Context & Introduction

Understanding the context of Romeo and Juliet is essential for a confident, well-rooted response in the Edexcel exam. This lesson covers Shakespeare's life, Elizabethan society, and the cultural background that shaped the play — and shows how to use that knowledge to enrich your personal response.

---

The Edexcel Shakespeare Question — How It Is Assessed

You will meet Romeo and Juliet on Edexcel GCSE English Literature Paper 1 (1ET0/01), Section A. A few essentials to fix in your mind from the start:

Feature	Detail
Paper	1ET0/01 — Shakespeare and Post-1914 Literature
Length	1 hour 45 minutes total (Section A: roughly 55 minutes)
Section A marks	40 marks for Shakespeare (20 marks for AO1, 20 marks for AO2, plus 4 marks AO4 for SPaG — SPaG is assessed only on the Shakespeare question)
Format	Closed book — no copy of the play in the exam
Question	An extract is printed in the paper. You answer one question, choosing from two options. Each requires you to write about the printed extract and the play as a whole
Assessment Objectives	AO1 (informed personal response with textual references) and AO2 (analysis of language, form and structure). AO3 (context) is NOT assessed on the Edexcel Shakespeare question — context is useful only insofar as it deepens your personal response

Examiner's tip: Because Edexcel does not award separate marks for AO3 on Shakespeare, do not write a "context paragraph". Instead, weave Elizabethan attitudes (to marriage, honour, fate, patriarchy) into the analysis where they sharpen your personal interpretation. Context earns no marks on its own — but it makes AO1 (your personal response) richer and more convincing.

---

Shakespeare: The Basics

Fact	Detail
Born	1564, Stratford-upon-Avon
Died	1616
Theatre	The Globe Theatre, London
Company	The Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men)
Romeo and Juliet written	c. 1594–1596
Genre	Tragedy

Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet during the Elizabethan era, early in his career. It is one of his best-known tragedies and has been performed continuously for over four centuries.

---

The Elizabethan Era

The Elizabethan era (1558–1603) was the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Knowing the period helps you understand what the original audience would have felt — and that, in turn, sharpens your personal response.

Key features of Elizabethan society

• Patriarchal — fathers held absolute authority over their households, including the right to choose their children's marriage partners.
• Honour-based — family reputation and honour were paramount. Insults demanded violent responses.
• Strictly hierarchical — social class was rigid. The nobility, merchants, and common people occupied fixed positions.
• Deeply religious — the Protestant Church of England dominated. Marriage was a sacrament, and defying parental authority was considered sinful.

---

Elizabethan Marriage

Marriage in Elizabethan England was primarily a financial and social arrangement, not a matter of personal choice:

Aspect	Detail
Age of marriage	Girls could legally marry at 12, boys at 14
Parental consent	Required — fathers chose husbands for their daughters
Purpose	Alliance between families, transfer of wealth (dowry)
Romantic love	Not expected; a bonus if it occurred, not a requirement

Examiner's tip: Juliet's defiance of her father's choice of Paris is not just teenage rebellion — it challenges the entire patriarchal system. An Elizabethan audience would have found this simultaneously thrilling and deeply transgressive. Use this to support a personal response such as: Shakespeare invites the audience to admire Juliet even as she breaks the rules her society depends on.

---

The Italian Setting

Shakespeare set the play in Verona, Italy. Elizabethan audiences associated Italy with:

• Passion and romance — Italy was seen as more emotionally expressive than England.
• Violence and vendetta — Italian feuds were legendary.
• Catholicism — Friar Laurence reflects the Catholic setting (England was Protestant).

---

Sources

Shakespeare's main source was Arthur Brooke's poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), which was itself based on Italian sources. Shakespeare made significant changes:

Brooke's version	Shakespeare's changes
Story spans 9 months	Compressed to just 4–5 days
Juliet is 16	Juliet is 13 ("not yet fourteen")
Nurse is a minor character	Nurse becomes a major comic and dramatic role
Mercutio barely appears	Mercutio becomes a vivid, scene-stealing character
Moralising tone throughout	Sympathetic treatment — audience pities the lovers

---

Genre: Tragedy

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy — a play that ends with the downfall and destruction of the central characters. But it is also unusual:

Features of Classical Tragedy

Feature	How Romeo and Juliet Uses It
Noble protagonists	Both come from wealthy, powerful families
Fatal flaw (hamartia)	Impulsiveness, haste — everything happens too fast
Reversal of fortune	From secret joy to public catastrophe
Catastrophe	Both protagonists perish
Catharsis	The audience feels pity and fear; the feud ends

Unusual Features

• The play begins like a comedy (witty dialogue, lovers meeting, plans for marriage) before turning dark after Act 3, Scene 1.
• Fate plays a larger role than hamartia — the Prologue tells us the outcome before the play begins.
• The tragedy is caused as much by society (the feud, patriarchal control) as by individual flaws.

