Best known as Shakespeare’s great tragedy that supplies archetypes of young, innocent lovers wrecked by rash, inauspicious love and the interminable enmity of their feuding families, Romeo and Juliet , conceived at the dawn of the dramatist’s career, is in many ways a blatant departure from what a traditional tragedy is like. Throughout the play the comic, oftentimes farcical, elements are astoundingly profuse, insofar as the tragic coda seems lack of a crucial, consistent built-up to generate any eruptive climax. One is inclined to label the play a “tragicomedy,” but then isn’t every of Shakespeare’s play to a certain extent and in some respect a tragicomedy? The fact that the comedic and the tragic are basically interchangeable in Shakespeare’s play testifies to how thoroughly the dramatist knows of the volatility of human nature: the laughter of one may easily be the tears of the other. Two contrasting moods may be divided only by a thin film, and a typical Shakespear...