Romeo and Juliet

In the early 1590s, plague shut London's theatres for nearly two years. Playhouses stood empty, actors toured or starved, and William Shakespeare turned to poetry to stay afloat. When the theatres reopened, he joined a new company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and wrote at speed for a public hungry for stories. Around 1595 he gave them Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy about two teenagers from feuding families in Verona who marry in secret and die for it.

He did not invent the story. It had been drifting through Italy for decades, told by writers like Matteo Bandello, and it reached English readers through a long poem by Arthur Brooke, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, published in 1562. Brooke used the tale as a warning against young lovers who disobey their parents. Shakespeare kept the plot and flipped the sympathy, because he put the audience inside the lovers' heads instead of above them. He also compressed the action. Brooke's romance unfolds over months. Shakespeare's burns through in a few days, so the play feels like something falling rather than something unfolding.

Audiences took to it fast. A pirated, garbled text appeared in print in 1597, which usually means a play was popular enough to be worth stealing. A fuller and better version followed in 1599, advertised as newly corrected and enlarged. Early writers mention Romeo the way people mention a celebrity, a sign the character had escaped the stage.

It has never really left. After the theatres reopened in 1660, some producers found the ending unbearable and staged versions where the lovers live. Later came Berlioz's symphony, Gounod's opera, Tchaikovsky's overture and Prokofiev's ballet. In 1957 West Side Story moved the feud to New York gangs, and film versions by Franco Zeffirelli and Baz Luhrmann introduced it to two more generations. Verona now receives thousands of letters addressed simply to Juliet, and volunteers answer them. A play about a rushed, secret, disastrous marriage became the world's default shorthand for love itself.