NT Education Workpack
Romeo and Juliet
The Play
Introduction 2
Just four days – a brief synopsis 2
Comedy or tragedy? 2
A Midsummer Night’s Dream and
Romeo and Juliet 3
Tragic time 3
The Sonnet 4
The Petrarchan lover 4
Opposites 4
The NT production 5
The design 5
Interview with Romeo and Juliet:
Chiwetel Ejiofor and Charlotte Randle 5
For discussion 7
Practical exercises 8
Written work and research 9
Related materials 10
Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare
Lighting Designer
Paule Constable
Opening: Olivier Theatre 29
September 2000
Music
Adrian Lee
See www.nt-online.org for
further production details
Music Programming
Simon Rogers
Director
Tim Supple
Designer
Robert Innes Hopkins
Director of Movement
Jane Gibson
Fight Director
Malcolm Ranson
Sound Designer
Paul Groothuis
NT Education
Royal National Theatre
South Bank
London SE1 9PX
T (020) 7452 3388
F (020) 7452 3380
E education@nationaltheatre.org.uk
Workpack written by
Dinah Wood
Editor
Dinah Wood
MA in Shakespeare and
English Literature at the
University of Bristol; Deputy
Editor of the National’s
programmes
Coordinator
Sarah Nicholson
Design
Patrick Eley
The play
Introduction
The story of two young lovers from opposing
families, with its roots in folklore and Greek
romance, was popular in Europe in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, long before Shakespeare
wrote Romeo and Juliet. The play’s preoccupation
with broken nuptials is a theme to which
Shakespeare returned time and again (think of
Much Ado About Nothing, All’s Well That Ends
Well and A Midsummer Night’s Dream to name
but a few). The play, described by Harley Granville
Barker as “a tragedy of youth as youth sees it”, has
proved endlessly popular.
Just four days – a brief synopsis
The opening fight between the Montagues and
Capulets occurs on Sunday morning. In the
afternoon, Paris talks to Capulet about marrying
Juliet. Romeo intercepts Capulet’s messenger
with invitations to the feast. Early that evening,
Lady Capulet prepares Juliet for Paris’ suit and
Romeo and friends set off for the feast. Romeo
Chiwetel Ejiofor
Charlotte Randle
photo Catherine Ashmore
and Juliet meet for the first time on Sunday
evening; the balcony scene occurs that night and
they part when “’Tis almost morning” (II.ii.176).
Romeo rushes to Friar Lawrence to arrange the
wedding as the sun rises on Monday; the Nurse
meets Romeo around midday and on the Nurse’s
return, Juliet goes to to the cell to be married.
Romeo has only been married for “an hour”
when he kills Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin, in retaliation
for Tybalt’s murder of Mercutio. Juliet hears of
Romeo’s banishment when just “thy three-hours
wife” (III.ii.99). Romeo and Juliet spend Monday
night together as Capulet arranges for Paris and
Juliet to marry. Romeo leaves for Mantua at dawn
on Tuesday, just before Juliet learns of her
imminent second wedding. Juliet goes to Friar
Lawrence, who gives her the “distilling liquor”
(IV.i.94), and returns to beg her father’s
forgiveness. Capulet insists on bringing forward
her wedding with Paris from Thursday to
Wednesday. Juliet drinks the potion on Tuesday
night.
On Wednesday morning Juliet is discovered
‘dead’ and is buried the same day . Romeo’s
servant rides to Mantua with the news. Romeo
buys the poison before leaving with great haste for
Juliet’s tomb in Verona. Friar Lawrence, learning
that the letter telling Romeo of Juliet’s feigned
death, has failed to reach him, sets off for the
tomb. Romeo arrives before him on Wednesday
night and finds the body of Juliet. He murders
Paris and drinks the poison just before Juliet
awakes to find him, dead beside her, his lips still
warm. She kills herself. They are discovered in the
early hours of Thursday morning.
Comedy or Tragedy?
Were it not for The Prologue, which prepares us
for the play’s suicidal denouement in the first few
lines (“A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life”),
Romeo and Juliet opens with all the ingredients of
comedy: the inconstant love-sick hero and his
(absent) chaste mistress, tyrannical parents, a
comic nurse, a benevolent friar and a grand feast.
The setting is predominantly domestic and the
banter is riddled with bawdy innuendo.
