Romeo and Juliet/Characters

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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

• Break the Cutie
• Closer to Earth: Juliet is way more practical and level-headed than Romeo. She's the one who proposes they get married, and worries about Romeo being caught by her kinsmen when he's climbed up to her balcony.
• Determinator - Plucky Girl: Juliet might seem sweet and innocent, but try and force her to marry someone she doesn't love, and she'll go through hell rather than do it.
• Driven to Suicide
• The Ingenue
• Love Interest
• Smitten Teenage Girl

Benvolio

• Bromantic Foil
• Brother Chuck: Disappears after Romeo's exile.
• Deadpan Snarker: In the second act.
• The Everyman
• Foil: To Mercutio, Tybalt, and Romeo for various reasons.
• The Lancer
• Only Sane Man
• The Reliable One
• Straight Man: To Mercutio's Wise Guy.

Mercutio

• Ambiguously Gay: Sometimes played this way.
• The Big Guy
• Boisterous Bruiser
• Bromantic Foil
• Deadpan Snarker. To the point that audiences (despite typically knowing his fate from high school literature) will sometimes take a while to get that he's not kidding after being stabbed by Tybalt.
• Hot-Blooded
• Ho Yay: With Benvolio, Tybalt, and, most prominently, Romeo.
• The Lancer
• Large Ham
• The McCoy
• Poisonous Friend
• Upper Class Wit

Tybalt

• Alternate Character Interpretation: In the Zeferelli version, Tybalt is a jovial troublemaker who kills Mercutio by accident.
  • In the French musical, he's in love with Juliet too. In the Hungarian adaptation of said musical, he's also possibly a pyromaniac and suffers from epilepsy.
• Asshole Victim
• Badass: Mercutio describes Tybalt this way to Benvolio.
• Grumpy Bear
• Hair-Trigger Temper: One gets the feeling that Tybalt could be... difficult to interact with.
• Hot-Blooded
• Informed Ability: Is supposedly a perfect gentleman, beloved by his uncle and cousin, and the best friend that Juliet's nurse ever had. We get none of this from his three scenes.
• Jerkass: No matter how he's played, Tybalt will have traces of this.
• Knight of Cerebus
• Pride
• Small Role, Big Impact: As noted above, he has 3 scenes, but his actions turn the story from a Romantic Comedy into a tragedy where most of the named characters die.
• Troubled but Cute: Certainly in Baz Luhrmann's adaption according to the opinion of many. Zeferelli's more playful, less vicious, Tybalt was also quite attractive.
  • Szilveszter Szabo in the aforementioned Hungarian musical is also pretty damn gorgeous.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Doesn't realise he's in a Romantic Comedy. His killing of Mercutio signifies the shift into Tragedy the second half is famous for.

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

• Jerkass

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

• Jerkass
• Overprotective Dad

Lady Capulet

• Absurdly Youthful Mother: She had Juliet when she was Juliet's age.
• No Accounting for Taste: Many productions portray her relationship with Capulet as a loveless marriage.

Prince Escalus

• Da Chief: In the Luhrmann version.
• Not So Different: Despite his disgust with the feud, in the end, the prince accepts that he, too, played a part in the tragedy.
• Reasonable Authority Figure

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.