ABSTRACT
Romeo and Juliet is a play about young love, and in the full Q2 version it is also a play about the raw sexuality of young people and the intensity of passion. But it is also a play about marriage and how young people fit into the conventions of their societies by getting married, how they behave and how they communicate their experiences. The history of the play in performance, editing and criticism tells us that people have had to deal in quite different ways with the issues that marriage, love, gender and friendship raise for their particular time and place. Romeo and Juliet charts a movement from a possibly idealistic sense of sexuality as interconnected with personal selfhood, to an isolated private individual whose gender is subject to social convention.
