Ad-free experience
Study Guides for 1,000+ titles
Full Text content for 250+ titles
No Fear Translations of Shakespeare’s plays (along with audio!) and other classic works
Flashcards
Mastery Quizzes
Infographics
Graphic Novels
AP® Practice & Lessons
Note-taking
Bookmarking
Dashboard
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. Read more: What Is a Theme in Literature?
The Forcefulness of Love
Romeo and Juliet is the most famous love story in the English literary tradition. The play focuses on romantic love, specifically the intense passion that springs up at first sight between Romeo and Juliet. In this play, love is an overpowering force that supersedes all other values, loyalties, and emotions. The young lovers are driven to defy their entire social world: their families (“Deny thy father and refuse thy name,” Juliet pleads in Act 2, Scene 2, “Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, / And I’ll no longer be a Capulet”); their friends (Romeo abandons Mercutio and Benvolio after the feast to go to Juliet’s garden); and even their ruler (Romeo returns to Verona for Juliet’s sake after being exiled by the Prince on pain of death.)
This violent type of love differs from the polite, dainty love that bad poets write about. Romeo, for instance, begins the play speaking of love in worn clichés that make his friends cringe. But the love he shares with 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 religious terms, 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” (2.6.33–34). 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.
The Complex Relationship Between Love and Sex
The themes of love and sex are closely linked in Romeo and Juliet, though the precise nature of their relationship remains in dispute throughout. For instance, in Act 1, Romeo talks about his frustrated love for Rosaline in poetic terms, as if love were primarily an abstraction. Yet he also implies that things didn’t work out with Rosaline because she preferred to remain a virgin:
She’ll not be hit
With Cupid’s arrow. She hath Dian’s wit.
And, in strong proof of chastity well armed,
From love’s weak childish bow, she lives uncharmed. (1.1.199-202)
Mercutio picks this thread back up in Act 2, when he insists that Romeo has confused his love for Juliet with mere sexual desire: “this driveling love is like a great natural that runs / lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole” (2.4.42). Mercutio’s words suggest a comparison between Romeo and either a court jester looking for a place to hide his staff or a mentally impaired person (i.e., a “natural”) seeking to hide a trinket. Yet Mercutio’s use of the phrases “lolling up and down” and “hide his bauble in a hole” also strongly imply sexual imagery (“bauble” and “hole” are slang for penis and vagina, respectively). Hence Mercutio’s words suggest a third comparison between Romeo and an idiot clumsily groping for a woman to have sex with. In Mercutio’s view, there is ultimately no such thing as love, since love is ultimately reducible to sexual desire.
Whereas Mercutio cynically conflates love and sex, Juliet takes a more earnest and pious position. Juliet implies that the concepts are distinct and that they exist in a hierarchical relationship, with love standing above sex. This view accords with Roman Catholic doctrine, which privileges the spiritual union of marriage, but also indicates that this union must be legally consummated through sexual intercourse. The speech Juliet delivers in Act 3, Scene 2, nicely demonstrates her view of the proper relationship between love and sex:
Oh, I have bought the mansion of a love,
But not possessed it, and though I am sold,
Not yet enjoyed. (3.2.26–28)
Here the notions of purchase and possession designate love/marriage and sex, respectively. Through marriage, Juliet has “bought” Romeo’s love (and likewise “sold” hers to him), but the moment of mutual possession has not yet taken place. Now that they’re married, however, Juliet clearly longs to “enjoy” the consummation. “Give me my Romeo,” she says: “And when I shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars” (3.2.21–22). “Die” was Elizabethan slang for orgasm, and the image of Romeo “cut . . . out in little stars” subtly references the sexual ecstasy Juliet anticipates.
The Connection Between Passion and Violence
Due to the ongoing feud between the Capulets and the Montagues, violence permeates the world of Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare demonstrates how intrinsic violence is to the play’s environment in Act 1, Scene 1, where Sampson and Gregory make jokes about perpetrating violent acts against members of the Montague family. Given how the feud between the two families continuously fans the flames of hatred and thereby maintains a low-burning rage, flaring outbursts of violence appear inescapable.
In Romeo and Juliet, violence is always connected to passion, whether that passion is love or hate. While the connection between hate and violence seems understandable, why does love lead to violence in this play? Love, in Romeo and Juliet, is a grand passion, and as such, it is blinding; it can overwhelm a person as powerfully and completely as hate can. The passionate love between Romeo and Juliet is linked with death from the moment of its inception: Tybalt notices that Romeo has crashed the feast and determines to kill him just as Romeo catches sight of Juliet and falls instantly in love with her.
From that point on, love seems to push the lovers closer to violence, not farther from it. In Act 3, Scene 3, Romeo brandishes a knife in Friar Lawrence’s cell and threatens to kill himself after he has been banished from Verona and his love. Juliet also pulls a knife to take her own life in Friar Lawrence’s presence just three scenes later. After Capulet decides that Juliet will marry Paris, Juliet says, “If all else fail, myself have power to die” (3.5.242). Finally, each imagines that the other looks dead the morning after their first, and only, sexual experience (“Methinks I see thee,” Juliet says, “. . . as one dead in the bottom of a tomb” (3.5.54–55).
This theme continues until its ultimate conclusion: double suicide. This tragic choice is the highest, most potent expression of love that Romeo and Juliet think they can make. In their minds, it is only through death that they can preserve their love, and their love is so profound that they are willing to end their lives in its defense. In the play, love emerges as an amoral thing, leading as much to destruction as to happiness. But in its extreme passion, the love that Romeo and Juliet experience also appears so exquisitely beautiful that few would want, or be able, to resist its power.
The Conflict Between Desire and Societal Expectations
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 demand terms of conduct with which the blind passion of love cannot comply.
Religious traditions similarly demand 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 the level of God (2.2.114). The couple’s final act of suicide is likewise un-Christian.
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 the 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.
The Inevitability of Fate
During the Act 1 Prologue, at the outset of the play, the Chorus makes several allusions to fate, including the famous reference to Romeo and Juliet as a “pair of star-crossed lovers.” Shakespeare coined the term “star-crossed,” which means “not favored by the stars,” or “ill-fated.” The science of astrology occupied a place of privilege in Renaissance society. Thus, the notion that one’s fate was written in the stars had a more immediate, literal meaning than it does today. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, then, their fates are cosmically misaligned.
It may seem counterintuitive for Shakespeare to open his play by spoiling its ending, but this storytelling choice allows Shakespeare to incorporate the theme of predetermined fate into the play’s very structure. Uniting the theme of fate with the play’s structure in this way introduces a sense of dramatic irony—the audience will have more insight into the unfolding events than the characters do. Watching the characters struggle against an invisible and unbeatable force such as fate heightens the tension throughout the play.
This struggle also amplifies the tragedy at the play’s conclusion. For instance, when Romeo cries out, “I defy you, stars!” (5.1.24), the audience knows that his headstrong resistance is no match for fate, and acknowledging this impotence only makes Romeo’s agony that much more painful. In the end, then, mentioning Romeo and Juliet’s fate at the beginning of the play doesn’t spoil the ending. Instead, it locks the audience into a tense anticipation of inescapable tragedy.
The mechanism of fate works in all the events surrounding the lovers: the feud between their families; the horrible series of accidents that ruin Friar Lawrence’s seemingly well-intentioned plans at the end of the play; and the tragic timing of Romeo’s suicide and Juliet’s awakening. These events are not merely coincidences, but rather manifestations of fate that help bring about the unavoidable outcome of the young lovers’ deaths.
Take the Themes, Motifs, and Symbols Quick Quiz
Dive into our comprehensive guide to ace your Shakespeare assignments
