The themes of Romeo and Juliet, love, hate, fate, haste, youth and age, light and darkness, and the closeness of love and death, all press on two young people who want only to be themselves in a city where a family name decides who you may love.
This guide explains the seven major themes of the play, with the lines that express each one, and then shows how they connect. For the plot and famous quotations, see our full guide to Romeo and Juliet; for the people, see the characters of Romeo and Juliet.
At a Glance
Here are the major themes of Romeo and Juliet for quick reference.
Love
The play shows love in many forms, and it sets them side by side so we can compare. Romeo’s love for Rosaline is the fashionable kind: sighs, tears, and clever paradoxes, “O brawling love, O loving hate, / O anything of nothing first create!” Friar Lawrence is unimpressed: “Young men’s love then lies / Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.”
Around the lovers, others treat love more coarsely or more coolly. Mercutio makes it a string of bawdy jokes, “If love be rough with you, be rough with love.” Juliet’s parents treat marriage as a family arrangement, and her mother describes Paris as a fine book that only lacks a cover.
Against all of these stands the love of Romeo and Juliet. It begins at first sight, in a shared sonnet and a kiss, and it is mutual and total from the start. On the balcony, Juliet finds words for it that no one else in the play could say: “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep. The more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite.”
Hate and the Feud
The feud between the Montagues and the Capulets is the force that surrounds and finally destroys the lovers, and the play never says how it began. The Prologue calls it simply an “ancient grudge,” and it has become a habit. It reaches down to the servants, who fight in the street because “A dog of the house of Montague moves me,” and up to the old heads of both houses, who call for their own swords when the brawl breaks out.
Tybalt embodies it. When Benvolio asks for peace, he answers, “What, drawn and talk of peace? I hate the word / As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee.” The feud turns love and hate into neighbors: when Juliet learns who Romeo is, she cries, “My only love sprung from my only hate!”
The feud’s cost falls on those who never chose it. Mercutio, a member of neither house, dies cursing it: “A plague o’ both your houses!” It ends only over the bodies of the lovers, when Capulet finally offers his hand: “O brother Montague, give me thy hand.” The Prince names the terrible irony: heaven has found a way “to kill your joys with love.”
Fate
Before the story begins, the Prologue tells us how it ends. The lovers are “star-crossed,” doomed by the stars, their love “death-marked.” Everything that follows plays out under that shadow, and the characters seem to feel it.
On his way to the Capulet feast, Romeo has a dark foreboding: “my mind misgives / Some consequence yet hanging in the stars / Shall bitterly begin his fearful date / With this night’s revels.” Juliet, learning Romeo’s name, says without knowing how true it is, “My grave is like to be my wedding bed.” After killing Tybalt, Romeo cries, “O, I am Fortune’s fool!”
Yet the play also shows that chance and choice work alongside fate. A letter goes undelivered because its messenger is held up. Romeo reaches the tomb just before Juliet wakes. And many of the steps toward disaster are human decisions. Whether the lovers are truly doomed, or simply unlucky and rushed, is one of the questions the play leaves open.
Haste
Everything in Romeo and Juliet happens fast. The lovers meet, marry, and die within a few days. Juliet herself worries about the speed on the balcony: their vows are “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden, / Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be / Ere one can say ‘It lightens.’”
Friar Lawrence preaches patience. “Wisely and slow,” he warns Romeo; “They stumble that run fast.” Just before the wedding he adds, “These violent delights have violent ends,” and “Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.” Yet he marries them the same afternoon.
The adults hurry too. Capulet, who once told Paris to wait two years, promises him Juliet within days, then moves the wedding up again. Each acceleration leaves less time for the Friar’s plan to work. Our main guide to Romeo and Juliet argues that haste, as much as fate, destroys the lovers.
Youth and Age
The play is a clash of generations. The young are all heat and speed. Waiting for the Nurse’s news, Juliet complains that “Love’s heralds should be thoughts, / Which ten times faster glides than the sun’s beams,” and grumbles that old people are “Unwieldy, slow, heavy, and pale as lead.”
