When and for Whom the Play Was Written
Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet in the mid-1590s, for the acting company of which he was a shareholder, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, in London. The exact date is not known: estimates range from 1591 to 1595. Theatre audiences were mixed, from apprentices and craftsmen to wealthy people, and women did not take the stage, so the role of Juliet was played by a boy.
London theatres closed when plague spread, as happened in 1592 and 1593, and fear of contagion enters the play: it is a house locked on suspicion of plague that keeps Friar John from delivering the letter to Romeo (scene 2 of Act V). It was also the age of the sonnet, and the play shows it: the Prologue has fourteen lines, like a sonnet, and the lovers' first dialogue, at the ball, also closes like one (scene 5 of Act I).
Where the Story Came From
The story of two young people from rival families who die for love was already old in Italy. Masuccio Salernitano told in 1476 the tale of Mariotto and Ganozza, set in Siena. Luigi da Porto placed it in Verona, with the Montecchi and Capuleti families, in a novella written in 1524 and published in 1531, and Matteo Bandello took it up again in 1554. The Frenchman Pierre Boaistuau translated Bandello in 1559, and from this line came the narrative poem by the Englishman Arthur Brooke, of 1562, which Shakespeare followed closely, and the prose version by William Painter, of 1567. The two houses were already cited before any novella: Dante names the Montecchi and the Cappelletti in the Purgatory, among the families whom factional struggles ruined.
Shakespeare kept the plot and changed the pace. Brooke's poem covers about nine months, and the play covers a few days, which makes haste one of its subjects: Friar Laurence warns Romeo that those who run fast stumble (scene 3 of Act II). He also gave substance to minor characters, especially Mercutio, Paris, and the Nurse, who in the street has to put up with Mercutio's mockery (scene 4 of Act II).
The Verona of the stage and the world of the audience
The city is Italian, but the audience was English, and several scenes speak to what it knew. The name Prince Escalus recalls the Della Scala, the family that ruled Verona from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century. Street violence, with swords drawn at a word, matches the fashion of the Italian duel, rapier fencing, then in vogue in London: Mercutio mocks Tybalt for fighting as if following a manual, with strokes bearing Italian names (scene 4 of Act II). The banishment that the Prince imposes on Romeo was a common punishment in the medieval Italian cities: Dante was condemned to exile by Florence in 1302 (scene 1 of Act III).
The play's religion was also remote from the audience. Friar Laurence is a Franciscan who hears confessions and marries the lovers in secret (scene 3 of Act II), but England had broken with Rome, and Henry VIII had closed the monasteries in the 1530s and 1540s. And Juliet's marriage, at almost fourteen, contrasts with English custom, in which young women married on average around the age of twenty-five (scene 3 of Act I).
Publication and Reception
The play was first printed in 1597, in a short text of uneven quality, and again in 1599, in a larger edition, advertised as corrected and enlarged. In the eighteenth century, adaptations for the English stage, the most famous being David Garrick's of 1748, had Juliet wake before Romeo died, so that the two could still speak to each other. In the original text, she wakes only after he drinks the poison (scene 3 of Act V), and the only consolation is the peace between the houses.