You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Understanding the context of Romeo and Juliet is essential for achieving top marks at GCSE. This lesson covers Shakespeare's life, Elizabethan society, and the cultural background that shaped the play.
| 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 (1558–1603) was the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Understanding this period is crucial for contextual marks (AO3).
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.
Shakespeare set the play in Verona, Italy. Elizabethan audiences associated Italy with:
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 |
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy — a play that ends with the downfall and destruction of the central characters. But it is also unusual:
| 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 |
"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.
| 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 |
Context carries AO3 marks on AQA Paper 1, but the way students use it determines the band. Weak candidates parade contextual facts in isolated paragraphs ("Elizabethan England was patriarchal"). Middle candidates drop facts into the middle of language analysis ("In Elizabethan times, fathers had legal authority, which is why Capulet…"). Top candidates treat context as an interpretive pressure on the text: they argue that a particular Shakespearean choice responds to or resists a specific contextual pressure. The shift is from context as decoration, to context as argument. This lesson establishes the contextual raw material you will later mobilise, but the real skill is learning to make it do interpretive work — a skill developed through the rest of the course.
A useful test: if you remove the contextual sentence from a paragraph and the analysis still stands unchanged, your context is decorative. If removing the contextual sentence weakens the analysis, the context is doing interpretive work. Aim for the latter.
The plays Shakespeare wrote in the mid-1590s were designed for a very specific theatrical apparatus. The Lord Chamberlain's Men performed in outdoor amphitheatres like The Theatre in Shoreditch and, from 1599, the Globe on Bankside. These venues held perhaps 3,000 spectators, with groundlings standing in the yard around a thrust stage and wealthier patrons seated in roofed galleries. There were no stage lights, no curtains covering the main playing area, no elaborate sets — scene changes were signalled by the text itself ("Verona: a street", "the orchard wall"). This performance context shapes the play's language in concrete ways: Romeo announces "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?" because the audience needs to be told, in broad daylight, that it is now imaginatively night and a window has appeared. The shared sonnet at 1.5 works partly because the actor-apprentice playing Juliet can hold audience attention through formal virtuosity alone.
Performances usually took place in the early afternoon, without intervals, and lasted around two hours — the "two hours' traffic of our stage" the Prologue explicitly names. The compressed timeline of the play's action (four days) mirrors the compressed duration of performance: Shakespeare is exploiting the co-operation of narrative time and theatrical time to intensify the audience's sense of haste. Boys played the female roles, which complicates any reading of the play's gender dynamics: an Elizabethan audience watching Juliet's defiance would have been watching a young male apprentice enact female agency within an otherwise all-male cast, adding a layer of theatrical artifice to the play's examination of gender norms.
To write convincingly about Romeo and Juliet for AQA Paper 1, students must do more than list contextual facts — they must show how the play grows out of a specific historical moment. The late sixteenth century was an age of extreme contradictions: a relatively stable Protestant monarchy under Elizabeth I coexisted with deep anxieties about Catholic rebellion, succession crises, and urban violence. London itself was a city of plague closures, public executions, and overcrowded playhouses where a play performed at the Globe might draw apprentices, merchants, aristocrats and courtiers into the same auditorium. Shakespeare's audience was therefore mixed, literate in the oral culture of sermons and ballads, and keenly attuned to coded political meaning.
The play's Italian setting is not incidental. For Shakespeare's contemporaries, Italy was associated with Machiavellian politics, Catholic excess, private vendetta and sensuous poetry — everything England officially defined itself against. By placing the feud in Verona, Shakespeare can explore passion, suicide and Catholic ritual at one remove, giving the play a frisson of the foreign while still holding a mirror to London's own street violence. The opening brawl would have reminded Elizabethan audiences of the real sword-fights that broke out regularly between rival apprentice gangs in the capital.
Romeo's early speeches borrow heavily from the Petrarchan sonnet tradition, named after the fourteenth-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarch, whose sonnets to the unattainable Laura defined European love poetry for two hundred years. Petrarchan love is characterised by:
When Romeo speaks of Rosaline with borrowed oxymorons, Shakespeare signals that this love is conventional, not genuine. When he meets Juliet, the Petrarchan conceits transform into the shared sonnet at 1.5 — love becomes collaborative rather than solitary performance.
Friar Laurence is a Catholic priest — a deeply charged figure in 1590s England. Catholic clergy had been persecuted under Elizabeth, and secret Catholic plots were a recurring national anxiety. The Friar's plan — involving confession, a secret marriage, a sleeping potion with herbalist overtones — sits uneasily with Protestant suspicion of Catholic ritual and interference. Shakespeare treats him ambiguously: he is sincere and peace-seeking, yet his meddling (Protestant critics would say) produces catastrophe.
Imagine the AQA question asks: "How does Shakespeare present attitudes towards marriage in Romeo and Juliet?" A strong contextual response might argue: Shakespeare dramatises the collision between two incompatible models of marriage that co-existed in Elizabethan culture. In Act 1 Scene 2, Capulet's outwardly modern position — "My will to her consent is but a part" — gestures towards the Reformation view, increasingly advocated by Protestant preachers, that marriage required the willing consent of both parties. Yet this apparent liberalism evaporates by Act 3 Scene 5, where Capulet's asyndetic list — "hang, beg, starve, die in the streets" — reveals the older feudal assumption that a daughter is a piece of property to be transacted between households. The poet Shakespeare exposes the hypocrisy of early modern patriarchy: "consent" is permitted only when it coincides with the father's will. Juliet's secret marriage inverts the legal norm that required parental permission for women under 21, making her a radical figure to an audience shaped by the Book of Common Prayer's wedding service. An AQA examiner operating the Level 6 descriptors rewards this kind of move — context treated not as a biographical fact bolted onto analysis, but as an interpretative lens that sharpens what the language is doing.
Top-band responses do not parade dates or name-drop Elizabeth I. Instead they embed context inside close analysis, so that a single sentence can carry both a language observation and a contextual insight simultaneously. Examiners reward students who show that context is contested — that the Elizabethan view of marriage, fate or honour was not monolithic but debated across sermons, plays and treatises. Avoid beginning paragraphs with "In Elizabethan times" as a bolt-on; instead try "Shakespeare writes into a culture where…" or "A contemporary audience, shaped by the Book of Common Prayer's marriage service, would feel the shock of…". Pitfalls to avoid: reducing context to "women had no rights", confusing Elizabethan with Victorian, or asserting that all audiences responded identically. Judicious context is precise, specific and integrated.
Some critics — following the historicist work of scholars like Stephen Greenblatt — argue that the feud in Romeo and Juliet should be read not as an individual failing of two stubborn patriarchs but as a structural feature of early modern aristocratic society. In this reading, Tybalt and Capulet are less villains than agents of an honour system that precedes them and outlives individuals. Another reading, drawn from feminist criticism, foregrounds Juliet's agency: she proposes marriage, takes the potion alone, and dies by an active choice rather than a passive collapse, quietly subverting the Petrarchan convention in which the woman is the silent object of male desire. A third, more theological reading treats the play's ending as a kind of sacrificial resolution in which the lovers' deaths purge the city of ancient sin — a structure inherited from medieval morality drama. Holding several of these readings in dialogue is what AQA's top band means by "exploratory".
This content is aligned with the AQA GCSE English Literature (8702) specification.