Context: Elizabethan Love & Honour
An Elizabethan Play, an Italian Setting
Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet around 1594–1596, drawing on Arthur Brooke’s long poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562). Setting the play in Verona, a hot Italian city, allowed Shakespeare to stage violent passions that would have felt inappropriate if set in London. Elizabethan audiences associated Italy with feuding, sudden anger and hot-blooded romance — a dramatic shorthand that gave the play licence to be extreme.
Verona is not just a setting — it is a stage for Elizabethan anxieties. Italian cities were associated with blood feuds, Catholic ritual and female sensuality. Each feature maps onto the play: the Capulet-Montague feud, Friar Lawrence’s cell and Juliet’s frank language.
Honour and the Feud
Elizabethan society prized honour — a public reputation that had to be defended, with swords if necessary. The Capulet-Montague feud is Shakespeare’s demonstration of how honour can corrupt a city. The opening scene shows servants brawling over the merest insult. Sampson and Gregory spar with puns on “thrusting” and “maidenheads”, mixing violence and sexuality from the first lines. The Prince’s intervention — “three civil brawls, bred of an airy word… have thrice disturbed the quiet of our streets” — signals that the feud is a problem of governance, not merely of families.
Tybalt is the play’s embodiment of wounded honour. He interprets every encounter as a challenge: “Peace? I hate the word, as I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee.” Shakespeare uses him to show how honour-violence spirals — each death demands another. Romeo’s killing of Tybalt, out of grief for Mercutio, is the play’s structural pivot: fate begins to tighten around the lovers.
Elizabethan fathers had near-total legal authority over their daughters. Marriage was an economic transaction: Capulet tells Paris that Juliet is not yet “ripe to be a bride”, and Paris replies that younger girls are already mothers. When Juliet refuses to marry Paris, her father explodes: “Out, you green-sickness carrion! Out, you baggage!” Shakespeare shows the brutality that patriarchy could license when crossed. At thirteen, Juliet is considered young even by the Elizabethan standards of the aristocracy — the Nurse’s frank talk about suckling her lets audiences feel her youth.
Lady Capulet reinforces the pressure. She is cold where the Nurse is warm and scolds Juliet with the logic of the marriage market: “Younger than you / Here in Verona, ladies of esteem, / Are made already mothers.” Shakespeare shows two models of motherhood competing for Juliet — the hired carer who loves her, and the biological mother who protects the family’s reputation.
Fate and Cosmology
Elizabethan audiences believed in the influence of stars on human life. The Prologue calls the lovers “star-cross’d” and says their love is “death-mark’d”. Shakespeare uses the prologue to announce the ending at the outset: no one is watching the play to find out what happens, only to see how. This controlled structure was a fashionable feature of Elizabethan tragedy, influenced by classical models.
Omens recur throughout. Romeo fears “some consequence yet hanging in the stars” before Capulet’s ball; Juliet, parting from Romeo at dawn, sees him “as one dead in the bottom of a tomb.” Shakespeare threads these pre-echoes through the play so that fate is felt as an active, pressing force, not an abstract idea.
Love in Elizabethan Writing
The play’s language is shaped by Elizabethan love conventions. Romeo opens speaking in Petrarchan clichés about Rosaline — “cold fire, sick health” — a style Shakespeare expects the audience to recognise as second-hand. When he meets Juliet he invents a new language with her. Their first conversation is a shared sonnet (Act 1 Scene 5), with Juliet taking six of the fourteen lines. Shakespeare dramatises the equality of their love by giving them joint authorship of a shared poem.
The shared sonnet shows that Romeo and Juliet’s love is equal, intelligent and playful — unlike Romeo’s earlier one-sided worship of Rosaline. Shakespeare uses poetic form to distinguish genuine love from cliché.
Elizabethan England was officially Protestant, and Catholicism was viewed with suspicion. Shakespeare’s Verona is openly Catholic — Friar Lawrence performs the marriage in his cell, and confession is treated as sacred. Critics have debated whether Shakespeare is endorsing Catholic ritual or using its associations (secrecy, ceremony, mystery) as theatrical shorthand. Either way, the Friar’s cell becomes a dangerous counter-space: marriage without parental consent, potion-crafting, plots to deceive. The religious setting gives the play moral weight beyond a simple romance.
Elizabethan Theatre Practice
The play was written for the open-air theatres of London, probably the Theatre and later the Globe. All actors were men or boys, including the actor playing Juliet. Performances took place in the afternoon without artificial lighting; scenes set at night, like the balcony, relied entirely on poetic language to conjure the dark. Shakespeare’s lines — “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun” — create the setting in language because the stage itself could not.
Knowing this changes your reading: the imagery is not decoration but necessity. Every quotation about light, darkness, stars or gravity is doing the theatrical work of the set.