Open the app
  1. Home
  2. Lessons
  3. KS3 English
  4. Romeo and Juliet: the story and the Prologue

Romeo and Juliet: the story and the Prologue

🎬 The doodle video for this lesson is coming soon. Subscribe on YouTube to see it first.

Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies, written in the mid-1590s. Studying it now is great preparation for GCSE, where Shakespeare is a key part of English Literature.

The Prologue

The play opens with a Chorus who speaks a sonnet of 14 lines. It tells us what will happen before the action starts.

The story in brief

Tragedy

A tragedy is a play that ends in the death of the main characters, often caused by a mixture of fate, bad timing and their own choices.
The Prologue calls the lovers 'star-cross'd': the stars (fate) are against them from the start.
Worked example

Why does Shakespeare tell us the ending in the Prologue?

  1. The audience knows the lovers will die.
  2. So the interest is in how and why it happens, not what happens.
  3. Every hopeful moment becomes painful to watch: this is dramatic irony.

Answer: Knowing the ending creates dramatic irony: we watch the lovers' hopes knowing they are doomed, which makes the play more tragic.

Key idea

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy set in Verona. The Prologue, a sonnet, reveals that the 'star-cross'd lovers' from feuding families will die, and that their deaths end the feud.

The interactive lesson includes the diagrams for this topic.

Check you have got it

Answer 7 quick questions with instant marking. If you get one wrong, GCSE-ready shows you why and gives you another go. It is free, and you do not need an account.

Practise this lesson free (7 questions)All KS3 English lessons