired by fourteenth-century writer, Francesco Petrarch), which was all the rage when Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595).

Gender

Machismo rules the day in Verona, the city where Romeo and Juliet takes place. Male honor –and male sexual posturing – are sources of both the play's humor and its final tragedy. The rivalry between Verona's two warring families, the Montagues and the Capulets, is driven by the testosterone-charged fighting between the young men of each family. Romeo Montague, the play's protagonist, is constantly torn between the male bonds he shares with his friends, especially his friend Mercutio, and his love for Juliet, a Capulet. Juliet, the only daughter of a well-to-do family, also faces some gender challenges that are pretty typical for young women in Shakespeare's literature – her parents choose a husband for her and threaten to disown her if she disobeys

Servants

For a play about the two noble teenagers struggling to preserve their forbidden love, Romeo and Juliet sure has a lot of scenes focused on servants and non-nobles. Shakespeare did this by design. The recurring presence of servants in the play, from Peter, the Capulet servant who can't read, to the apothecary who's so poor he's willing to sell poison, Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet goes to great efforts to show that the poor and downtrodden have lives of their own, and that to them Romeo and Juliet's love and death mean absolutely nothing. After all, why would the death of two noble teenagers mean anything to servants just trying to make it through the day and scrounge up something to eat for dinner?