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The Most Excellent and Lamentable \
Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet\
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\b0 I\fs36 NTRODUCTION\
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O\fs24 N\fs28 its first appearance in print, in 1597, \i Romeo and Juliet\i0 was described as `An excellent conceited tragedy' that had `been often (with great applause) played publicly'; its popularity is witnessed by the fact that this is a pirated version, put together from actors' memories as a way of cashing in on its success. A second printing, two years later, offered a greatly superior text apparently printed from Shakespeare's working papers. Probably he wrote it in 1594 or 1595.\
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The story was already well known, in Italian, French, and English. Shakespeare owes most to Arthur Brooke's long poem \i The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet\i0 (1562), which had already supplied hints for \i The Two Gentlemen of Verona\i0 ; he may also have looked at some of the other versions. In his address `To the Reader', Brooke says that he has seen `the same argument lately set forth on stage with more commendation than I can look for', but no earlier play survives.\
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Shakespeare's Prologue neatly sketches the plot of the two star-crossed lovers born of feuding families whose deaths `bury their parents' strife'; and the formal verse structure of the Prologue\'b1\'b1a sonnet\'b1\'b1is matched by the carefully patterned layout of the action. At the climax of the first scene, Prince Escalus stills a brawl between representatives of the houses of Montague (Romeo's family) and Capulet (Juliet's); at the end of Act 3, Scene 1, he passes judgement on another, more serious brawl, banishing Romeo for killing Juliet's cousin Tybalt after Tybalt had killed Romeo's friend and the Prince's kinsman, Mercutio; and at the end of Act 5, the Prince presides over the reconciliation of Montagues and Capulets. Within this framework of public life Romeo and Juliet act out their brief tragedy: in the first act they meet and declare their love\'b1\'b1in another sonnet; in the second they arrange to marry in secret; in the third, after Romeo's banishment, they consummate their marriage and part; in the fourth, Juliet drinks a sleeping draught prepared by Friar Laurence so that she may escape marriage to Paris and, after waking in the family tomb, run off with Romeo; in the fifth, after Romeo, believing her to be dead, has taken poison, she stabs herself to death.\
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The play's structural formality is offset by an astonishing fertility of linguistic invention, showing itself no less in the comic bawdiness of the servants, the Nurse, and (on a more sophisticated level) Mercutio than in the rapt and impassioned poetry of the lovers. Shakespeare's mastery over a wide range of verbal styles combines with his psychological perceptiveness to create a richer gallery of memorable characters than in any of his earlier plays; and his theatrical imagination compresses Brooke's leisurely narrative into a dramatic masterpiece.\
