Capulets and Montagues

Capulets and Montagues, the English spelling of the names of the Cappelletti and Montecchi, two noble families of Northern Italy, according to tradition of Verona, chiefly memorable from their connection with the legend on which Shakespeare has founded his tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. They both belonged to the Ghibelline faction, as we see from a reference in canto vi. of Dante's Purgatorio. The first publication in which we recognise the essential incidents of Shakespeare's play is a novel by Luigi da Porto, printed at Venice in 1535. Another version was given by Bandello in 1554, and soon after a French version of the tale, by Pierre Boisteau, in Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques, which was translated into English in 1567, and published in vol. ii. of Paynter's Palace of Pleasure. Boisteau's novel had already in 1562 been formed, with considerable alterations and large additions, into an English poem of four thousand lines by Arthur Brooke, entitled The Tragical Hystory of Romeus and Juliet, written first in Italian by Bandell, and now in English. There is evidence that an English play had appeared previously, and that before Shakespeare's time the story was so well known in England that it had supplied subjects for tapestries. Shakespeare's play seems to have been principally based on the English poem, almost the only variations being the compression, for dramatic effect, of the action from four or five months into as many days, and the bringing in of Paris to die at Juliet's bier by the hand of Romeo. But Shakespeare's faithfulness in following his text does not detract at all from the magnificent dramatic intuition by which the old story has been fused into a tragedy of transcendent splendour and pathos.