Romeo and Juliet - the Opening

GCSE reduces city’s tragedy to love-at-first-sight party

Were you asked to study Act 1 Scene 5 of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet for GCSE?

Did your teacher tell you not to bother reading the previous four scenes?

One of the consequences of the GCSE approach is that many sensitive and hard-working students never get an insight into the workings of drama because they are directed to studying cherry-picked scenes in isolation. With no sense of what is driving the various characters, students are limited to their own, contemporary, interpretations of how the relationship between Romeo and Juliet begins and develops. The playwright’s economical and arresting presentation of the dynamic of the city, with its trigger-happy young men, its egocentric family heads, its exasperated citizens and its frustrated ruler, remains a blank to them.


wise teachers

Many teachers understand the importance of the scenes which build up to the climax of Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting. If you are a student of one such wise teacher, you may lose little by clicking onto another website right now.


Shakespeare did not make up this story

The story of Romeo and Juliet had become well established before the Shakespearian play was written.

Stories with similar themes (or “analogues”) can be traced back to ancient Greece, while a version which corresponds in very many details to Shakespeare’s play was published as early as 1476 in a novella set in Siena by the Italian writer Masuccio Salernitano. In 1530, another Italian, Luigi da Porto, published a version of the legend set in Verona, naming the feuding families “Montecchi” and “Capelletti,” and developing the psychological interest of the story

In 1554, the story was further developed by Bandello then translated with elaborations into French. Eventually, in 1562, Arthur Brooke produced a 3020-line poem in English rhyming hexameters based mainly on these two works.


transforming a sad tale into tragic drama

Academics debate even today whether the author of the Shakespearian plays could read the main Italian dialects of his time; that he did read Brooke’s poem there is no doubt.

For a young playwright to take on such a well-known tale was an act of some courage; by triumphing with it artistically he proved that he had true dramatic skill.

When we compare the earlier works with the play we now know, we can see where Shakespeare has invented completely new scenes, turned sketchy characters into convincing psychological portraits and brazenly thrust his own imagery-rich poetry into the mouths of adolescents. He has tightened and reworked the plot, teases us cunningly with his theme of misinterpreted and lost messages and makes us so involved with the fortunes of his lovers that even when we know the story inside out we ache with hope that, maybe this time, Romeo will delay long enough to see Juliet awaken.


right from the start, we know they’re going to die

In the version of the script published in 1599 (the “Second Quarto”), which most editors take as the most authoritative, a fourteen-line prologue in sonnet form tells us that it was through the suicides of a “pair of star-cross’d lovers” that a feud between two Veronese households was brought to an end.

Although this prologue did not feature in the collected plays published in 1623 after Shakespeare’s death (the “Folio”), we must assume it was normally used to herald each stage production.

If we, the audience, are told before a play begins that its central characters will die, the purpose of acting it out and of watching it must be more than to find the answer to “Will they? Won’t they?” The lovers’ passion may draw us in while the twists and turns of the plot will keep us on edge, but somehow the drama must engage us at a deeper level. In the Shakespearian tragedies, it is frequently the environment in which the characters find themselves which is somehow not right. The prologue to Romeo and Juliet serves as a come-on which promises us not merely a wringing-out of our emotions, but an experience through which we might come to understand something about the resolution of discord in our own lives.


don’t ignore Shakespeare’s first scenes

Shakespeare’s version opens with a completely new invention: two fairly low-status men of the Capulet household, Sampson and Gregory, who will not feature much in the unfolding of the plot.

They seem like comics with their puns about fighting and sex, but through their attitudes Shakespeare is already directing our attention towards the fuel for so many of the disturbances of his time and of ours: the energy of self-regarding young males whose identity is entirely shaped by the group which accepts them and the group which they despise. Sampson’s boast is that he will beat Montague’s men and seduce Montague’s women.

As any attempt to act the scene will soon reveal, the sequence of the insulting gesture of thumb-biting is a powerful demonstration on stage of what has been dubbed by some “disrespek” or “dissing.” The audience is immediately caught up by the genuineness of the quarrel: these two scallywags are depressingly recognisable.

