They would not have been prepared to see Mercutio's and Tybalt's corpses lying in pools of blood midway through the play, nor to witness Romeo and Juliet commit a double suicide in a dark tomb in the middle of the night at the end of Act 5. Audiences who enjoyed The Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Comedy of Errors, Love's Labor's Lost and perhaps A Midsummer Night's Dream would have expected to see Romeo and Juliet end with at least one marriage. His only tragedy to that date (and that's using the term loosely) was Titus Andronicus, which is more in the genre of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. When Romeo and Juliet first appeared onstage about 1595, Shakespeare's early reputation was built on a handful of histories and comedies. Why was it cut from the Folio? For that matter, why did Shakespeare feel the need to reveal the plot and ending at the opening of the first performances of this play? We can only speculate, so here is one theory. It only appears in the earlier quarto editions. The opening sonnet, which gives away the plot including the ending before any characters even step onstage, does not appear in the 1623 First Folio edition. And the play closes fittingly with an abbreviated sonnet - the first two quatrains, like Romeo and Juliet, missing. The chorus returns to open Act 2 with another sonnet. The second appears in Act 1, Scene 5, and it is dialogue spoken by Romeo and Juliet. The first, spoken by a chorus, opens Act 1. In fact, he wrote four sonnets in the play. Shakespeare, who had begun writing his sonnets sometime in the 1590's, decided that the form would be useful in Romeo and Juliet.
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