The start of the play (I,i) opens with a fight between Montague and Capulet, this fight doesn’t exactly break out straight away into death but it does present us with the feud between Montague and Capulet even before love is mentioned. Shakespeare’s intention we can see must have been to give us a play about a feud rather than one about love and the only reason the love is in there from Shakespeare is to give us a way of seeing how the feud can affect things in life, in this case, love.
Love does come into I,i after the feud but when it is introduced to us it isn’t the love of Romeo and Juliet it is the love between Romeo and this unknown character Rosaline, Shakespeare gives us hints and clues though to show us that this love is just an exaggerated teenage love. He shows us through his remarkable use of language, he uses what is known as a heroic cuplet in which the last two lines of the characters speech rhyme, he uses it to present love throughout the play and so he gives Romeo a heroic cuplet to use when describing his love for Rosaline, but to show us this love is in fact false Romeo’s heroic cuplet needs to be finished off by Benvolio as he is not properly in love. This immediately tells us that Shakespeare favoured the idea of a feud as when he finally presents love he just makes it seem false and pathetic but when the feud is presented the whole play becomes more frantic and interesting.
The next scene within the act sets up the meet between Romeo and Juliet, Peter the illiterate servant is sent out to invite people to the party at which point he bumps into Romeo and Benvolio who manage to get themselves invited to this party, but Peter does say that they shall come only if they be not of the house of Montague, which obviously they are but Peter does not know this, this again represents the feud in the play and this again is before the love between Romeo and Juliet has been discovered.
The last scene in act 1 is scene 5, this is where Romeo and Juliet meet each other, but thrown in with all the love in the scene is 3 cases of where the feud exists. The first is when Tybalt spots that Romeo is here and that he is indeed a Montague, he gets annoyed at this and sends for one of the servants to fetch his rapier, only to be calmed down by Capulet, but this again shows how Shakespeare favours the play to be about the feud rather than Romeo and Juliet's love. The scene then progresses until Romeo and Juliet share a kiss, at which point they both ask the Nurse who each other are as they are not fully aware that they are of the two rival households, she tells Juliet that Romeo is a Montague and Romeo that Juliet is a Capulet. This again shows us the feud, ok love has been mentioned this time but if love really was the main focus of the play the feud would not crop up every time that love is mentioned.
Act 2 consists of Romeo and Juliet sneaking around, getting married etc. all behind there families backs, in this scene the love does triumph yet the feud is still there in the play for all to see. Why are they sneaking around? Why do they get married in secret? Because of the feud, the feud always interferes with the love regardless of how strong the love is, Shakespeare has done this on purpose, he intends the play to be about a feud not love, it was just more interesting and more relevant to the times.
The third act is the climax, where all that the audience has been waiting for happens, death, violence etc. but it is not the love that delivers this, it is the feud. Tybalt, Mercutio and Romeo all fight ending in Tybalt and Mercutio dying and Romeo being banished to another city. In this scene the feud has triumphed, triumphed to move Romeo and Juliet away from each other and make it harder for the love to triumph between the two. This problem has all happened from the feud though, showing us the feud is more important to the play than the love, everything relates back to the feud even when love is present, somehow Shakespeare finds a way to link it back to the feud.
Act 4 is where we find out Romeo has left for good, well supposedly, but we find out that Juliet's wish is to go with Romeo to where he has been banished, we find out she is going to pretend to be dead to do this. This is probably the only scene in which the feud doesn’t interfere with the love, the fact that Romeo has been banished is linked to the feud so it could be said that the plot by Juliet and the Friar is loosely linked to the feud although no real link is evident. This is the only argument I could find to say that the love is the main focus of the play, and one act out of a five act play shows that it just cannot be the main focus of the play whatsoever.
Act 5 is where the whole play evens out, with both Romeo and Juliet's death, the line of the prologue
‘death mark’d love’
come into meaning, the love has been doomed all through the play, from the first time they lay eyes upon each other they have been doomed, and that was all because of the feud. The only good thing that comes out of Romeo and Juliet's death is that the feud of Montague and Capulet is now buried and forgotten, but this is where Shakespeare shows us the feud is most important. The love was a means of burying the feud meaning that the reason the love was there was only to get rid of the feud in the first place, so from the start the feud has been the main focus as that is what the love was put there for, to resolve the feud, showing once more that the feud between the Montague and the Capulet households was the more prevalent feature in the play.
The final argument to present the feud being the main focus is that, without the feud the love between Romeo and Juliet couldn’t possibly be as strong as it was. The only way Shakespeare could show us how it was strong was by letting it play its way around the feud but by doing that he has made the feud the main focus of the play. The love Romeo and Juliet exhibited towards each other was phenomenal even if it was only a teenage romance, it was that strong it managed to live on even while this massive feud was going on between both their families, this shows that without the feud the love would just have been meaningless. The play would have been just another clichéd love story but with the feud it made the pay stand out from all the rest making it the masterpiece it is.
After analysing the whole of the play the statement at the beginning we can see is so obviously true. Every time love is mentioned so is the feud, the love plays around the feud, the feud takes up most of the play, this can only prove that when Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet he intended it to be about the feud between the two household rather than a love story. It made it different, more up to date with what the people wanted at the time which made it a better play than all the others.
