Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare (1597)
“The world's most famous love story is actually a play about how hatred destroys the things it never meant to touch.”
Character Analysis
Romeo begins as a Petrarchan cliché — lovesick, eloquent, performatively miserable over Rosaline — and becomes, through the course of the play, something genuinely tragic: a man of real feeling whose impulsiveness destroys what he loves most. His killing of Tybalt is not villainous; it is human in the worst way. His belief in Juliet's death, and his decision to die beside her, is the same quality that made him fall in love — total, overwhelming commitment with no protective irony. That quality is both his best and most fatal trait.
Opens in elaborate Petrarchan conceits and oxymorons — performed grief in formal verse. After meeting Juliet, shifts to direct, image-driven blank verse. In Act V, strips to plain declarative sentences. The trajectory from ornate to bare tracks his emotional development.