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In: Italy·Romance·Plays/Films/Dramas
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #1112.
The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is a drama set in Verona, Italy, that pits the youthful heirs of the feuding Capulet and Montague families against one another. The play opens with a brawl between servants, Sampson, Gregory, and their counterparts, who exchange sharp‑tongued threats, brandish swords, and provoke a city‑wide disturbance that draws the attention of the Prince. This chaotic street scene immediately establishes the central themes of vendetta, generational conflict, and the volatile passions of young lovers who will soon emerge from the turmoil.
Shakespeare’s language, filtered through a 17th‑century printing practice that swaps letters and preserves original spelling quirks, retains the poetic rhythm and rhetorical flourish of the Elizabethan stage. The dialogue crackles with wit, metaphor, and a heightened sense of honor, while the verse often bends into prose during the heated exchanges. Readers who enjoy richly layered verse, intricate character dynamics, and the stark contrast between violent feud and tender romance will find this early‑modern tragedy compelling, especially those fascinated by the interplay of youthful idealism and entrenched family hatred.
The opening · free to read
As I understand it, the printers often ran out of certain words or letters they had often packed into a "cliche". . .this is the original meaning of the term cliche. . .and thus, being unwilling to unpack the cliches, and thus you will see some substitutions that look very odd. . .such as the exchanges of u for v, v for u, above. . .and you may wonder why they did it this way, presuming Shakespeare did not actually write the play in this manner. . . .
The answer is that they MAY have packed "liue" into a cliche at a time when they were out of "v"'s. . .possibly having used "vv" in place of some "w"'s, etc. This was a common practice of the day, as print was still quite expensive, and they didn't want to spend more on a wider selection of characters than they had to.
You will find a lot of these kinds of "errors" in this text, as I have mentioned in other times and places, many "scholars" have an extreme attachment to these errors, and many have accorded them a very high place in the "canon" of Shakespeare. My father read an assortment of these made available to him by Cambridge University in England for several months in a glass room constructed for the purpose. To the best of my knowledge he read ALL those available . . .in great detail. . .and determined from the various changes, that Shakespeare most likely did not write in nearly as many of a variety of errors we credit him for, even though he was in/famous for signing his name with several different spellings.
So, please take this into account when reading the comments below made by our volunteer who prepared this file: you may see errors that are "not" errors. . . .
So. . .with this caveat. . .we have NOT changed the canon errors, here is the Project Gutenberg Etext of Shakespeare's The first Part of Henry the Sixt.
Michael S. Hart Project Gutenberg Executive Director
What this is and isn't. This was taken from a copy of Shakespeare's first folio and it is as close as I can come in ASCII to the printed text.
The elongated S's have been changed to small s's and the conjoined ae have been changed to ae. I have left the spelling, punctuation, capitalization as close as possible to the printed text. I have corrected some spelling mistakes (I have put together a spelling dictionary devised from the spellings of the Geneva Bible and Shakespeare's First Folio and have unified spellings according to this template), typo's and expanded abbreviations as I have come across them. Everything within brackets [] is what I have added. So if you don't like that you can delete everything within the brackets if you want a purer Shakespeare.
Another thing that you should be aware of is that there are textual differences between various copies of the first folio. So there may be differences (other than what I have mentioned above) between this and other first folio editions. This is due to the printer's habit of setting the type and running off a number of copies and then proofing the printed copy and correcting the type and then continuing the printing run. The proof run wasn't thrown away but incorporated into the printed copies. This is just the way it is. The text I have used was a composite of more than 30 different First Folio editions' best pages.
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