One of the protagonists of the play, along with Juliet . He is the male heir to the dynasty of House Montague, which is in a long-standing feud with House Capulet. At the start of the play, Romeo is too busy pining over his unrequited love for a young woman named Rosaline to join his kinsman in the many petty fights and brawls they engage in with members of House Capulet—Romeo would rather chase down love (or stand around sighing about how he’s failing to do so) than raise his sword against his family’s enemies. After Romeo is dragged to a masquerade at the Capulet house by Mercutio , his wild, fun-loving friend, and Benvolio, his cousin, Romeo falls in love with the beautiful Juliet—not realizing that she is a Capulet, and therefore his sworn enemy due to the feud between their families. Romeo quickly abandons his feelings for Rosaline and swears his eternal, undying love for Juliet, revealing his melodramatic and quickly changeable nature. After secretly marrying Juliet with the help of Friar Laurence , Romeo is even more resistant to being drawn into his kinsmen’s brawls. But after the hotheaded Tybalt , furious at the Montagues for crashing the Capulets’ party, kills Mercutio, Romeo takes a stand and kills Tybalt. This further confirms Romeo’s inconsistent and reactionary tendencies, and he is exiled to Mantua by Prince Escalus , where he pines for Juliet while awaiting news from Friar Laurence. Unbeknownst to Romeo, the friar helps Juliet avoid a forced marriage to the count Paris by devising a plan that will make her appear dead after she drinks a special potion. This way, she can be put to rest in her family tomb, excavated, and reunited with Romeo outside the walls of Verona. Romeo is unaware of this plan, however, and when his servant, Balthasar , brings him news that Juliet is dead, Romeo once again flies into a melodramatic rage, procuring poison from a local apothecary and rushing back to Verona—against the order of his exile—to kill himself inside Juliet’s tomb. Upon waking up from her staged death, Juliet is distraught over Romeo’s death and uses his dagger to commit suicide herself. Impulsive, dramatic, and obsessed with the pursuit of love, Romeo’s changeable, impulsive, childish personality has fascinated audiences for centuries. In popular culture, a “Romeo” is a young man so swept up in the grips of love he can focus on nothing else—in the play, Romeo’s emotions so obscure his sense of reason and calm that he takes his own life in the name of following his love interest into death.
The Romeo and Juliet quotes below are all either spoken by Romeo or refer to Romeo. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows,
Doth with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
