The characters of Romeo and Juliet surround two young lovers with people who love them, advise them, and fight around them, and one by one, nearly every adult they trust lets them down.
This guide covers every major character in the play, grouped by the circles they move in: the lovers, Juliet’s household, Romeo’s family and friends, the peacemakers, and the minor characters. For the plot, themes, and famous lines, see our full guide to Romeo and Juliet.
At a Glance
Here are the main characters of Romeo and Juliet for quick reference.
The Lovers
Two young people from enemy houses, who meet, marry, and die within days.
Romeo
The only son of Lord Montague. When we first meet him, he is moping over Rosaline, a woman who has sworn never to love, and speaking in the fashionable paradoxes of a lovesick poet: “O brawling love, O loving hate.” He feels so lost that he says, “This is not Romeo. He’s some other where.” His friends think it is all a pose, and perhaps it partly is.
Then he sees Juliet, and Rosaline is forgotten in a moment: “Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight, / For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.” From here on, Romeo feels everything at full strength and acts on it at once. He climbs into the Capulets’ orchard, asks for the wedding the next morning, “I stand on sudden haste,” and when his friend Mercutio is killed, he kills Tybalt in a fury and cries, “O, I am Fortune’s fool!” His last act is just as swift: believing Juliet dead, he buys poison, rides to her tomb, and dies kissing her.
Juliet
The only daughter of the Capulets, not yet fourteen. At first she is an obedient child. When her mother raises marriage, she answers, “It is an honor that I dream not of,” and agrees to consider Paris only as far as her parents wish: “I’ll look to like, if looking liking move.” Then she meets Romeo, and learns in the same moment that he is a Montague: “My only love sprung from my only hate!”
From that point, Juliet is often the clearer-sighted of the two lovers. On the balcony it is she who worries that their vows are “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,” and she who proposes marriage. When Romeo kills Tybalt, she feels the full conflict, “Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical!,” and then chooses her husband: “Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?” She defies her father, loses her nurse, drinks a potion alone in her room, and at the end, waking beside Romeo’s body, she takes his dagger. Of all the characters, she changes the most, from a dutiful girl to a young woman who makes her own choices, to the very end.
Juliet’s Household
The family and servants of the house of Capulet.
Lord Capulet
Juliet’s father, the head of the house. At first he seems a warm and patient parent. When Paris asks for Juliet, Capulet says she is too young, “Let two more summers wither in their pride / Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride,” and that her own consent matters: “My will to her consent is but a part.” At his feast, he even protects Romeo from Tybalt, saying Verona praises him as “a virtuous and well-governed youth.”
But Capulet has a temper, and he expects to be obeyed. “Am I the master here or you?” he shouts at Tybalt. After Tybalt’s death, he promises Juliet to Paris within days, and when she refuses, he turns on her savagely: “Hang thee, young baggage, disobedient wretch!” He threatens to throw her out into the streets. His rage leaves Juliet with nowhere to turn but the Friar.
Lady Capulet
Juliet’s mother, a cool and formal figure who was herself a mother at Juliet’s age: “I was your mother much upon these years / That you are now a maid.” She urges the match with Paris, and after Tybalt’s death, she demands that Romeo pay with his life. The Nurse, not her mother, is the one who knows Juliet best.
The Nurse
Juliet’s nurse since she was a baby, talkative, bawdy, and deeply affectionate. Her first scene is a long, rambling story about Juliet as a toddler, full of the love of a woman who lost her own daughter, Susan, who was the same age: “Thou wast the prettiest babe that e’er I nursed.” She becomes the lovers’ go-between, carrying messages to Romeo, teasing Juliet by delaying the good news, and fetching the rope ladder for their wedding night.
When the crisis comes, the Nurse changes sides. With Romeo banished and Capulet raging, she advises Juliet to forget her husband and marry Paris. To her it is simply practical; to Juliet it is betrayal, and from that moment Juliet no longer confides in her. The Nurse’s mix of warmth and worldly compromise makes her one of Shakespeare’s most human comic characters, and one of the play’s saddest.
Tybalt
Juliet’s cousin, the Capulets’ fiercest fighter, whom Mercutio mocks as the “prince of cats.” He lives for the feud. In the opening brawl, when Benvolio asks for peace, Tybalt answers, “What, drawn and talk of peace? I hate the word / As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee.”
At the Capulet feast, he recognizes Romeo and is forbidden to fight him, and he leaves swearing that the intrusion “shall, / Now seeming sweet, convert to bitt’rest gall.” The next day he challenges Romeo in the street, kills Mercutio, and is killed by Romeo in return. His death is the turning point that sends the play from love story to tragedy.
Romeo’s Family and Friends
The house of Montague, and the young men who run with Romeo.
Mercutio
Romeo’s closest friend, a kinsman of the Prince and neither a Montague nor a Capulet. He is the play’s most dazzling talker, quick, bawdy, and restless, and he mocks Romeo’s romantic sighing without mercy: “If love be rough with you, be rough with love.” His Queen Mab speech, about a tiny fairy who brings dreams, spins into something darker until Romeo stops him, and he admits, “True, I talk of dreams, / Which are the children of an idle brain.”
When Romeo refuses Tybalt’s challenge, Mercutio is disgusted, “O calm, dishonorable, vile submission!,” and fights Tybalt himself. As Romeo tries to part them, Tybalt stabs Mercutio under Romeo’s arm. Dying, he still jokes, “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man,” but he also curses the feud that has killed him: “A plague o’ both your houses!” His death ends the comedy of the play.
