The tragedy of Romeo and juliet - the greatest love story ever.

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A full edition of the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet (1597), with helpful commentary.

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare early in his career about two young star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately reconcile their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and along with Hamlet, is one of his most frequently performed plays. Today, the title characters are regarded as archetypal young lovers. Romeo and Juliet belongs to a tradition of tragic romances stretching back to antiquity. The plot is based on an Italian tale translated into verse as The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke in 1562 and retold in prose in Palace of Pleasure by William Painter in 1567. Shakespeare borrowed heavily from both but expanded the plot by developing a number of supporting characters, particularly Mercutio and Paris. Believed to have been written between 1591 and 1595, the play was first published in a quarto version in 1597. The text of the first quarto version was of poor quality, however, and later editions corrected the text to conform more closely with Shakespeare's original. Shakespeare's use of his poetic dramatic structure (especially effects such as switching between comedy and tragedy to heighten tension, his expansion of minor characters, and his use of sub-plots to embellish the story) has been praised as an early sign of his dramatic skill. The play ascribes different poetic forms to different characters, sometimes changing the form as the character develops. Romeo, for example, grows more adept at the sonnet over the course of the play.

Oxford School Shakespeare is an acclaimed edition especially designed for students, with accessible on-page notes and explanatory illustrations, clear background information, and rigorous but accessible scholarly credentials. This edition of Romeo and Juliet includes illustrations, preliminary notes, reading lists (including websites) and classroom notes. Romeo and Juliet is a set text for KS3 in England, and remains one of the most popular texts for study by secondary students the world over.

In this magnum opus, Britain's most distinguished scholar of 16th-century and 17th-century literature restores Shakespeare's poetic language to its rightful primacy.

Offers a literary analysis of the classic play and includes discussions of its performance history, historical context, and modern interpretations. Hager (English, the State University of New York-Cortland) draws from both historical and contemporary materials to examine the classic play from many perspectives. He explores subjects as specific as copycat suicide based on fictional models, and as general as the nature of vendetta and group violence. Following a literary analysis, there are commentary and primary documents on its narrative backgrounds, and discussions of its performance history, historical context, and modern interpretations such as the recent film with Leonardo DiCaprio. The tragic love story of Romeo and Juliet has touched the hearts of young and old for nearly four hundred years. In this work, Alan Hager has compiled a rich collection of primary and contemporary materials ranging from information about the earliest performances of Romeo and Juliet to discussions of suicide in the 1990s. Designed to help students of the play, Understanding Romeo and Juliet highlights many different aspects of the play's context. Such aspects include a discussion about religions of love in the East and West, an examination of vendetta and collective violence, and an analysis of the play in the context of classical and medieval thought. Hager relates the work to issues as recent as the so-called Werther Syndrome (copycat suicide based on fictional models) and as remote as the notion of reincarnated love such as that of Rama and Sita in the Sanskrit epic Ramayana.