Romeo and Juliet - context
Tragedy and setting
Romeo and Juliet suffer because of bad luck and bad judgement. Romeo’s decision to fight Tybalt and Juliet’s decision to take the sleeping potion has negative consequences.
In the play, fate caused a lot of the tragedy - Romeo and Juliet were fated to fall in love and fated to die to end the fighting between the Capulets and the Montagues.
Tybalt causes further tragedy as he kills Mercutio as revenge on Romeo and this causes Romeo to take revenge on him by killing him.
Tragic characters often bring about their own downfall. Romeo and Juliet deciding to get married could be considered an error in judgement as they don’t think about the consequences in terms of their families’ reactions. Other errors in judgement may be their decisions to kill themselves without properly thinking about it.
Tragedies are stories about the downfall of characters, and this means the characters start the play in happy situations and end up in bad ones (like Romeo and Juliet).
Romeo and Juliet was written in 1594 by William Shakespeare in England during the Elizabethan era.
The play was set mostly in Verona, Italy, with Romeo banished to Mantua later on. There are many settings in the play, from marketplaces to large family homes and tombs.
During the Elizabethan era, not many English people would have been able to visit Italy, meaning they would know very little about or have very little understanding about life in Italy, especially Verona. Italy was a great place to set Romeo and Juliet. Italy is an effective setting for stories of dramatic romance and violence because of the Romans. Italy was a catholic country during this time, and England was unable to decide which religion it wanted to be. So catholics and Protestants didn’t like each other and wanted to fight all the time.
The two families are rich and powerful but don’t stick by the law with regards to feuding.
I used Seneca for these notes but tried my hardest to put them into my own words!
