Two teenagers from feuding Verona houses fall in love with total, reckless sincerity; the city’s adult world — vendetta, arranged marriage, well-meant scheming — closes over them in less than a week.
The tragedy announces its ending in the prologue, so the play’s power is all in the racing against it: the wit of Mercutio, the Nurse’s garrulous warmth, and love scenes that remain genuinely rapturous. If you last read it at school, it is sharper, funnier, and faster than you remember.
Which edition?
1Arden Shakespeare, Third Series
Ed. René Weis · Bloomsbury, 2012
Weis’s Q2-based text with a warm, unembarrassed introduction — the play taken seriously as tragedy.
2Oxford World’s Classics
Ed. Jill Levenson · Oxford University Press, 2000
Levenson prints both early versions — the play and its faster, rougher first Quarto.
3The New Cambridge Shakespeare
Ed. G. Blakemore Evans · Cambridge University Press
A veteran editor’s steady hand, strongest on sources and staging.
4Folger Shakespeare LibraryFirst read? Start here
Ed. Barbara Mowat & Paul Werstine · Simon & Schuster
The classroom classic for a reason — clean text, instant glosses.
Romeo and Juliet on screen
1West Side Story (1961)
Film · dir. Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins · inspired by Romeo and Juliet
2Romeo and Juliet (1968)
Film · dir. Franco Zeffirelli
3Romeo + Juliet (1996)
Film · dir. Baz Luhrmann
4Shakespeare in Love (1998)
Film · dir. John Madden · inspired by Romeo and Juliet
5West Side Story (2021)
Film · dir. Steven Spielberg · inspired by Romeo and Juliet
Reading Romeo and Juliet this year?
Mark it in your record when you finish — one seat, kept for decades.