Benvolio
Romeo’s cousin, whose name suggests goodwill. He is the peacemaker of the play. In the first scene, he tries to stop the brawl, “Part, fools! / Put up your swords. You know not what you do,” and tells Tybalt, “I do but keep the peace.” He tries to cure Romeo of Rosaline by taking him to the Capulet feast, and after the fatal duel, he gives the Prince an honest account of what happened. After that scene, he disappears from the play.
Lord and Lady Montague
Romeo’s parents. Montague is worried by his son’s melancholy but cannot learn its cause, and after the duel he pleads with the Prince that Romeo only did what the law would have done. Lady Montague’s first words are relief that her son was not in the fight. In the final scene, Montague reports that she has died of grief: “Grief of my son’s exile hath stopped her breath.” Over the bodies, he and Capulet at last make peace, and Montague promises to raise a statue of Juliet “in pure gold.”
The Peacemakers and the Suitor
The men who try to end the feud, and the one who simply wants to marry Juliet.
Friar Lawrence
A Franciscan friar and Romeo’s confessor, who gathers herbs and understands their double nature: “Within the infant rind of this weak flower / Poison hath residence and medicine power.” He teases Romeo about how quickly he forgot Rosaline, “Young men’s love then lies / Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes,” but agrees to marry the lovers, hoping “To turn your households’ rancor to pure love.”
The Friar is full of wise warnings, “Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast,” and “These violent delights have violent ends,” yet he acts in haste himself. He marries the lovers the same day, and later, to save Juliet from marrying Paris, he devises the risky plan of the sleeping potion. When the plan fails and he hears a noise in the tomb, he flees, leaving Juliet alone. At the end, he confesses everything to the Prince.
Prince Escalus
The ruler of Verona, who tries to stop the feud by law. After the first brawl, he warns, “If ever you disturb our streets again, / Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace.” When Romeo kills Tybalt, he chooses banishment over death, though he knows mercy has limits: “Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.” Mercutio was his kinsman, so the feud costs him too. At the end he speaks the verdict on everyone, “All are punished,” and the play’s closing lines.
Paris
A young count and Capulet’s choice of husband for Juliet. He is eager to marry her, brushing aside her father’s worry about her age with “Younger than she are happy mothers made.” He never knows she is already married. He comes to her tomb to mourn her, challenges Romeo there, and is killed.
Minor Characters
Smaller roles that still leave their mark.
Rosaline
The woman Romeo loves before he meets Juliet. She never appears or speaks, and we learn only that she has sworn to remain chaste. She exists to show what Romeo’s love looked like before it became real.
Sampson and Gregory
Two Capulet servants whose crude joking and thumb-biting start the brawl in the first scene. Their quarrel shows how far down the feud reaches, into households whose masters are not even present.
Balthasar, the Apothecary, and Friar John
Three small parts that decide the ending. Balthasar, Romeo’s servant, brings him the news that Juliet is dead. A poor apothecary in Mantua sells Romeo the poison. And Friar John, carrying Friar Lawrence’s letter explaining the plan, is held up and cannot deliver it.
A Closer Reading: The Adults Who Could Have Saved Them
Romeo and Juliet are often blamed for their own haste, but the play keeps pointing at the grown-ups around them, and especially at the two adults the lovers trust most.
The Nurse and Friar Lawrence are the lovers’ go-betweens, and both genuinely love them. The Nurse carries their messages and fetches the rope ladder; the Friar marries them and hopes the match will end the feud. But neither will do the one thing that might have helped: tell the Capulets the truth. Instead, each chooses a workaround. When Capulet demands the marriage to Paris, the Nurse’s workaround is to forget Romeo; the Friar’s is a potion that makes a living girl look dead. Both plans treat the feud as something to be dodged rather than faced.
The parents fail in their own way. Capulet begins by saying that his daughter’s consent matters, “My will to her consent is but a part,” and ends by threatening to throw her into the street. Lady Capulet backs the match with Paris from the start. As each adult falls away, Juliet grows more alone, until in the tomb even the Friar runs from her, and she is left with no one at all. When the Prince declares that “All are punished,” he includes the parents. The play’s young lovers die, but it is the older generation, with its feud, its tempers, and its half-measures, that leaves them no other way out.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about the characters in Romeo and Juliet, answered briefly.
Who Is the Villain of Romeo and Juliet?
The play has no true villain. Tybalt comes closest, since his challenge leads to the deaths that doom the lovers, but the real antagonist is the feud itself, which no character started and no one can end until it is too late.
Is Rosaline in the Play?
Only by name. She is invited to the Capulet feast, and Romeo talks about her at length, but she never appears on stage or speaks.
Why Does the Nurse Tell Juliet to Marry Paris?
Because with Romeo banished and Capulet furious, she sees no practical way for the marriage to Romeo to survive. She thinks she is protecting Juliet. Juliet sees it as a betrayal and stops trusting her.
Why Is Mercutio So Important?
He brings wit and energy to the first half of the play, and his death is its turning point. When he dies cursing both houses, the comedy ends and the tragedy begins.
Who Dies in Romeo and Juliet?
Mercutio, Tybalt, Paris, Romeo, and Juliet. Lady Montague is also reported dead of grief in the final scene.
Related Reading
Three pages that take the characters of Romeo and Juliet further.