Shakespeare was probably writing some of his sonnets at this time as well. He's doing something that engages with the predominant poetic fashion of the mid 15 nineties when he's writing this play. When we first encounter romeo, he's in love with rosaline. What stops this being just slightly ridiculous? And perhaps a couple of lines his wishes ore juliet. So i think he's drawing in other kinds of languages of love. Out of them, he's going to forge a new language of love for the lovers - which combines the sensual and the spiritual. It really takes love poetry to a new level.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss William Shakespeare's famous tragedy, written in the early 1590s after a series of histories and comedies. His audience already knew the story of the feuding Capulets and Montagues in Verona and the fate of the young lovers from their rival houses, but not how Shakespeare would tell it and, with his poetry and plotting, he created a work so powerful and timeless that his play has shaped the way we talk of love, especially young love, ever since.
The image above is of Mrs Patrick Campbell ('Mrs Pat') as Juliet and Johnson Forbes-Robinson as Romeo in a scene from the 1895 production at the Lyceum Theatre, London
With
Helen Hackett
Professor of English Literature at University College London
Paul Prescott
Professor of English and Theatre at the University of California Merced
And
Emma Smith
Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford
Producer: Simon Tillotson