Family Feud & Hate in Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeare opens the play with a brawl, and he opens the brawl with servants. Sampson and Gregory aren’t anyone’s relatives. They’re employees. They pick a fight in the street because their employers’ name says they should. The Prince has stopped this fight three times before. We never hear what the families are fighting about. That’s the point: the feud is not a dispute. It’s a habit.

The play takes the cost of that habit and adds it up scene by scene. The Prince warns both houses that another street brawl will be punished with their lives. Tybalt picks the fight anyway. Mercutio dies. Romeo kills Tybalt. Romeo is banished. Capulet, panicked by the death in his family, moves up Juliet’s wedding to Paris and threatens to disown her if she refuses. Juliet, with no support, drinks the potion. Romeo, getting bad news from Mantua, buys poison. Every one of those decisions is downstream of the same thing: a grudge nobody chose and nobody stopped.

The play also offers, quietly, the people who don’t want it. Benvolio is a Montague who tries to break up the brawl. Romeo, even after Tybalt insults him, tries to leave. Capulet — the head of the Capulet house — tells Tybalt to let Romeo enjoy the party, calls him a “virtuous and well-govern’d youth.” The Friar marries the lovers because he hopes the marriage “may so happy prove, / To turn your households’ rancour to pure love.” The will to peace is in this play. It just doesn’t beat the inertia.

By Act 5 hate hasn’t been outargued. It’s been outlasted. The Prince, surveying the bodies, tells Capulet and Montague: “See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate, / That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.” The two patriarchs shake hands over their dead children. The play is too honest to call this redemption. It’s exhaustion. The feud ends because the families have nothing left to fight with.