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The play
Chiwetel Ejiofor
Patrick O’Kane
photo Catherine Ashmore
While the violence of the opening fight is real
enough, Tybalt’s sword actually cuts no more than
“the winds” (I.i.109), old age appears to temper
ancient grudges – “’tis not hard I think / For men
so old as we to keep the peace” (I.ii.2/3) – and, in
offering the brawlers no more than a warning, the
Prince demonstrates a surprising leniency quite
alien to tragedy. In stark contrast to the brutal
impatience Capulet shows towards Juliet after
Tybalt’s murder in Act III – “go with Paris to Saint
Peter’s Church, / Or I will drag thee hither”
(III.v.154/5) – here, Juliet’s father (in Tim Supple’s
production, ostentatiously relaxed as he enjoys a
cigar) restrains the amorous Paris with words of
patience: “Let two more summers wither in their
pride / Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride”
(I.ii.10/11). When the Friar marries the young
lovers we have reason to share his hope that their
union, in true comic style, will restore harmony to
the feuding households: “For this alliance may so
happy prove / To turn your households’ rancour to
pure love.” (II.iii.88)
It is not until the death of the ever-clowning
Mercutio in Act III that the action takes on the
irreversible quality of tragedy. Now, Romeo can no
longer respond to Tybalt’s threats with “love”
because “Mercutio’s soul” demands revenge –
and once Tybalt, with remarkable speed, is slain,
the Prince is “deaf” to excuses (although even
here he resists the death penalty demanded by the
Capulets) and Romeo is banished. In Supple’s
production, the moment of Tybalt’s murder has a
stylized, dreamlike quality; after the hot-blooded
fighting, the action is carried out in slow motion,
highlighted in a pool of cold blue light.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo
and Juliet
The parallels between the comedy, A Midsummer
Night’s Dream and the tragedy of Romeo and
Juliet, both written between 1594 and 1596, are
marked. Most obviously, both plays evolve around
the prohibited union of a pair of lovers. Like Hermia
and Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Romeo and Juliet determine to marry in spite of the
obstacles set by their “parents’ rage”. In Romeo
and Juliet we watch the fate of the “star-cross’d
lovers” (Prologue, line 6); in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream we learn that “The course of true love never
did run smooth” (I.i.34). Oberon’s love potion
secures a happy ending for the lovers in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream while the Friar’s
“distilling liquor” (IV.i.94) in Romeo and Juliet, in
imitating death, leads to death itself. The tragic
fate of Pyramus and Thisbe, rendered comic by
the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
becomes the real fate of Romeo and Juliet. While
comedy may resolve itself with the help of magic,
tragedy has no such licence.
Tragic time
Shakespeare’s principal source for Romeo and
Juliet was a long poem written by Arthur Brooke in
1562, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Iuliet.
In Brooke’s poem, the tragedy develops over nine
months allowing Romeo and Juliet several months
of clandestine wedlock before the murder of
Tybalt. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,
calamity is telescoped into just four days.
The breathless pace with which the tragedy of
Romeo and Juliet advances creates an exciting
dramatic urgency. The very impatience of the
lovers emphasises their youthful passion and
contrasts starkly with the kindly Friar, whose
attempts to divert tragedy are dependent upon an
altogether slower pace. “Be patient”, he counsels,
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The play
to a man who would gladly suffer death for “one
short minute” (II.iv.5) with his beloved. His plan has
a nursery-rhyme charm that assumes a temporal
ease quite at odds with the pressing course of
tragedy. Romeo must travel to Mantua and wait,
till we can find a time
To blaze your marriage, reconcile your friends,
Beg pardon of the Prince, and call thee back. (III.iii.149)
When Capulet abandons his former patience
in favour of a rushed marriage, he embraces tragic
time – notice Juliet’s surprise in Act III: “I wonder
at this haste, that I must wed / Ere he that should
be husband comes to woo.” (III.v.118). And when
Juliet’s marriage is advanced it is the Friar’s
attempt to procure time with his sleeping draught,
that leads directly to the lovers’ suicides.
Chiwetel Ejiofor
photo Catherine Ashmore
The Sonnet
The sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines of which
there are three widely recognized forms: the Italian
or Petrarchan, the Spenserian, and the English or
Shakespearean. A Shakespearean sonnet has
three quatrains and a concluding couplet with the
rhyming scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. It is
written in iambic pentameter, a line of ten syllables
with the accent on the second ‘foot’ – ‘When I do
count the clock that tells the time’.
