So today I'm going to talk about Romeo and Juliet.

One of the two tragedies, the other is Titus Andronicus, that Shakespeare writes near the beginning

of his career in the early 1590s.

Then, as you all know, he moves away from tragedy to comedies and English histories, comes back

to tragedies with Hamlet around the turn of the 17th century.

So these are, Roman Juliette with Titus and Diannecours, it's a bit of a generic, chronological

kind of misfit. It comes within at a time of comedy writing, and that may come up later

in the lecture so most critics

would date Roman Juliette to about 1594 to 5 somewhere in between midsummer night

stream and Richard the second midsummer night stream has obviously got kind of

Romney Julia parody in the Pyramismby plot, either a preemptive parody

if it comes before or a kind of afterwards parody if it comes afterwards, but we don't exactly

know. It's quite interesting to think about Roman and Julietac's formal linguistic structures,

though, I think, in relation to those two adjacent plays, that cluster of plays together, mid-Sahman outstream, Romeo and Juliet's formal linguistic structures though I think in relation to those two adjacent plays that cluster of plays together mid-summer-outstream Romeo and Juliet

Richard the second are in some ways the most formal or the most formally kind of inflected of Shakespeare's

plays the most obvious use of verse rhyming the sonnet form in Romeo, Juliette, for instance, all the different

kinds of language that the different characters use in Midsomenite's dream.

And just as a sideline, maybe we think that putting plays together because of something

about their poetry or something about how they sound might be an interesting way to group plays as opposed to what we generally do, which is to group them by plot broadly or by character.

Okay, so usually in these lectures I begin by giving an outline of the play in the expectation that at least some of you won't have read it or seen it.

That seems a bit pointless with Romeo and Juliet and in some ways that pointlessness, the pointlessness of summarising the plot, I guess is what I want to try and talk about today.

Would it be possible in the educated English speaking world, not even beyond that, I guess,

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