two lovers depicted in literature, music, dance, and theatre and best known from a play (1594-95) written by William Shakespeare. The appeal of the young hero and heroine--whose families, the Montagues and Capulets, respectively, are implacable enemies--is such that they have become, in the popular imagination, the representative type of star-crossed lovers. Shakespeare's principal source for the plot was The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), a long narrative poem by the English poet , or …showed first 75 words of 974 total…

…showed last 75 words of 974 total…an impression on potential purchasers of playbooks. Bibliography manuscript fairly close to Shakespeare's own. Yet in neither edition did Shakespeare's name appear on the title page, and it was only with the publication of Love's Labour's Lost in 1598 that publishers had come to feel that the name of Shakespeare as a dramatist, as well as the public esteem of the company of actors to which he belonged, could make an impression on potential purchasers of