Although the sonnet of today may embrace
any mood or subject, it was originally used
primarily as a love lyric. Shakespeare’s Prologue
draws our attention to the affinities between the
sonnet form and his subject matter. The sonnet
gave voice to intimate expression, usually
proclamations of love; in Romeo and Juliet this
quite specific form of address, hitherto the
province of non-dramatic poetry, is absorbed into
the play. When the lovers first meet, Romeo’s
opening words to Juliet form the first quatrain of a
sonnet, which Juliet shares and which ends in a
kiss (I.v.92).
The Petrarchan lover
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I there was a
vogue for sonnet-writing, inspired by the
fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch, who
wrote a series of poems in praise of Laura, his
famously chaste mistress. Petrarch’s sonnets set a
standard of conventional love characterized by the
cruel chastity of the unattainable mistress and the
suffering of the spurned lover – his inability to
reason and his paradoxical, bitter-sweet state:
Eyeless I see, without a tongue I call;
I long to perish, and cry out for succour;
I hate myself, and yet I love someone.
I feed on grief, and as I weep I smile;
and death and life seem bad as one another.
And all this, lady, is what you have done.
[Petrarch, translated by JG Nichols]
In the opening scene, Romeo, thinking himself in
love with Rosaline (who has, in true Petrarchan
fashion, “forsworn to love” I.i.221), speaks exactly
as a spurned lover should:
O brawling love, O loving hate,
O anything of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity (I.i.174).
His clichéd expression suggests a lack of
authenticity. When truly in love, Romeo gains a
tremendous flexibility of expression – look at the
way he addresses the body of Juliet in the tomb:
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Ah dear Juliet,
Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe
That unsubstantial Death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour? (V.iii.100)
Opposites
An oxymoron is a paradoxical statement which
contains two incongruous words such as Romeo’s
“heavy lightness” and “loving hate”. Since Romeo
and Juliet are beset with divisions and conflicts,
right from the very first violent clash between their
feuding families in Act 1, the oxymoron is a
particularly appropriate rhetorical device – Romeo
has over ten in the first Scene.
Love and hate, brought together in the
opening Prologue: “Here’s much to do with hate,
but more with love”, becomes a constant motif.
“My life were better ended by their hate / Than
death prorogued, wanting of thy love” (II.ii.77)
promises Romeo. The conflict between life and
death is another example. When Juliet first sees
Romeo she makes the ominous observation, half-
Chiwetel Ejiofor
photo Catherine Ashmore
laughing as she does so in Supple’s production:
“If he be married, / My grave is like to be my
wedding bed” I.v.133). Just two days later her
wedding feast serves as her funeral wake:“Our
bridal flowers serve for a buried corse, / And all
things change them to the contrary.” (IV.v.89/90).
Light and dark is another juxtaposition that runs
throughout the play – “More light and light, more
dark and dark our woes!”
The NT production
Director Tim Supple was particularly interested in
the play as vivid poetic drama. We are transported
to a hot, explosive, ex-colonial world. White actors
are cast as Capulets and black actors as
Montagues – their “ancient grudge” is perhaps
one of hostile race relations. The military have a
strong presence. Soldiers with machine guns
guard the Prince; ordinary men in the street carry
machete-like swords. Polite society is liable to
erupt into a fighting fray at any moment.
The design
The dress is emblematically modern, the aesthetic
striking and contemporary. Two vast, curved,
lattice walls of stone and metal move about the
stage to form orchard walls, the balcony, the
banquet hall; in the second half they cast grid-like
shadows and become walls of the tomb itself. The
Friar’s hut is built with corrugated iron like a
shanty-town shack, an Aladdin’s cave of potions,
herbs and books. Props on the whole are sparse
and serve several functions; Romeo kills Paris with
the “mattock” (a kind of pick-axe) he has brought
to force open the tomb.
Interview with Romeo and Juliet;
Chiwetel Ejiofor and Charlotte Randle
Have you seen other productions of Romeo and
Juliet?
Charlotte Randle I’ve never seen the play on
stage, but it’s my favourite ballet. I watched half of
Baz Luhrmann’s film, which I loved, but I didn’t
allow myself to see the whole thing – I’d just been
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The play
cast as Juliet and didn’t want to be unduly
influenced.
This production is very accessible. Was this
something you talked about during rehearsals?
Chiwetel Ejiofor Definitely. It should be clear.
Hopefully we play characters who people can
relate to rather than romantic ideals.
CR The costume is modern day. It’s saying, these
people aren’t just historical figures, they are the
same as you. We have our own contemporary
references. Today Juliet would be on the internet!
