Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy by the English playwright William Shakespeare, written between about 1591 and 1595 and first published in a quarto edition in 1597. Set in Verona, Italy, the play follows Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet, the teenage children of two feuding families, who fall in love after meeting at a masked ball and are secretly married by Friar Laurence in the hope that their union might reconcile the households. A street brawl in which Romeo kills Juliet's cousin Tybalt, in revenge for Tybalt's killing of Romeo's friend Mercutio, gets Romeo banished from Verona, and when Juliet is then forced toward a marriage to Count Paris, Friar Laurence's plan to fake her death with a sleeping potion goes disastrously wrong: a message meant to warn Romeo fails to reach him, and finding Juliet apparently dead in the Capulet tomb, Romeo kills himself with poison, after which Juliet wakes and, finding him dead, kills herself with his dagger. The lovers' deaths finally shame the feuding Montague and Capulet families into reconciliation. One of Shakespeare's most performed plays alongside Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet has become the archetypal story of young, ill-fated love in Western culture and has been adapted for stage, ballet, opera and film more often than almost any other work in the language.