Romeo and Juliet and the experiences of youth and young love
It’s fascinating that Shakespeare chose to make the protagonists of this play so scandalously young, even by the standards of the 16th century. Unusually, he specifies that Juliet is not yet 14 years of age – it’s clear he wants us to take note of that point.
The story itself is an old one, though Shakespeare’s most recent source was a 1562 poem by Arthur Brooke, whose Juliet is 16. However, unlike Brooke – who paints the couple as naughty, libidinous teenagers – Shakespeare ultimately views the tragic teens as victims of their families’ fatal feud.
We tend to think of the teenager as an invention of the 20th century but, even in Shakespeare’s day, parenting manuals were produced to explain the changes adolescents go through and advise how to keep teenagers on the straight and narrow. Shakespeare himself is pretty astute about teenage boys: the play explores gang warfare, and its male romantic hero is also its most violent character.
In the 20th century, Romeo and Juliet became a launchpad for discussions about the teenage experience, and that emphasis on rebelliousness and gang identity grew ever more prominent as overt teen culture developed. The most famous adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, the musical West Side Story, was inspired by reports of teenage gang violence in New York. In general, though, Shakespeare himself appears to have been on the side of the young.
Romeo and Juliet has become a byword for the ultimate love story. Because of this, the extreme youth of its title characters is sometimes overlooked. If we focus on the fact that they’re so young, though, the story becomes less about pure romance and more a picture of teen infatuation – a kind of Elizabethan Twilight. In many ways, it’s quite toxic, invoking seductive but unsustainable ideas of ‘us against the world’ and ‘true love hurts’. If the protagonists were older, there would be ordinary life to grapple with: Romeo would have an estate to manage, and Juliet would be running a household. In fact, during their longest sequence together on stage, one of them is either dead or unconscious. In short, it’s a very atypical relationship that has become a curious kind of template for romance.