She has little experience – she is innocent – but
she can imagine what it would be like to fall in love
and so on.
Is there a pivotal moment for Juliet?
CR Because of the terrible nature of her situation
she matures from a young girl to somebody with
experience incredibly quickly. During the course of
the play she marries, she sleeps with Romeo, and
yet she’s still treated by her parents like a little girl
– and when she’s with her parents, she feels like
one to a certain extent. It’s Romeo who allows her
to grow-up. Tim Supple described Juliet as being
like a resistance fighter; everybody is against her.
Nobody allows her to have her own feelings about
anything, so she has to play the game. They want
to marry her off to Paris, thinking they are doing
her a favour. She has to deceive even the Nurse –
to suddenly grow-up. Except there is that moment
with the poison when she calls back the Nurse,
before she realises, ‘I’ve got to do this on my own,
there is no one else I can trust, except the Friar
and then I don’t know if I can still trust him.
Perhaps it’s a poison. But no, I’ve got to trust him,
he’s the only person left, except Romeo.”
Is there such a moment for Romeo?
CE Yes, definitely – the moment he sees Juliet at
the party. He indulges in his infatuation with
Rosaline until then. And then when Tybalt kills
Mercutio. At the death of Mercutio the entire
nature of the play changes. If Tybalt hadn’t killed
Mercutio then Romeo wouldn’t have killed Tybalt
and Romeo wouldn’t have been banished.
Perhaps the lovers would have carried on in
secret? It’s hard to know. Perhaps they’d see each
other once a week until they plucked up their
courage to tell their parents?
How do Romeo and Juliet relate to their parents?
CE It’s different for Romeo as a young man. They
just want him to be of a status, of a maturity to take
over. We were both aware that Romeo and Juliet
come from wealthy aristocratic backgrounds, and
that gives them a certain degree of confidence;
they have been brought up with a knowledge of
their status. They are at ease in the town as
members of two leading families.
CR The interesting thing is that both households
are very patriarchal. The father rules. You can see
that once Lady Capulet was strong, and yet she’s
told what to do as much as Juliet. Moving on a
generation, Romeo and Juliet have a very equal
relationship. I believe that Juliet goes so hell for
leather not just because she’s caught up in a
whirlwind romance, a dream; it’s also a way out.
“This is a man that treats me with respect and
listens to what I say.” If Romeo hadn’t come to the
party, Juliet would have married Paris, I expect. But
she’s got that rebellious streak.
How did you feel about the casting of black actors
for Montagues and white actors for Capulets?
CE It’s difficult to impose a contemporary political
point on an ancient play. But at the same time, the
idea of families with difference; well it’s useful
emblematically but they are “both alike in dignity”
and it isn’t about race per se.
CR When Juliet regrets that Romeo is a
Montague, it doesn’t enter her head that Romeo is
not white. It definitely doesn’t. It’s quite a mixed
society; the Prince is black, the Friar white.
Perhaps the families came from different places
and both grew in prosperity and became rivals?
If, at the end of the play, you had to predict what
would happen next, what would you say?
CE I think that the fundaments are in place to
resolve the two families’ differences.
CR Yes, it’s so shocking what has happened. Their
children are dead.
CE And they are their only children.
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For Discussion
1
Before Romeo has met Juliet, he is love-sick over
Rosaline (“Shut up in prison, kept without my
food” I.ii.55). How does Romeo’s language in
these early scenes suggest that this is no more
than infatuation?
2
At what point does the play become tragic?
Would it be possible to create a happy ending for
Romeo and Juliet? What might it be?
3
“In a tragedy, nothing is in doubt and everyone’s
destiny is known. That makes for tranquillity....
Tragedy is restful; and the reason is that hope, that
foul and deceitful thing, has no part in it. There isn’t
any hope. You’re trapped.” Jean Anouilh, Antigone
(Chorus) Trans. by Lewis Galantière (Methuen,
1951)
Think about this statement in relationship to
Romeo and Juliet. To what extent is it a useful
analysis of tragedy?
Chiwetel Ejiofor
Charlotte Randle
photo Catherine Ashmore
4
At the Capulets’ feast in the NT production, the
Montagues enter wearing skull-like masks and
carrying burning torches; when Mercutio seeks the
concealed Romeo just before the balcony scene,
he addresses his speech (“Romeo! Humours!
Madman! Passion! Lover!” (II.i.7)) to Romeo’s
discarded skull-mask and jacket which he places
on the ground like a prone skeleton. How does this
affect our reading of the scene?
