Romeo and Juliet - ACT I - Summary and Analysis
Welcome to a complete summary and analysis of ACT I in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet!
Although we often think of this as one of the greatest love stories, as you’ll see there is a lot more to this play than love. In fact, even though it’s full of slick lines about love, attraction, and beauty, the core themes of the play center far more on family, community, honor, and youth. Romeo and Juliet, if anything, is a play about the unadulterated ideals of youth and their collison with the realities of the darker, adult world.
The play begins with the famous “prologue” - a sonnet shared to us by a narrator, or Chorus, and reveals to us everything that’s about to happen in the story. So…spoiler alert. The prologue tells us that there are “two houses, both alike in dignity” in the Italian city of Verona. These two houses have hated each other for a long time, but along come two lovers from each respective household who kill themselves and cause their families to finally make peace. It’s interesting that the prologue positions Romeo and Juliet as “star-crossed” and “misadventured,” suggesting that their tragic story is more determined by fate and elements beyond their control, which is often a theme in Shakespearean tragedies: how much of their eventual outcome can characters ultimately control?
The real action of the play begins as many Shakespearean plays do - with minor characters introducing to the audience the major conflicts of the play. Gregory and Sampson - two servingmen in the house of Capulet - banter like young schoolboys about women and violence, and tell us “The quarrel is between our masters and us their men.” We never learn what the actual quarrel between the Capulets and Montagues is all about, but it also doesn’t really matter. The characters themselves probably don’t even know the origins or meaning of this “ancient grudge.” Eventually Gregory and Sampson pick a fight with two Montague servingmen, but we have to take note that the fight mainly escalates because both sets of young men realize that one of their kinsmen is approaching and they have to save face and can’t back down in front of the family.
In this fight we’re introduced to two more important characters: Tybalt and Benvolio. We get the impression here that Benvolio - as his name “good will” suggests - is attempting to break up the fight. And we get the impression that Tybalt is interested in engaging in the fight as Benvolio asks for peace and Tybalt tells him, “I hate the word as I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee.” There are some cool lines in this play.
At any rate, the fight in the streets escalates so much that both the Capulet and Montague households are aroused and you get the impression that this is becoming a full blown gang violence battle. Finally, as the violence reaches its peak, the Prince of the city appears and yells everybody down. In this opening scene he lays out what becomes a significant plot point, which is that any individual perpetuating the violence their “lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace” - so he’s really fed up with these guys.
But the scene’s not quite through yet. As the Montague’s trot away from the scene of the fight, Lord Montague begins asking as to the whereabouts of his son, Romeo, and Shakespeare uses the last half of this scene to introduce us to the main character. You see, even though Romeo’s family is glad he wasn’t at this street fight, they are concerned that he’s been acting, well, a bit odd lately. His father tells Benvolio - who is Romeo’s cousin - that Romeo has basically been spending his mornings wandering around alone, and then when the sun rises he goes to his room, closes the curtains, and sits in the dark, probably crying a lot. So, yeah, Romeo is a little emo before emo was cool. But like a good cousin, Benvolio promises that he’ll be able to get out of Romeo what’s bothering him.
For as nice as Benvolio is, he knows the score and pretty much guesses the cause of Romeo’s behavior right away. He asks Romeo if he’s in love, and Romeo admits it. Romeo goes on and spins a string of paradoxes about his experience with love: love is both a very elevating and transcendent feeling, but it can also be cruel, uncontrollable, and rather burdensome. Romeo’s poetic language, we should note here, is unlike anyone else’s in the play, and he speaks like this - in lofty, romanticized terms about his internal experiences - throughout most of the course of the story.
Benvolio is a good cousin and patiently listens to and sympathizes with Romeo. Romeo can be quite the romantic downer. But then Benvolio proposes a solution that of course a young man would propose: “By giving liberty unto thine eyes / Examine other beauties.” He basically tells Romeo that he’s going to take him to look at other girls so he can forget this crushing love he’s experiencing for the girl we’ll come to know as Rosaline...
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