---

The Prologue

"Two households, both alike in dignity, / In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, / From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, / Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean."

The Prologue is a sonnet — 14 lines of iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme. It tells the audience the entire story before it happens.

Function	Effect
Dramatic irony	The audience knows the outcome; the characters do not
Fate	The lovers are "star-crossed" — doomed from the start
Sonnet form	Associates the play with love poetry
"Star-crossed"	Suggests destiny controls their lives

Examiner's tip: The Prologue establishes the play's central tension: we watch hoping the lovers will succeed, knowing they will not. This creates a sense of tragic inevitability throughout — a useful idea for a sustained, conceptualised personal response (top-band AO1).

---

Key Contextual Terms

Term	Meaning
Patriarchal	A society ruled by men/fathers
Vendetta	A prolonged blood feud between families
Honour culture	A society where reputation must be defended, often violently
Star-crossed	Destined by the stars to fail; fated
Catharsis	Emotional release experienced by the audience through tragedy
Hamartia	The tragic hero's fatal flaw

---

Courtly Love and the Petrarchan Tradition

When Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, English love poetry was dominated by the Petrarchan tradition, named after the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch. Petrarchan poets used a highly conventional set of moves to describe love:

Petrarchan convention	Example in the play
Love as painful suffering	Romeo's "O brawling love, O loving hate" (1.1)
The beloved as unattainable	Rosaline has sworn chastity
Oxymoron as the dominant figure	"Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health" (1.1)
Love as religious devotion	"Call me but love, and I'll be new baptised" (2.2)
The lover as pilgrim, the beloved as shrine	The shared sonnet at the feast (1.5)

Shakespeare uses the tradition, but he also criticises it. Romeo's feelings for Rosaline are a parade of Petrarchan clichés — performative rather than felt. When Romeo meets Juliet, his language shifts from borrowed convention to original, cosmic imagery ("It is the east, and Juliet is the sun"). Juliet then gently teases the pilgrimage conceit — "You kiss by th' book" (1.5) — and we realise Shakespeare is at once inside and outside the tradition. For an Edexcel personal response, you can argue that Shakespeare measures the lovers' growth by how far they move beyond convention.

---

Marriage, Patriarchal Authority and the "Problem" of Juliet

Juliet is "not yet fourteen" (1.3). Shakespeare has deliberately made her younger than Brooke's sixteen-year-old heroine. This intensifies the moral pressure:

• Under English common law at the time, girls could legally marry from twelve, boys from fourteen, but this was the minimum, not the norm. Most Elizabethan women married in their early twenties.
• Juliet's youth makes her father's insistence on an immediate marriage to Paris seem cruel rather than reasonable.
• Her youth also makes her moral clarity more striking: she decides, at thirteen, to defy the entire patriarchal system that owns her.

The legal frame is important. A daughter was, in law, her father's property until she became her husband's. Juliet's secret marriage to Romeo is not only emotionally transgressive; it is legally transgressive. By marrying without her father's consent she removes herself from Capulet's authority and places herself under Romeo's — a move that would have been literally dangerous in 1595. Shakespeare's sympathetic treatment of Juliet's defiance is therefore a quietly radical dramatic choice.

---

Honour Culture as a Social Institution

Modern audiences often read the feud as simple hatred between two families. A richer reading — one Edexcel examiners reward — is to see it as an honour culture: a system in which reputation must be defended through violence, whether or not the individuals involved feel personal enmity.

Key features:

• Insults demand violent responses. When Sampson bites his thumb (1.1), Gregory treats it as a challenge. When Mercutio perceives Romeo's refusal to fight Tybalt as "vile submission" (3.1), the honour code obliges him to act.
• Honour is communal, not individual. Tybalt hates Romeo not for anything Romeo has done but because Romeo is a Montague.
• The feud is self-sustaining. Every response creates a new insult requiring response. The Prince's threats cannot break the cycle because the cycle is cultural, not rational.

Shakespeare critiques the system by showing that it destroys outsiders (Mercutio, who is kinsman to the Prince), women (Juliet, treated as currency), and the young (Romeo, radicalised into violence by the demands of vengeance). An alternative, historicist reading sees the tragedy as caused less by the stars than by the feud's social logic.

