Romeo and Juliet/Characters

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The following are the characters from Romeo and Juliet.

Romeo

  • Driven to Suicide
  • Emo Teen: Locks himself up in his room with the curtains drawn, writes depressing poetry and generally mopes until he meets Juliet.
  • Fatal Flaw: His impulsive behavior has him marry Juliet the day after meeting her and kill Tybalt for killing Mercutio. About an hour later.
  • Hot-Blooded: People tend to focus on this trait in Mercutio and Tybalt, but Romeo has a lot of it, too.
  • Love Interest: Obviously.
  • Tragic Hero
  • Unstoppable Rage: Far from the most aggressive of the bunch, but killing his friends is a bad idea.

Juliet

Benvolio

Mercutio

Tybalt

Nurse

  • Dirty Old Woman: Generally played that way, although the chronology of the play suggests she's actually in her mid-to-late 30s
  • Does Not Like Men: Considering how Benvolio and Mercutio treated her, however, she cannot be blamed.
  • Sassy Secretary

Friar Lawrence

  • The Chessmaster: He uses Romeo and Juliets relationship to end the conflict between the Montagues and Capulets.
  • Only Sane Man
  • What the Hell, Hero?: To Romeo, twice. First, he calls him out for falling for a girl he met a day ago while completely forgetting about Rose. Secondly, he calls out Romeo for his excessive Wangst and tells him to suck it up and go do something about it.

Paris

  • Demoted to Extra: Or left out all together in subsequent adaptations.
  • Meaningful Name: In a manner of speaking. "Paris" was a common name in Shakespeare's day for a plant also called "truelove", and it's very likely that he intended to show that, tragically, Juliet may have actually come to experience a fulfilling, life-long romance with Paris had she ended up with him.
  • Princely Young Man
  • Romantic False Lead

Lord Montague

Lady Montague

  • Adaptation Expansion: In the Presgurvic musical, she's a widow (running the Montague family on her own and frustrated by her inability to stop her family from battling the Capulets), and she survives the end of the play.
  • Death by Despair

Lord Capulet

Lady Capulet

Prince Escalus

Friar John

  • Demoted to Extra: Arguably Double Subverted. For the character whose failure to do a simple job drives the ultimate tragedy of the story, he has a grand total of four lines in the original work. But dang are those four lines important.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Because he stopped to get some company for the trip delivering Friar Lawrence's letter, he was locked up for fear of contracting the plague, and wasn't able to deliver the letter explaining that Juliet was alive to Romeo.