1. Were Romeo and Juliet too young to fall in love?





Yes. Juliet’s age is revealed in Act 1, Scene 3 in a discussion between Lady Capulet (Juliet’s biological mother) and the Nurse (who functions as Juliet’s de facto mother):

NURSE
Faith, I can tell her age unto an hour.

LADY CAPULET
She's not fourteen.

NURSE
I'll lay fourteen of my teeth,--
And yet, to my teeth be it spoken, I have but four--
She is not fourteen. How long is it now
To Lammas-tide?

LADY CAPULET
A fortnight and odd days.

There’s a (kind of funny) joke in there where the nurse tries to swear by fourteen of her teeth, then realizes that she only has four. But to the point: Juliet is “A fortnight and odd days” from being fourteen, so she’s thirteen years old. Romeo’s age isn’t explicitly stated, but his skill with a sword suggests he’s closer to twenty than to thirteen. In the poem that forms the basis for Shakespeare’s story, Arthur Brooke’s The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), Juliet is sixteen.

This bold and severe decrease in the age of Juliet’s character seems to be part of a dramaturgical strategy from Shakespeare to ratchet up the tension in the play however he can. At the outset, it seems to be structurally and thematically a comedy: the yin-yang structure of the warring families certainly has a comedic geography, and the focus on two young lovers (rather than the grabs at political power which drive the more mature tragedies) seems apposite to a comedy. Shakespeare rushes everything through with the impetuousness of youth, though, and suddenly relatively trivial matters (like Friar John being held up by a plague outbreak) become cases of life and death; usually the latter. Their warring families, as well as the extreme stupidity of Friar Laurence, both play a part in the downfall of the two young lovers, but it’s their total lack of maturity and perspective that proves to be the true tragedy of the play.