Romeo and Juliet

1. Think of a disagreement between two groups where nobody can quite explain how it started. What keeps a conflict like that alive after the original reason is gone?
2. Is it possible to know you love someone after meeting them once? What is the difference between love and a powerful first impression?
3. When adults make a major decision about a young person's life without asking them, what options does that young person actually have?
4. Who do you go to when you cannot tell your parents something important, and what makes that person trustworthy?
5. Shakespeare announces in the first minute that this story ends badly. Why might a writer give away the ending on purpose, and how does knowing it change the way you watch?
6. Think of a time when a message was delayed, misheard, or never delivered. How much can one missed message change?

• Hurry versus patience: notice how often characters act within minutes of an idea, and what the story suggests waiting might have cost or saved.
• Fate versus choice: the Prologue blames the stars, but track how many freely made decisions push events forward.
• Inherited hatred: watch how the feud is taught to the next generation and who benefits from keeping it going.
• Public face versus private self: many characters behave one way in the street or the great hall and another way alone or with one trusted person.
• Language as a weapon and a shelter: pay attention to insults, puns, and poetry, and notice which characters use words to wound and which use them to connect.
• Adults and young people: consider which adults actually listen to Romeo and Juliet, which only give orders, and how that shapes what the teenagers do next.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a market town in England, where his father made and sold gloves. He never attended university, but by his late twenties he was working in London as an actor and playwright, and eventually became part-owner of a theater company that performed at the famous Globe Theatre. Over about twenty-five years he wrote roughly thirty-eight plays and more than 150 poems, inventing or popularizing hundreds of words and phrases that English speakers still use today. He wrote comedies, histories, and tragedies for a mixed audience of nobles and ordinary working people, all standing or sitting in the same open-air theater.

Shakespeare wrote this play in the mid-1590s, but he set it in Italy and borrowed the plot from stories that had been circulating in Europe for decades, most directly a long English poem by Arthur Brooke. Audiences in his day expected a tragedy to follow certain rules, and they would have understood things a modern reader has to learn: that wealthy families arranged their children's marriages for money and status, that a girl of thirteen or fourteen could be considered ready to marry, that dueling in the street was both illegal and a matter of personal honor, and that being banished from your city could feel worse than a prison sentence. Because there were no lights, no microphones, and almost no scenery at the Globe, Shakespeare wrote the setting into the dialogue itself — when a character says it is dark, the audience believed it, even at two o'clock on a sunny afternoon.