Romeo and Juliet is a play about a tragedy brought about by the meeting of two rivers – the cyclical hate and killing of the blood feud, or vendetta, and the loss of judgment than can afflict teenagers when they first feel hot passion.  One is a force for life; the other a force for death.  Both involve heat.  And in that part of the world that brought us Boccaccio and Petrarch, and the Guelphs and Ghibellines, and the Mafia, neither was in short supply.

The great American judge and jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes said that ‘the Roman law started from the blood feud, and all the authorities agree that the German law began in that way.’  The phrase ‘German law’ there means our law, since English law grew not from Roman law, but from the laws of the Angles and Saxons.  The compact OED has for vendetta ‘1 a prolonged bitter quarrel with or complaint against someone 2 a prolonged feud between families in which people are murdered in revenge for previous murders.’  That fits the Capulets and Montagues.  The problem about breaking the cycle had been looked at two thousand years before in the Oresteia.

Sex is, well, sex.  We would cease to exist without it, but all hell can break loose in that period described as puberty – which is where the thirteen-year-old Juliet, still minded by her nurse, finds herself.

When those two currents meet, you may get mayhem – of precisely the kind described in this play.  We learn immediately of ‘ancient grudge’ and ‘new mutiny,’ where ‘civil blood makes civil hands unclean,’ so that ‘a pair of star-crossed lovers take their life’ – and these ‘misadventured piteous overthrows….with their death bury their parents’ strife’. 

How else could that strife end? 

There are three key words in the lexicon of those in a blood feud – respect, insult, and honour.  You may recall the scene in Godfather III when one Mafia don quits a meeting hissing that the Godfather has not shown him enough respect – and then all hell break loose, and the building is raked with machine gun fire.

At the start of the play, Romeo thinks he’s in love with Rosaline.  That she is a Capulet does not appear to trouble him.  He’s more worried about what usually troubles boys – her commitment to ‘chastity’ (1 1 213 and 221).  His mate Benvolio suggests they gatecrash a Capulet party so that Romeo can compare Rosaline with other young women (and as we know, with one look at Juliet, Rosaline goes clean out the window).  The Montagues know this will be seen as a mortal insult by the Capulets.  They will go masked – like the trio in Don Giovanni – but Romeo knows this is not a good idea – his mind misgives (1.4.47 and 106).  Such is the rashness, and price, of the young male ego.  Another mate, Mercutio, who has about him a kind of death wish, launches into a speech about nothing, and the troop marches on – and in.

Inevitably, they are sprung, and by the Capulet point man, a very nasty piece of work called Tybalt, who immediately calls for his rapier to answer this ‘scorn at our solemnity’ (1.5.59 and 65).  Capulet talks him out of it at the party, but Tybalt is not satisfied.  He serves a written challenge on Montague. 

So, when the day is hot, and the Capulets are abroad, and the ‘mad blood’ is stirring, Benvolio knows a brawl is inevitable and suggests to Mercutio that they retire (3.1.1-4).  But Mercutio is as hot for a fight as Tybalt, and you know the rest.

This happens while Romeo meets, falls for, and marries Juliet in some of the most gorgeous and best-known language in our letters. 

In the result, we may overlook that within a couple of days, Romeo has killed two people, the first a Capulet, the other a relative of the prince who was scheduled to marry Juliet, and who appears to have been beyond a reproach for a young noble of that time.

Romeo kills twice in hot blood, but that was not a legal excuse then – it flouted the edict of the prince – and it was only a moral excuse if you subscribed to the law of the vendetta.  Romeo did not do so – he had seen it all before and he had had enough (1.1 174-186).  His first killing, Tybalt, is the vendetta tit for tat, pure and simple.

He kills Paris when mad with grief and bent on suicide – but only suicide in stage-mannered way.  Paris had every right to arrest Romeo as a felon – if not a ghoul – but the crazed Romeo can only respond ‘Wilt thou provoke me?  Then, have at me, boy!’  The insults flow in even in death found in heat.  (‘Boy’ was the final insult in Coriolanus.)  Then Romeo sees who he has killed and recalls that his servant had told him that ‘Paris should have married Juliet’ and he says that he will bury Paris ‘in a triumphant grave’(5.3.78 and 83) – whatever that means.  He even comes to terms with Tybalt.

Tybalt, liest thou there in thy bloody sheet?
O, what more favour can I do to thee,
Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twain
To sunder his that was thine enemy?
Forgive me, cousin!   (5.3.97-101).

It is almost Wagnerian, but it does not strike us like that.  We are wrung out – and in less than half of five hours.  We find it easier to come to grips with the youth of Juliet than that of Romeo – in practice, it is the other way around.  Girls mature faster than boys.  The difference here is I suppose, that when it became for the killing, it was the boys who went for their rapiers.  The vendetta was male thing.

Such is the power of the playwright, that it does not occur to us that had our hero not killed himself, he may have faced two counts of murder – even putting to one side the edict of his ‘moved prince’ and the ineluctable force of the vendetta.  All we know is:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head:
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe.
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.