Overview
The Prologue to Romeo and Juliet is spoken by a Chorus figure who steps onstage before any of the play's characters appear. In just fourteen lines, the Chorus establishes the essential backdrop for the entire tragedy: the city of Verona is home to two noble families of equal standing whose long-standing hatred has erupted into fresh violence. From these feuding households, two young lovers will emerge, fall in love, and ultimately die. It is only through their deaths that the bitter rivalry between their parents will finally come to an end. The Chorus then invites the audience to watch the story unfold over the "two hours' traffic" of the stage, promising that the performance will fill in whatever the brief prologue has left unsaid.
Structure and Form
Shakespeare writes the Prologue as a Shakespearean (or English) sonnet: fourteen lines of iambic pentameter organized into three quatrains and a closing couplet, following an ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme. This is a deliberate formal choice. The sonnet was the dominant form of love poetry in the Elizabethan period, so framing a tragedy about doomed lovers in a sonnet signals from the very first moment that love and its destruction will be at the heart of the play. The tightly controlled structure also conveys a sense of inevitability—just as the rhyme scheme locks each line into place, the lovers’ fate is already sealed before the action begins. The closing couplet shifts from narration to direct address, breaking the fourth wall and drawing the audience into a collaborative relationship with the players.
Themes and Motifs
The Prologue introduces the central thematic tension of the play: fate versus free will. By revealing the outcome before the story begins, Shakespeare suggests that Romeo and Juliet’s tragedy is predetermined—they are "star-cross'd," governed by forces beyond their control. The phrase "death-mark’d love" reinforces the idea that their passion carries a fatal stamp from the outset. Alongside fate, the Prologue establishes the opposition of love and hate. The lovers’ devotion is born from, and ultimately consumed by, their families’ hatred. The motif of sacrifice and reconciliation also surfaces: it is the children’s deaths alone that can end what years of conflict could not. Finally, the Chorus introduces the theme of civil disorder—private grudges spill into public violence, making "civil hands unclean."
Literary Devices
Foreshadowing dominates the Prologue; the audience learns from the start that the lovers will die, creating dramatic irony that colors every hopeful moment in the play. Shakespeare employs oxymoron and paradox throughout: "civil blood makes civil hands unclean" uses the word "civil" in two senses (civic and civilized) to expose how supposedly dignified citizens have been corrupted by violence. The compound epithet "star-cross’d lovers" fuses astrology with destiny, while "death-mark’d love" personifies death as a force that brands the relationship from inception. The phrase "fatal loins" is a striking juxtaposition, linking procreation with doom. Alliteration and assonance—"from forth the fatal," "star-cross’d"—give the language a formal, incantatory quality befitting the Chorus’s role as a prophetic narrator.