TLDR Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet

by William Shakespeare

In Verona, the Montagues and Capulets hate each other for reasons nobody bothers to explain. Romeo Montague crashes a Capulet party, forgets his crush Rosaline, and falls for Juliet Capulet. Friar Laurence marries them in secret. Tybalt kills Mercutio, Romeo kills Tybalt, and the Prince banishes Romeo to Mantua. Juliet, facing marriage to Paris, takes the Friar's sleeping potion to fake her death. The plan goes wrong. Romeo finds her in the tomb, kills Paris, drinks poison, and dies. Juliet wakes and stabs herself. The families make peace. Too late, obviously.

• Juliet is not yet fourteen. Her mother and the Nurse work out her age in Act 1, Scene 3. Her fourteenth birthday, Lammas Eve, is just over a fortnight off. Marriage talk starts anyway.
• The first printing is much shorter. The First Quarto of 1597 is a shorter text than the Second Quarto of 1599. Scholars have long treated the two printings as different versions of the same play.
• Shakespeare squeezed months into days. Arthur Brooke's 1562 poem Romeus and Juliet, Shakespeare's main source, stretches the story across months. The play compresses it into roughly four days, which is why everyone moves so fast.

• “Romeo and Juliet both die by poison.” Nice try, though. Romeo drinks poison in the tomb, but Juliet wakes up too late to share it. She uses his dagger instead. Two deaths, two methods, one very bad timing problem.
• “Juliet drinks poison to fake her death.” Hold on, Friar. Juliet takes a sleeping potion from Friar Laurence, not poison. It only makes her look dead, which is the whole plan and also the whole problem.
• “The play is set in Venice.” Wrong canal. It is set in Verona, with Romeo banished to Mantua. Venice turns up in other Shakespeare plays, but this feud never goes near it.

• If they say: “Romeo and Juliet is just a love story.”
  You say: “I'd say it's a feud play. It opens with a servants' brawl, and the Prince closes it with 'See what a scourge is laid upon your hate.'”
• If they say: “Why didn't Juliet just text Romeo?”
  You say: “I'd say the Friar's letter never got there. Friar John, carrying it to Mantua, was shut in a house over fear of plague, so Romeo only heard she was dead.”