Content Warning: The source material and guide refer to suicide and violence, including discussions of sexual assault.

A narrator, known as the Chorus, appears and lays out the whole story. Two families from the Italian city of Verona, the Montagues and the Capulets, are fighting out an “ancient grudge.” The children of these families will fall in love and die, ending the grudge between their families. It’s now the job of this play to fill in the whole story.

The play proper begins with two boastful young men, Gregory and Sampson, exchanging a series of increasingly filthy puns. They’re from the house of Capulet, and they’re swaggering around the streets looking for trouble from the Montagues. They find it; a fight breaks out in the street. One Montague, a young man called Benvolio, tries to break up the fight, but Tybalt, the ferocious nephew of Lord Capulet, won’t allow this and attacks him. The heads of the families, Lord and Lady Montague and Lord and Lady Capulet, come upon the scene. The old lords want to get in on the fighting, but their wives hold them back.

The brawl at last breaks up when Verona’s ruler, the Prince, arrives.