Shakespeare's Most Adolescent Play

It may not surprise you to hear that Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s teenaged play—after all, it is the most popular play in US high schools, a ninth-grade favorite! But that might have surprised earlier readers who considered the play adolescent for other reasons writes scholar Ellen MacKay. In a thought-provoking essay, excerpted below, MacKay, an associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, notes that with the young lovers dead at the end of the play the audience is left to figure out what went wrong and what else might be possible—an ideal task for the classroom.

The essay comes from The Folger Guide to Teaching Romeo and Juliet, which published today along with guides to Hamlet and Macbeth. The Folger Guides to Teaching Shakespeare offer educators fresh insights and innovative tools for teaching some of Shakespeare’s most frequently taught plays, with guides to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Othello publishing in March 2025.

No play of Shakespeare’s is as strongly associated with adolescence as Romeo and Juliet. Famously, it is a work about teenagers. The tragedy is unusual for its specification of Juliet’s age as not quite fourteen, and “young Romeo,” who starts the play shut away in his bedroom, “so secret and so close,” seems not much above that (2.4.121; 1.1.152). It is also a work for teenagers. Because it is common for the play to be the first work of Shakespeare’s that students are taught, Romeo and Juliet is well established as a high school rite of passage. Like the quadratic formula or parallel parking, it is a step on the ladder to informed maturity. Of course, its status as a curricular mainstay doesn’t ensure that the play is remembered in any particular way. Like the quadradic formula or parallel parking, its specifics are as likely to be forgotten as remembered. But what is assured by the fact that teachers keep teaching Romeo and Juliet to teenagers is the prominence that Anglo-American culture accords the work in the construction of a shared reality. If education is the key site for a nation to make its truths evident, Romeo and Juliet is teenaged in the sense that for decades it has been chosen to help realize the transition from child to citizen. Served up to a population on the brink of legal majority, and about to enjoy all the rights that come with that change in status (among them, the right to vote, the right to serve in the military, the right to consent to marriage, the right to control their own bodies and to administer their own property, etc.), the play shows something that the culture wants its budding members to know.

What is that something, though? Oddly for a work that is such a fixture of high school reading lists, this is a question without a clear answer. Editors of Shakespeare from the 18th and 19th centuries would be surprised to learn that Romeo and Juliet has become the most school-identified of Shakespeare’s works. In their time too, the play was considered adolescent, but not because of its content or its audience. (Nor was it because Shakespeare wrote the play in his youth—so far as we know, Shakespeare left behind no juvenilia; Romeo and Juliet likely dates from 1596, when the playwright was in his early thirties.) Rather, the play was classified as an immature work because it was seen as a less developed version of a genre that Shakespeare would go on to master. Judged in comparison with Hamlet (1600), Othello (1604), Macbeth (1606), and King Lear (1606), the four plays widely considered to be Shakespeare’s “great” tragedies, Romeo and Juliet has long been viewed as a less enlightening, less exemplary precursor.

This judgment has a lot to do with the narrow outlook of the leading couple. Tragedy in its classic Shakespearean form tends to end in an expanded view, with the fall of the protagonist shown in relation to the grand scheme of things. A guiding example is King Lear’s cry of self-reproach when the storm brings him face-to-face with his kingdom’s “houseless” and “unfed”: “O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this” (3.4.34, 36–37). The same pattern of ethical reckoning applies to Macbeth, Othello, and Claudius (Hamlet’s villainous uncle), whose crimes take on the scope of failures of the state. But Romeo and Juliet takes the opposite course. As the play hurtles toward its back-to-back suicides, the protagonists pull away from their social environments. By the fifth act, parents, the Prince, Nurse, Page, and Friar have all dropped out of the picture, leaving the lovers utterly alone. This depopulation of the stage is striking in light of the crowded scenes that have preceded it—the street brawl at the play’s start and the Capulets’ feast at the culmination of Act 1. Romeo and Juliet is a play that teems with life from all social levels, yet among its crowd of attendants, servants, gentlemen, ladies, citizens, and clergy, no one is on hand to correct the false reality in which the lovers ultimately find themselves. They die ignorant of the events that they have unleashed; even worse, they die ignorant of the needlessness of their own suicides.

By leaving its lovers in the dark, the tragedy has provoked a divided response. The view of early editors was that Romeo and Juliet fell short of tragic excellence by failing to expose and chastise its young heroes’ disobedience. The more recent consensus is that the play is great because it breaks free from old-fashioned literary conventions. Richard Wagner composed his opera Tristan and Isolde as a testament to this view (1859). He called the final aria, in which Isolde dies enraptured by her lover’s “shining” corpse, a Liebestod (meaning “love death”), a term that critics have used to describe the paradigm of self-immolating transcendence that Romeo and Juliet has made famous. One of the most quoted musical compositions in the 20th century—Leonard Bernstein draws from its shimmering chromatic ascension in the final notes of West Side Story—the Liebestod was the theme of youthful rebellion before rock-and-roll anthems entered the scene.