The playwright is too canny to allow the fight to get far. He wants to bring in Benvolio (whose name literally means “well-wishing”) as peacemaker so we can sense there is variety in the attitudes towards conflict held by the various young men. With his “you know not what you do,” Benvolio echoes a familiar line from the biblical Jesus, but his attempt to stop the fight by drawing his sword is misinterpreted by Tybalt, who has just turned up.


gang-fights on the streets of Verona

Idle young men hanging around in the typical Italian city state would generally not take long to turn up at the scene of trouble, if trouble was what they were looking for. Very quickly, we get a picture of Tybalt’s passion for violence:

“What, drawn and talk of peace? I hate the word,
As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee”

As soon as he has established Tybalt’s venom, Shakespeare needs to stop the fight, and to effect this has the genius to bring in an important factor in the city: the citizens. He knows he cannot afford to develop any citizens as characters during the unfolding of the lovers’ story, but by introducing them here he tells us that the strife between the two families is most definitely not popular:

“Down with the Capulets! Down with the Montagues!”


everyone but the lovers within 79 lines

The citizens having been established, the argument escalates with the arrival of the top Capulet couple. In just two lines, the husband is established as combative while his wife shows herself as his mocker. Next, the Montagues, husband and wife, appear and the two “old” men threaten each other.

How can mayhem be stopped without losing dramatic authenticity? Surely the playwright has set up a situation in which wholesale slaughter must ensue or the audience’s “willing suspension of disbelief” will fail.

Shakespeare has been holding back a trump card. He did not invent a prince to rule over this city; he did not even make up the prince’s name of Escalus. He found that in his sources.

What he does invent is this escalating scene of conflict stopped by the timely intervention of the chief authority, Prince Escalus. The play is only 78 lines in, yet the politics of the whole city and its principal individuals have been revealed to us already through this edgy, breathtaking scene. When Escalus issues his edict forbidding the two families to disturb the peace again on pain of death, he is setting up the consequences which will follow upon Romeo’s later killing of Tybalt.


Romeo the lover

We have not yet seen either Romeo or Juliet. Romeo's mother eventually refers to him:

“O where is Romeo, saw you him today?
Right glad I am he was not at this fray.”

By keeping him absent from the brawl, Shakespeare gives us the sense that his heart is not in fighting. There is some bitter irony in this, because by the end of the play Romeo has brought about more deaths than any other character.

We learn from Romeo's parents that he has been melancholy, and then from the young man himself that he is in love. Shakespeare was following Brooke’s poem in this, but he must have felt that Romeo’s lengthy complaint about how he adores his lady but she rejects him is important to an understanding of his character.

The name of the young woman Romeo loves is Rosaline.

What is the significance of this? Surely the bard is telling us that Romeo is prone to falling in love. Adolescent love is usually quickly entered and intense. Young men can be lovesick, unable to sleep, to carry out normal tasks or to think of anything but the loved one.

But young love can very easily fade away; passion can turn into disdain; one beauty can be usurped by another.


the changeable heart

When Romeo while on the lookout for Rosaline first meets Juliet, all feelings for his former love are abandoned.

The action of Shakespeare’s tragedy is completed within a few days, when both lie dead. Could we not read as an implied subtext that this infatuation with Juliet may itself have become a passing phase? Without the pressure from the parents, the aggression of the youths, the bringing forward of Paris’ wedding date, the meetings held in secret and the meddling of the friar, might the relationship not have run its course and fizzled out?

Shakespeare reduced Juliet’s age to 14, which as her father reminds Paris at their first meeting is young for marriage. The dramatist in him could not resist creating for her a nurse of extreme vulgarity. The image onstage of an innocent girl (played by a young boy) acting opposite such a brutish female figure would surely increase the sense of her vulnerability. Every one of those who should be caring for and guiding her fails properly to discharge that duty. It is no wonder that she is swept up by the passion of a romantic youth.

more GCSE: Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet to come