In the Library
Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare, 1597
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 2 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 24
- Length
- Length 25k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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The Sorrows of Young Werther
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Sorrows of Young Werther does the same thing, but strips away the feuding families and leaves just one young man's love burning itself out alone.
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Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina does the same thing, but moves the forbidden love into adulthood, where the cost of following the heart is paid in years, not days.
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About the book
A masked boy crashes a Capulet ball, sees a girl across the torchlight, and within an hour is climbing the wall of an enemy's orchard to call her name beneath her balcony. William Shakespeare wrote this tragedy in the mid-1590s, drawing on an Italian novella already centuries old and pouring into it a young poet's full reservoir of language: aubade, sonnet, prothalamion, bawdy joke, and Mercutio's Queen Mab speech, which has nothing to do with the plot and is among the loveliest digressions in the language. Friar Lawrence keeps his herb garden. Tybalt picks his fight. The apothecary sells what he should not, and two children of feuding houses lie dead in a tomb because the adults around them could not stop hating in time.