Shakespeare wrote tragedies from the beginning of his career. Very simply, Romeo and Juliet can be considered a tragedy because the protagonists - the young lovers - are faced with a momentous obstacle that results in a horrible and fatal conclusion. This is the structure of all Shakespeare's tragedies. A tragic theme also is present in Romeo and Juliet: the triumph of man's spirit and will over life's cruelty. The play does not show the common pattern of tragedy, a person of high rank falling to death. Instead it shows the deaths of two protagonists, young and hasty, caught in a web only partly of their own making. But Shakespeare himself was a young man, who possibly married in haste, and his play combines attributes of both classical and medieval tragedy. And much drama of the period deliberately combined conventions of comedy with those of tragedy. …
