The tale of Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells the story of two Babylonian lovers forbidden from marrying one another by their feuding parents. Shakespeare drew on many sources-both ancient and contemporaneous with his own era-in the writing of Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare drew on many poems, novels, and myths in the construction of Romeo and Juliet-but the play also may very well have been a timely critique of Renaissance-era social inequality and the trivial concerns of the upwardly mobile elite. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy-but the play knowingly wags its finger at the warring Capulets and Montagues, wealthy families who can’t look past their own insularity and haughty self-importance to be good to one another, or to allow their children the chance at real love. In the cities, politically powerful wealthy elites became patrons of the arts and a luxury class emerged quickly-but social inequality throughout the majority of the country was profound, and most of Italy belonged to the peasant class. Rome was mostly ruins-but Padua and Verona came under Venetian control, and cities like Florence and Milan (sometimes called the “cradle of capitalism”) flourished under early financial innovations spearheaded by the Medici clan of bankers and politicians. In the early years of the Renaissance, Italy was divided up into several smaller city-states which often warred with one another.

His surviving works include nearly 40 plays and over 150 sonnets, and his body of work is widely performed, analyzed, studied, and reinterpreted to this day. Shakespeare died in 1616 of a rumored “fever” just a month after creating a will in which he declared himself to be in good health. In 1609, he published a book of sonnets, and released other long poems in the mid-1590s while London’s theaters were closed due to the plague. His theatrical career likely began in the mid-1580s, and between then and 1613, he composed such works as Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, the Henriad, Julius Caesar, Othello, and many more. There is a gap in the historical record between the birth of Shakespeare’s twins and his first recorded appearance on the London theater scene in 1592. She later bore two more children-one of whom, Hamnet, died at the age of 11.

At 18, Shakespeare wed a woman eight years his senior, Anne Hathaway just six months after their marriage, Hathaway gave birth to a daughter. His father was a glove-maker and assemblyman in Stratford-upon-Avon, and his mother was the daughter of a well-to-do landowner.

Romeo and juliet full play script