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Romeo and Juliet: Context & Background
Context Profile – At a Glance
- Date Written: Around 1594–1596, in the reign of Elizabeth I.
- Genre: Tragedy.
- Primary Source: Arthur Brooke's narrative poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562).
- Italian Roots: The story descends from Italian tales by Masuccio, Da Porto and Bandello.
- Fate and the Stars: An Elizabethan belief that the heavens shaped human destiny – the lovers are "star-crossed".
- Social Backdrop: A patriarchal world of arranged marriages, family honour and the blood feud.
The Origins: From Italian Novella to Brooke's Poem
Shakespeare did not invent Romeo and Juliet. The story had been circulating in Europe for decades, growing through a chain of Italian writers – Masuccio Salernitano, Luigi da Porto, who first set it in Verona and named the lovers, and Matteo Bandello, whose version spread the tale across the continent.
Shakespeare's direct source was English: Arthur Brooke's long poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, published in 1562. Shakespeare follows Brooke's plot closely but transforms it. He compresses an action that takes months in the poem into a few breathless days, makes Juliet strikingly young, and turns Brooke's flat, moralising narration into vivid, fast-moving drama. Where Brooke uses the story to warn against disobedient youth, Shakespeare makes us feel for the lovers rather than judge them.
Exam tip: The most useful point about the sources is what Shakespeare changed. Brooke's months become Shakespeare's four days, and Brooke's sermon against rash teenagers becomes a play that takes the lovers seriously. Arguing that the compression and sympathy are deliberate lets you treat speed and youthful passion as Shakespeare's design, not accidents of the story.
Fate, Fortune and the Stars
For an Elizabethan audience, the idea that the lovers were doomed by the heavens was not just a figure of speech. Many people genuinely believed that the stars and the goddess Fortune governed human lives, and astrology sat alongside religion as a way of explaining why things happened.
The play leans on this belief from the start. The Prologue calls Romeo and Juliet "a pair of star-crossed lovers" and speaks of "The fearful passage of their death-marked love", telling us they are marked for death before we have met them. Throughout, the characters blame the stars and Fortune for their disasters. Yet the play also shows human decisions driving events, so it leaves a real tension open: how much is destiny, and how much is the result of hatred, haste and chance?
Exam tip: Don't settle the fate-versus-free-will question too quickly. The strongest essays show that the play points both ways at once – the Prologue insists on fate, but the plot is full of choices that could have gone differently. Holding both readings together is more sophisticated than declaring the lovers either simply doomed or simply careless.
Honour, the Feud and Renaissance Verona
The tragedy is set in a world ruled by family honour. In the city-states of Renaissance Italy – and in Shakespeare's own England – a family's reputation was something men were expected to defend with violence, and a public insult could only be answered with a duel. The "ancient grudge" between Montague and Capulet turns this culture of honour into open, recurring bloodshed.
This is why the lovers' situation is hopeless from the outset. Romeo and Juliet do not simply face disapproving parents; they fall in love across a feud that defines who their families are. Tybalt's fury at Romeo's presence at the feast, and the readiness of young men to draw swords in the street, show a society in which loyalty to the clan outranks almost everything, including the law of the Prince. The lovers' private devotion runs directly against the public code of their world.
Exam tip: Treat the feud as a social force, not just a backstory. The duels and the obsession with honour explain why a private love becomes a public catastrophe. Linking Tybalt's aggression and Capulet's rage to this honour culture turns "the parents are mean" into a sharper argument about a whole society built on violence.
Love, Marriage and the Position of Women
Marriage in Shakespeare's day, especially among the wealthy, was often a matter of family strategy rather than romance. A daughter could be promised to a suitable husband to secure money, land or status, and a father expected to be obeyed. This is exactly the pressure Juliet faces when Lord Capulet insists she marry Paris, threatening to disown her when she refuses.
Juliet is also strikingly young – presented as not yet fourteen, and younger than in Shakespeare's sources. While the law allowed very early marriage, most ordinary Elizabethans actually married in their twenties, so Juliet's youth would have struck audiences as remarkable and made her courage and sudden maturity all the more dramatic. Against a world that treats her as property to be matched off, her decision to choose her own husband in secret is a quiet act of rebellion.