The old look back with a kind of regret. At his feast, Capulet reminds his cousin, “you and I are past our dancing days.” Friar Lawrence observes that “Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye, / And, where care lodges, sleep will never lie.”
But the older generation also keeps the feud alive, and fails the young people who depend on them. Capulet forces a marriage on his daughter; the Nurse advises her to abandon her husband; the Friar’s plan is too risky to work. The lovers turn to each other partly because the adults around them cannot understand them. Our guide to the characters looks at how each of these adults lets them down.
Light and Darkness
The lovers meet at night, marry in secret, and share their only night together in the dark. Yet whenever they describe each other, they reach for images of light. Seeing Juliet for the first time, Romeo says, “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!” On the balcony, “It is the East, and Juliet is the sun.”
Juliet reverses the pattern: for her, Romeo is light within darkness. Longing for her wedding night, she calls, “Come, night. Come, Romeo. Come, thou day in night,” and imagines that after his death he could be cut “out in little stars” to make the face of heaven so fine “That all the world will be in love with night.”
In this play, darkness protects the lovers and daylight threatens them. Their love shines brightest in the dark, and the morning always brings danger, parting, or death.
Love and Death
From the start, the play keeps love and death side by side. The lovers are “death-marked” in the Prologue. Juliet, asking who Romeo is, fears that if he is married, “My grave is like to be my wedding bed.” When she hears of his banishment, she cries that “death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead!”
Friar Lawrence’s warning ties them together too. Violent delights, he says, “in their triumph die, like fire and powder, / Which, as they kiss, consume.” The image of a kiss that destroys comes true in the tomb. Romeo, believing Juliet dead, drinks the poison and dies with “Thus with a kiss I die.” Juliet, waking, kisses his lips hoping some poison remains on them.
In the end, the only wedding bed the lovers share for long is the Capulet tomb. The play’s tragedy is that love and death, which seemed to be opposites, turn out to be bound together.
A Closer Reading: What’s in a Name, After All
Behind all of these themes is a struggle over names: the lovers try to escape the names that divide them, and the play ends by turning their own names into the only thing that lasts.
In Verona, names are everything. The servants fight over them. Romeo only hears of the Capulet feast because a servant who cannot read asks him to read a list of names. And the lovers’ first discovery about each other is the worst possible name. On the balcony, Juliet makes her great argument against it: “’Tis but thy name that is my enemy,” and “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet.” Romeo agrees at once: “Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized. / Henceforth I never will be Romeo.”
They cannot escape. Every disaster that follows flows from the names Montague and Capulet. But at the end, something shifts. Over their bodies, the family names finally lose their power, as the fathers take each other’s hands. And the lovers’ own first names take their place: Montague promises a golden statue so that “whiles Verona by that name is known,” none shall be honored like “true and faithful Juliet,” and the Prince’s last words are “Juliet and her Romeo.” The names that divided them are buried; the names they chose to be known by live on.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about the themes of Romeo and Juliet, answered briefly.
What Is the Main Theme of Romeo and Juliet?
Love, and the forces that destroy it: the family feud, the haste of everyone involved, and a fate the Prologue announces before the story begins.
Is Romeo and Juliet About True Love or Infatuation?
The play contrasts both. Romeo’s love for Rosaline is infatuation, and the Friar mocks it. His love for Juliet is presented as something different: mutual, serious, and willing to sacrifice everything. Many readers still question whether a love that grows so fast can be real, and the play leaves room for that doubt.
Are Romeo and Juliet Doomed by Fate?
The Prologue calls them “star-crossed,” and they often sense their fate. But the play also shows human choices and bad luck driving the tragedy, so it can be read as fate, chance, haste, or all three together.
Why Is There So Much Light Imagery?
Because the lovers meet in darkness and see each other as light. The images make their love the one bright thing in a dark and violent city.
How Does the Feud End?
Only with the lovers’ deaths. Over their bodies, Capulet and Montague finally make peace, and Montague promises to raise a statue of Juliet in pure gold.
Related Reading
Three pages that take the themes of Romeo and Juliet further.