5
In Arthur Brooke’s long poem, The Tragicall
Historye of Romeus and Iuliet (1562), the tragedy
develops over nine months allowing Romeo and
Juliet several months of clandestine wedlock
before the murder of Tybalt. In Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet, calamity takes just four days to
culminate. How do you think these different time
scales affect the story?
6
There are many examples of temporal disorder in
Romeo and Juliet, climaxing in a burial that
precedes the death: “And Juliet bleeding, warm,
and newly dead, / Who here hath lain this two
days buried” (V.ii.74). Find other examples when
time is out of joint.
7
Think about the roles of Mercutio and the Nurse.
How do you think they alter the play’s dynamic.
You might find the following quotation useful.
“The modest force which undermines the value of
passionate sexual love is bawdry: light-hearted,
witty derision of the whole undignified business
which young men make a fuss about. Mercutio is
an expert at that form of masculine amusement.
His commentary would wreck the delicate,
sentimental catastrophe; and therefore, to keep
the play together, either he must stop being
Mercutio or he must cease altogether.
Shakespeare stopped him.”
AP Rossiter, Angel with Horns
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Practical Exercises
Staff director Sarah Wooley found the following
three exercises useful in rehearsal:
This helps to give each line a fresh energy, even
when it is part of a longer sentence.
Sit in a circle and allow each member of the group
to say one line; at the end of each line the rest of
the group claps with the speaker.
This encourages the whole cast to think about
how they are feeling, even when they do not have
a speaking part.
Stop an actor mid-scene and ask him/her how
they feel about, say, Romeo refusing to dance at
the party. How is one of servants at the feast
feeling? You may gain fresh insight – is Peter just
a little in love with Juliet for example?
This is an exercise which helps students to
understand the text.
Take a scene and read it aloud as it is written
down. Then try to paraphrase, putting each
speech into modern prose. Be quite precise. Do
not invent things that are not there.
1
Rosaline, much eulogised by Romeo, does not
appear, although she is referred to by Mercutio as
a “pale, hard-hearted wench” (II.iv). Improvise a
scene in which Romeo and Rosaline first meet.
Think about the scene in which Romeo first sees
Juliet. How would his meeting with Rosaline
differ?
2
Although The Prologue tells us at the very
beginning of the play that the Montagues and
Capulets are enemies, we are never told why.
Think about possible reasons for their hatred and
prepare a scene which demonstrates what
incident from long ago lies at the root of their
“ancient grudge”.
3
David Garrick (1748) provided a popular new
ending to Romeo and Juliet in which the lovers
converse in their death-throes. In pairs, improvise
your own endings.
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Written work & research
1
By the end of the play, Romeo, Tybalt, Mercutio
and Juliet are dead. Choose one of these
characters and write an obituary, thinking carefully
about their character traits.
2
An oxymoron is a statement which contains two
contradictory or incongruous words such as
‘burning ice’. Romeo and Juliet contains many
oxymorons. Why are they particularly appropriate
to this story? Find at least five examples.
3
Research in novels, plays and newspapers for
other young lovers who have married against their
parents’ wishes. You might consider issues of race
and religion.
4
Many of Shakespeare’s phrases are still popular.
Expressions from Romeo and Juliet that we use
today include “cock-a-hoop” and “on a wild goose
chase”. There are many more examples. See how
many you can find. Try to write your own sentences
including these phrases.
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Related material
Books
Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare, ed. Brian Gibbons,
Arden (Routledge, 1988)
Romeo and Juliet
by Cedric Watts, Harvester New Critical
Introductions to Shakespeare (Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1991)
Rhetorical Devices in Romeo and Juliet
by Roger O Evans, (University of Kentucky Press,
1966)
Shakespeare A to Z: The Essential Reference
to His Plays, His Poems, His Life and Times
and More
by Charles Boyce, Facts on File (Roundtable
Press, 1990)
Romantics on Shakespeare
by Jonathan Bate ed., (Penguin, 1992)
Canzoniere
by Petrarch, translated by JG Nichols, (Carcanet
Press, 2000)
Film
Romeo and Juliet, directed by Franco Zeffirelli,
1968
With two very young lovers, Leonard Whiting
(aged sixteen) and Olivia Hussey (aged fifteen)
William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,
directed by Baz Luhrmann, 1997
“This acid-house rendition... is something to
behold” – Sight and Sound
Web
Search the web for Romeo and Juliet – there are
literally thousands of entries.
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