---

Shakespeare's Source: Arthur Brooke's Tragicall Historye

Arthur Brooke's poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562) is Shakespeare's direct source. Brooke's preface explicitly moralises against the lovers, calling them an example of "unhonest desire" that ends justly in destruction. Shakespeare makes three crucial changes:

Brooke	Shakespeare	Effect
Nine-month timeline	Four-to-five days	Creates urgency, emphasises haste
Juliet is sixteen	Juliet is thirteen	Intensifies sympathy; sharpens critique of patriarchy
Moralising tone	Sympathetic, tragic tone	Invites pity, not judgement
Nurse is minor	Nurse is a major comic presence	Gives Juliet an adult world to react against
Mercutio is barely present	Mercutio is a scene-stealing foil to Romeo	Makes Act 3 Scene 1 a structural and thematic pivot

Shakespeare's changes redirect the audience's sympathy. Where Brooke's readers were meant to condemn the lovers, Shakespeare's audience is invited to grieve for them. This is not a neutral adaptation — it is a reclaiming of the story as tragedy rather than moral exemplum.

---

The Court and the Commercial Theatre

Romeo and Juliet was written for the public Globe-era theatre (actually first performed at the Theatre in Shoreditch before the Globe was built in 1599). That context shapes the play:

• Performances took place in daylight, outdoors. So when Shakespeare wants night, he fills the verse with words like "night," "dark," "moon," "stars" — the language does the lighting.
• The audience was socially mixed: groundlings paying a penny, gallants in the gentlemen's rooms. The play's mix of bawdy servant humour and high lyric poetry reflects that audience.
• Tradition (though evidence is limited) holds that the play was popular enough to be performed before Queen Elizabeth's court. Whether or not that is true, the play's success was substantial — it was printed in quarto in 1597 and again in 1599, a sign of commercial appeal.

These conditions matter because they help you explain why Shakespeare constructs scenes the way he does — why the verse works so hard to create atmosphere, why prose and verse alternate, why the action compresses.

---

The Role of the Audience and the Theatre

The first audience of Romeo and Juliet would have watched it standing in an open yard in front of an outdoor wooden stage, in daylight, with no set and only a handful of props. Understanding those conditions sharpens your reading of the play's choices:

• Daylight performance, night-time scenes. Because the plays were performed in the afternoon, Shakespeare had to build night into the language, not the lighting. Almost every major scene of emotional intimacy (balcony, wedding night, potion) is saturated with references to night, stars, moon, candles, dark. When Romeo says "It is the east, and Juliet is the sun," the word east is doing the work of stage-lighting.
• A mixed audience. Groundlings (paying a penny) stood in the yard; gentlemen sat in the galleries; the wealthy had access to the "gentlemen's rooms" above the stage. Shakespeare needed to hold a wildly mixed audience at once, and the play's register reflects that — bawdy servant jokes for the groundlings, love-sonnets for the gallants, moral sententiae for the middling sort.
• Boy actors playing women. Juliet would have been performed by a teenage boy. This is worth noticing because the intensity of the part, the extended soliloquies, the moral weight placed on a "girl" of thirteen — all of this shaped how the role was written. Shakespeare was designing a part that a skilled boy actor could carry alone on stage for extended moments.

These conditions were not limitations to work around; they shaped the art. When you analyse the play's imagery patterns, its use of verse and prose, its alternation between public street and private chamber — all of this is Shakespeare responding to the conditions of his theatre.

---

How to Use Context on an Edexcel Answer

Because AO3 is not separately assessed on the Edexcel Shakespeare question, a "context paragraph" will not earn you marks. Context is useful only where it sharpens your personal response. Compare the two approaches:

Weak use of context (no marks)	Strong use of context (enriches AO1)
"Shakespeare wrote this play in Elizabethan times. The Elizabethan era was patriarchal. Girls had to obey their fathers."	"Juliet's defiant 'I will not marry yet' (3.5) is dangerous in a society where a father could legally disown a disobedient daughter — which is exactly what Capulet threatens. Shakespeare makes her defiance the moral centre of the scene."
Detachable block of historical facts	Integrated into the analysis of a specific moment

The second version does three things at once: analyses language (AO2: modal verb "will"), offers a personal response (AO1: defiance as moral centre), and uses context to deepen the reading. This is the shape to aim for.

---

Summary

• Romeo and Juliet was written c. 1594–1596 during the Elizabethan era.
• Elizabethan society was patriarchal, honour-based, and hierarchical.
• Marriage was a family arrangement — Juliet's defiance challenges this system.
• The Petrarchan tradition shapes Romeo's early language; Shakespeare uses and critiques it.
• Honour culture is a social institution, not personal hatred — it sustains the feud.
• The play draws on Italian settings and Arthur Brooke's earlier poem, which Shakespeare reshapes sympathetically.
• It is a tragedy that begins like a comedy, with fate and society as driving forces.
• The Prologue establishes dramatic irony and the theme of destiny.
• On Edexcel, context is not separately rewarded — use it to enrich your AO1 personal response.

---

This content is aligned with the Edexcel GCSE English Literature (1ET0) Paper 1 specification.