This pendulum swing from critical disappointment to exaltation tracks with modern art’s preference for rebellion over convention, and modern readers are correct to detect a willful irreverence at work in the play. In ways that seem designed to shake up the story’s received understanding, Shakespeare deviated from his sources when he composed Romeo and Juliet. Because there were multiple, well-known versions circulating in the 16th century, his flouting of tradition would have been highly visible to a Renaissance audience. He drew especially strongly on Arthur Brooke’s popular poem “The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet” (1562), which begins by announcing that the role of good literature is to give out “rules of chaste and honest life.” Brooke goes on to explain that Romeus and Juliet’s history is “tragical” because the lovers break several of those rules. First and worst of all, they fail to respect the “authority and advice of parents,” and second, they fail to shun the bad influence of “drunken gossips” (the Nurse) and “superstitious friars.” Quite pointedly, Shakespeare does not follow Brooke’s lead. When the Prologue promises a “fearful” tale of “star-crossed lovers” and “death-marked love,” he announces a play that is poised to jump the track of its own well-known, didactic precedents.

Yet Romeo and Juliet doesn’t exactly take the side of its teenagers either, given its merciless tour of the damage caused by their secret marriage. A searing example is Romeo’s murder of County Paris at the door to the Capulet crypt. When Romeo pauses over Paris’s body to lament a fellow victim of “sour misfortune,” it’s hard not to notice his total failure to hold himself accountable for his innocent rival’s death (5.3.83). If, as Juliet tells the Nurse, you can’t be too tired to talk if you have the breath to say so (2.5.31–32), then surely you can’t be too “desperate” to keep from killing a man if you have the presence of mind to warn him of your desperation (5.3.59). Here especially, but elsewhere too, the play cuts a jagged line between the fateful cruelty of a world that fails to accommodate the lovers’ desires and the seemingly inadvertent cruelty of Romeo and Juliet, whose belief that they are star-crossed gives license to devastating recklessness. If there is heroic transcendence to be found in the couple’s “death-marked love,” the couple’s disregard for the lives of others tugs hard against it.

It is this mingled construction that makes Romeo and Juliet a teenage play in the best sense. Uprooted from the hectoring tone of the story’s earlier versions, and unversed in the tragic form that will bring Shakespeare future glory, the play’s condition recalls Malvolio’s description of the youth Cesario in Twelfth Night: “Tis with him in standing water, between boy and man” (1.5.157). The middle space of adolescence, in which skepticism and alienation mix with moments of profound self- and social recognition, aptly describes the play’s turbulent vision, which lurches from the violent disorder in Verona’s streets, to the merry hospitality of the Capulets’ feast, to the electric jolt of love at first sight, to the occult experiments of the Friar’s cell, to the “grubs and eyeless skulls” of the grave (5.3.126). It also describes the unsettled state in which it concludes. The Prince’s rushed inquest, which merely recaps incidents that have already been witnessed, seems designed to show that Romeo and Juliet’s tragic “ambiguities” won’t be “clear[ed]” judicially (5.3.225). With the lovers dead, it lies with the audience to figure out what went wrong—the closing lines of the play demand as much with their instruction to “Go hence to have more talk of these sad things” (5.3.318). Such “talk” promises to be difficult work, since the lovers’ failure to make better choices is hopelessly entangled with the culture’s failure to envision better possibilities, beyond self-sacrificing obedience (the option that Brooke backed) and self-sacrificing resistance (the option that Wagner glorified in his opera). But it is also teenage work, since the capacity to set aside the given conditions of the world to ask what else might be possible is a quintessential virtue of youth. This invitation to notice and judge its construction of events is what makes the play ideal for educational use. Left to take up the unfinished business of pardoning and punishment, the audience is asked to participate in an ethical reckoning no less weighty than what King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, or Hamlet represent. Since achieving this expanded view means raising in conversation the “sad things” that the play’s theatrical action cannot resolve, one might even say that the classroom is the designated location of Romeo and Juliet’s last act. The archetypal domain of inquiry and debate, it provides a space to draw conclusions by the clear light of day.

Dr. Ellen MacKay is Associate Professor of English and Chair of Theatre and Performance Studies (TAPS) at the University of Chicago, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare, Renaissance Drama, Performance Historiography, and Theatre Theory. She has served as Head Scholar at the Teaching Shakespeare Institute since 2014. She has published articles in Theatre Survey, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Yearbook, and Theatre History Studies, and in numerous edited volumes and disciplinary guides, including the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion.