Famous First Lines: Romeo and Juliet

Ask any freshman in college what her favorite Shakespeare play is and she will say Romeo and Juliet, because it will be the one she is most familiar with (though she may not necessarily have read it all the way through). This early Shakespeare tragedy has many faults -- Shakespeare himself parodies the overly florid melodramatic language of Romeo and Juliet in A Midsummer Night's Dream, with the tragi-comic story of Pyramus and Thisbe -- but it endures; the fate of the young lovers captures the imagination of many a moody teenager. Plus there are some great sword fights.

Shakespeare's job as playwright was to fill seats, and this play has always been popular -- the balcony scene is probably the most widely recognized moment in the theater, ever. Juliet's speech on anticipation ("gallop apace, ye fiery-footed steeds") is a wonderful set piece on passion's overwhelming power, countering Mercutio's more raunchy riff on lust. But surely the most clever (in terms of meshing the ploy of "love at first sight" with the language of love) moment is when the two meet, and their dialogue shapes a love sonnet (three quatrains and a couplet), and ending with a kiss. A nice touch.

One stylistic choice Shakespeare made was to introduce some of the scenes with a sonnet outlining the action. The sonnet is appropriate for the topic of love; interestingly, at the end of the play when the body count at its height, the final verses comprising the epilogue are a truncated version of the form. But the prologue is complete:

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

Spoken by the Chorus (a commentator on the action), the sonnet encapsulates the plot in a tightly packed summary: what we are going to see is not a surprise; the novelty lies in how it comes about.

What is our fascination with star-crossed lovers?  Romeo and Juliet are the quintessential "death-mark'd" lovers, whose deaths quell the strife among their respective families and restore order to the realm (Verona, in this case). 

The sonnet is metatheatrical in that it refers to the play that the audience is watching with as much detail as Hamlet uses to describe the action of The Murder of Gonzago, his play-within-a-play designed to entrap Claudius.  It also implies a moral lesson to be learned about what happens when "civil blood makes civil hands unclean." The oxymoron of the "civil brawls" that the duke complains about in Act One of the tragedy is more than mere wordplay for a country where rioting and civil unrest were not unknown.