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Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is commonly considered to be the story of two lovers caught in circumstances beyond their control: the feuding of their two houses. The play has been criticized as not tragic in an Aristotelian sense on the grounds that the outcome does not grow out of flaws in the main characters but results from fortuitous happenings. The thesis of this paper is that Romeo and Juliet is more profoundly a story of the impact of adolescence, a process which each of the principal and secondary characters must deal with in himself or in those close to him. The tragedy is indeed not Aristotelian in the strictest sense, not a result of pathology in Romeo or Juliet, but it is close in that it grows not out of fortuitous circumstances but out of the difficulty all the characters have in dealing with adolescent processes.
M. D. Faber4 sees the play as the story of the inability of the ruling families of Verona to allow their children to individuate because of the families' stake in defensively maintaining their merged family identities. This is an interesting point, but I have trouble fitting some aspects of the play into it, disagree with some of his interpretations, and so feel more comfortable with my thesis, which has a broader base. I think the feuding has a different character. For example, in the very first scene, after a brawl breaks out among the servants of the two houses, old Capulet and Montague enter, roused by the clamor.