Romeo and Juliet

Chapter 4: THE PROLOGUE

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About This Book

Two noble households in a city maintain a bitter feud that spills into public brawls and civic unrest. Amid this hostility, two young members of the opposing families fall passionately in love, marry in secret with the aid of a cleric, and try to reconcile private desire with social obligation. A chain of duels, exile, and a desperate scheme intended to reunite them results in tragic miscommunication and their deaths. Their passing forces relatives and civic authorities to confront the cost of entrenched hatred. The drama blends lyric monologues, comic interludes, and swift shifts between intimacy and violence while exploring fate, youthful ardor, and the consequences of longstanding enmity.

THE PROLOGUE

Enter Chorus.

CHORUS.
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 misadventur’d 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.

[Exit.]