Exam tip: Use Juliet's age and the forced match with Paris to show what she is up against. Her defiance reads far more powerfully once you set it against a patriarchal system in which a daughter was expected to marry where her father chose. That context turns her secret marriage into resistance rather than mere teenage impulsiveness.
Key Takeaways
- The story was already old: Shakespeare reworked Arthur Brooke's 1562 poem and its Italian roots.
- He sped it up and made Juliet young: Months become days, and the lovers gain our sympathy.
- Elizabethans believed in the stars: "Star-crossed" signalled a real belief in fate and Fortune.
- Honour fuels the feud: A culture of family reputation and duelling makes the love affair deadly.
- Marriage was a family matter: Juliet's forced match with Paris reflects the position of women of the time.
Romeo and Juliet Context – Frequently Asked Questions
What were Shakespeare's sources for Romeo and Juliet?
The tale was already well travelled before Shakespeare touched it. It took shape through a series of Italian writers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: Masuccio Salernitano told an early version, Luigi da Porto set it in Verona and gave the lovers their names, and Matteo Bandello's retelling carried it across Europe.
Shakespeare's immediate source, however, was an English poem: Arthur Brooke's The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562). He kept Brooke's storyline but reshaped it for the stage, compressing the timescale dramatically, deepening minor figures like Mercutio and the Nurse, and replacing Brooke's heavy moralising with genuine sympathy for the lovers. The result is far more intense and far less preachy than its source.
What does "star-crossed" mean, and did Elizabethans really believe in fate?
"Star-crossed" means opposed or thwarted by the stars. It draws on astrology, the belief that the arrangement of the heavens at your birth influenced your character and your destiny. To call the lovers star-crossed is to say the cosmos itself is set against them.
Many Elizabethans took this seriously. Astrology was widely consulted, and the idea of Fortune, a power that raised people up and cast them down, was a common way of explaining sudden disaster. Shakespeare uses these beliefs deliberately, framing the tragedy as fated in the Prologue while also showing human choices at work, so that the play can be read as a story of doom, of human error, or of both at once.
Why couldn't Romeo and Juliet simply be together?
The obstacle is the feud, and the honour culture that sustains it. Romeo and Juliet are born into families locked in an "ancient grudge", and in a world where a family's reputation had to be defended with the sword, marrying the enemy was unthinkable. Their love is treason against the loyalty each owes their house.
On top of the feud sits the authority of the father. Juliet is expected to marry whoever Lord Capulet chooses, and he has settled on Paris. A daughter who refused such a match risked being disowned or worse. Caught between a hostile feud and a forced marriage, the lovers have no honest, open path to being together, which is what pushes them towards secrecy and, finally, the Friar's dangerous plan.
How old is Juliet, and was that normal for the time?
Juliet is presented as not yet fourteen, and Shakespeare made her younger than she is in his sources, where she is a few years older. Her extreme youth is a deliberate choice, sharpening both her vulnerability and the remarkable courage and self-possession she shows as the play goes on.
It would be a mistake to assume this was ordinary. Although the law permitted marriage from a very young age, in practice most Elizabethans – especially outside the wealthy elite – married in their twenties. A bride of thirteen would have seemed young even then, so Juliet's age is part of the drama rather than a simple reflection of everyday life. It also makes her father's determination to marry her off at once feel all the more forceful.
Why is the play set in Italy?
Partly Shakespeare set it in Italy because that is where his sources placed it: Verona and Mantua come straight from the Italian tradition and from Brooke's poem. But the setting also did useful work for an English audience. Italy was imagined as a glamorous, passionate and dangerous place, famous for fierce family rivalries, vendettas and hot-blooded duelling.
That reputation made Verona the perfect home for a story of sudden love and lethal honour. Setting the violence and intrigue abroad also gave Shakespeare a degree of freedom, letting him explore feud, rebellion against parents and disorder at a slight, safe distance from his own city while his audience enjoyed the exotic backdrop.