Conflict: the feud, the fights, and what hate actually costs

The play opens with a street fight over a rude gesture: a servant biting his thumb at the other family's men. By the last scene six people are dead, and not one of them died over a thumb. The thumb was never what this feud runs on.

This is one of the big-idea videos on the play, so it argues rather than retells, and the plot itself waits in the Overview.

Here is the claim to argue: the feud is a public habit the whole city joins in with, far more than a private quarrel between two families. Watch who joins the first fight. The servants start it, and then a new voice arrives, shouting against both houses at once. Whose voice is it: a Capulet servant, a Montague servant, or a citizen of Verona? A citizen of Verona, with others behind him: Clubs, bills, and partisans! Strike! Beat them down! Down with the Capulets! Down with the Montagues! Bills and partisans are long-handled weapons, and the citizens turn them on both sides, so the city is in the fight before either family has finished it. Then old Capulet arrives in his dressing gown, shouting: What noise is this? Give me my long sword, ho! And his wife answers: A crutch, a crutch! why call you for a sword? Two old men call for weapons, while one wife mocks her husband and the other holds hers back. Shakespeare makes the feud ridiculous before he makes it fatal, and he mirrors the houses so that neither is the villain.

The Prince, who rules Verona, sends both families the bill: Three civil brawls, bred of an airy word, By thee, old Capulet, and Montague. He says the riots made old citizens take up old weapons, Cankered with peace, to part your cankered hate. Cankered means rusted, eaten away. Why does he use one word for the weapons and the hate? Because both have been left to rot for years. The feud is corrosion, an old habit eating the city, rather than a hot passion. And the cost lands on everyone: citizens dragged out with rusty weapons, a ruler forced to keep the peace, and a penalty that will soon fall on Romeo.

At the feast, the feud needs no reason, only a name. Tybalt hears a Montague's voice and swears: Now by the stock and honour of my kin, To strike him dead I hold it not a sin. On Monday afternoon one man tries to step out of it. Romeo, married in secret to Tybalt's cousin an hour before, answers the challenge with this: And so, good Capulet – which name I tender As dearly as mine own – be satisfied. Why does Romeo's offer of peace read as weakness to everyone watching? Because nobody there knows why he says it. The marriage is secret, so to the street his kindness looks like fear.

Mercutio, Romeo's friend, a relative of the Prince and neither family, cannot bear to hear it: O calm, dishonourable, vile submission! He draws his own sword on Romeo's behalf, so the feud is enforced by a man watching it. Romeo steps between them, and Tybalt wounds Mercutio under Romeo's arm. His dying curse falls on both houses together: A plague o' both your houses! I am sped. I am sped means I am finished. Which house does the feud kill first: Montague, Capulet, or neither? Neither. Mercutio belongs to no side, and he says so with his last breath.

So the feud is a habit the whole city joins: servants, citizens, an old man in his dressing gown calling for a sword. That is why the one person who tries to step out of it, in Act 3 Scene 1, is read as a coward instead of a peacemaker.

If your own answers already start with the citizens rather than the lovers, one examiner's report on this play describes the same route. Most students started with the extract and the impact, in particular on the citizens of Verona, before widening their answers to both the prologue and the feud between the two families. That is the habit to copy: start with the people in the street, widen out to the Prologue, then name the specific fights. Now a question to plan yourself: how Shakespeare shows that the feud belongs to the whole city, and not only to two families. Three nudges, if you want them. Start with who is on stage in the first fight, not with the lovers. Count the people joining in who are neither Montague nor Capulet. And ask what the Prince's penalty costs anybody. Pause and plan three points, each with a quotation. One plan starts in the street, where the opening fight pulls in citizens shouting against both families at once. From there it widens to the state, because the Prince counts three civil brawls bred of an airy word, with old citizens dragged in to stop them. And it ends on the first death, Mercutio, from neither house, whose curse names both of them at once. Two wrong turns to avoid. The first is retelling the fights in order, and one mark scheme puts it plainly: Re-telling sections of the text without commentary is of little or no value. The other is making one family the aggressor. The Prologue calls them both alike in dignity, and Shakespeare gives each house its own old man reaching for a sword.

To finish, the feud's own words come back, one gap at a time. What is the Prince's one word for both the old weapons and the hate? Cankered. Cankered with peace, to part your cankered hate. Next, Mercutio on Romeo: O calm, dishonourable, vile what? Submission. O calm, dishonourable, vile submission! Now his dying curse: a plague o' what? Both your houses. A plague o' both your houses! Here's a different one: in the tomb at the end, which body belongs to neither house? Paris, the young nobleman, a relative of the Prince. The feud kills outsiders from first to last, and the Prologue had already named its price: Which, but their children's end, nought could remove.

If you can say what a fight over a bitten thumb really runs on, using the first and last scenes, this one has stuck, so the thumb goes up. If it hasn't, store the video and build the plan again on paper, because a second plan comes quicker than the first.

Next in the chapter: Love: is any of this real?

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