SOURCE: Andrews, John F. “Falling in Love: The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.” In Classical, Renaissance, and Postmodernist Acts of the Imagination: Essays Commemorating O. B. Hardison, Jr., edited by Arthur F. Kinney, pp. 177-94. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Andrews discusses the effect of Romeo and Juliet on contemporary audiences.

What happens in Romeo and Juliet?¹ What did a dramatist of the 1590s want the “judicious” members of his contemporary audiences to see and hear, and how did he expect them to feel, as they attended the play² a later age would laud as the most lyrical of all love tragedies? Before I hazard a response to what is admittedly an unanswerable question, I should make it clear that what I'm really posing is a query about the “action”³ of Shakespeare's drama, and more specifically about the effect such an action might have...