Completely re-edited, the New Folger Library edition of Shakespeare's plays puts readers in touch with current ways of thinking about Shakespeare. Each freshly edited text is based directly on what the editors consider the best early printed version of the play. Each volume contains full explanatory notes on pages facing the text of the play, as well as a helpful introduction to Shakespeare's language. The accounts of William Shakespeare's life, his theater, and the publication of his plays present the latest scholarship, and the annotated reading lists suggest sources of further information. The illustrations of objects, clothing, and mythological figures mentioned in the plays are drawn from the Library's vast holdings of rare books. At the conclusion of each play there is a full essay by an outstanding scholar who assesses the play in light of today's interests and concerns.

There have always been lovers, and we’ve always loved hearing stories about them. Although it’s about 400 years old, Romeo and Juliet is one of the most popular stories ever told. It’s got all the right ingredients: teenagers sharing forbidden love, their witty friends and troublesome parents, fights, parties, murders, and nights of love.
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet tells us a lot about human nature. It also tells us about the society and times in which it was written; and about the passionate, spirited, witty young man who wrote it.
The story was popular in England before Shakespeare made it into a play in
1596. The central problem in Romeo and Juliet is a deadly feud between two powerful families. The English had been involved in a deadly feud for years. This one wasn’t between powerful families, but within England’s royal family.
Elizabeth I was Queen when Shakespeare wrote this play. Her father, Henry VIII, had left the Roman Catholic Church to found the Church of England, usually considered to be a Protestant denomination. When he died, his oldest daughter Mary, who was a Catholic, eventually became Queen. She persecuted and killed members of the Church of England with the same zeal that Henry had used against Catholics. When Mary died, her Protestant sister Elizabeth became Queen. This violent tug of war left its mark on the country. The English had seen how feuding in one family had divided a country and caused thousands of deaths.
Even though Elizabeth tried to be nonviolent and tolerant of Catholics, her Catholic cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, tried to start a civil war and take the throne. Elizabeth had Mary beheaded only nine years before Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet.
Even today in Ireland, Juliet and Romeo could be Catholic and Protestant rather than Capulet and Montague. For the English of Shakespeare’s day, the play was that immediate.
Both the Protestants and Catholics of that time had a very strong feeling that God ordered the universe in a specific way. When something evil, like the feud among the Capulets and Montagues, broke the laws of this order, that evil had to be checked. In Romeo and Juliet, two innocent lives must be sacrificed to restore order.
London, like Verona in the story, was a thriving, busy city. Because it was crowded and walled in, violence could spread quickly. Public fights were considered a serious offense. Londoners would have judged the Capulets’ and Montagues’ street fights very harshly.
Politics aside, London was a good place to live in the 1590s. Europe was in the middle of the Renaissance, which refers to the “rebirth” of learning. Some of this exciting spirit had reached London, England’s capital and cultural center.
Here, Elizabeth had her royal court; here, musicians, actors, poets, and painters came to learn and work. Many young artists left their small towns for the cultural Mecca of London, and William Shakespeare was one of them.
Who was this country boy who turned the moral fable of Romeo and Juliet into a hot-blooded story of passion, love, hate, comedy, revenge, and murder? No biographies of Shakespeare were written during his lifetime. But what we can’t learn about him from public records in his hometown of Stratford-on-Avon, we can fill in by reading his plays and poems.
There are many reasons the story of Romeo and Juliet could have appealed to the 32-year-old Shakespeare. He was apparently familiar with feelings of passion and forbidden love. When he was only 19, he quickly married Anne Hathaway, who was three months pregnant. Anne was eight years older than he, uneducated, and the daughter of a poor farmer who lived outside Stratford. She was probably not the match that John Shakespeare would have chosen for William, who was his oldest son.
In Romeo and Juliet, Lord Capulet is quite a social climber, and so was Shakespeare’s father. John Shakespeare was born to a family of tenant farmers, but he wanted to be rich. He married the daughter of his family’s wealthy landlord, and moved into the small city of Stratford to start a business. In the play, Lord Capulet is determined that Juliet will marry Paris, a wealthy young man from a higher social class.
William went to school in Stratford, where he studied literature and learned Latin. But he probably learned how to speak like someone from the upper class from his mother, Mary. The main characters in Romeo and Juliet (and many of his other plays) have the proper speech of the gentry. Mary Shakespeare came from a Catholic family of landowners. Although it was illegal to be Catholic, it seems she taught William to respect her religion. Shakespeare was the only playwright of his day to treat Catholic characters, like Friar Lawrence, with respect.
After William and Anne’s marriage, the young couple probably moved in with his parents and five younger brothers and sisters. Their daughter Susanna was born six months later, and two years later they had twins named Hamnet and Judith.
Soon after this, William left Stratford under mysterious circumstances. There is a legend that he was forced to flee Stratford (much as Romeo fled Verona) because he was caught poaching on a private estate.
Whatever the case, he left his family and went to live in London. He became a well-known actor and playwright. By the time he wrote Romeo and Juliet, he had already written six very successful plays—and he was only at the beginning of his career!
In those days, poets were more respected than playwrights, and so Shakespeare decided to take time out and make a name for himself as a poet. He was a success. His two long Romantic poems, The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis, became bestsellers. He then experimented with other popular poetic forms, such as sonnets. Soon after this, he wrote Romeo and Juliet. The storyline is similar to the stories of the Romantic poems he had just written. And he wrote sonnets and other kinds of poems right into the dialogue of the play!
We don’t know if William and Anne had a happy marriage, but we do know that Shakespeare loved his children. It’s interesting to note that he made Juliet 13 years old—the same age at the time as his daughter Susanna. Shakespeare could also understand the Capulets’ and Montagues’ grief over their childrens’ deaths.
Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, died the year he wrote the play.
Romeo and Juliet was a hit from the beginning. That very year, Shakespeare was rich enough to buy his money-conscious father a family coat of arms. His father, who once thought William was a rebellious young man, now called him “the best of the family.” Legend has it that he told his customers that William got from him the earthy humor that he put into Mercutio and the Nurse. Wherever Shakespeare’s talent came from, it makes Romeo and Juliet moving and unforgettable.