In his play Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare reveals the natural inclination for adolescent humans, who lack the wisdom obtained from life experience, to react with dramatic haste, failing to contemplate the possible risks consequences of their actions.  Through the sequence of events leading to the tragic demise of his two main characters, Shakespeare shows how rationality and patience are virtues which, when not practiced, lead to downfall.

      Like many adolescents before and after their time, Romeo and Juliet are impulsive and do things with too much haste.  The mere fact that their entire relationship was five days long goes to show this.  They flared and burned out.  At the beginning of the play, Romeo considers himself to be desperately in love with a woman named Rosaline. His good friends decide to show him just how superficial his love for Rosaline actually is – by taking him to a party where he can have the chance to see many beautiful women, compared with whom Rosaline appears to look common.  Upon laying eyes on Juliet, Romeo’s obsession over Rosaline is instantly replaced with a new one for Juliet. He asks himself, “Did my heart love till now?” (I, v, 54). This short phrase reveals exactly how Romeo allows himself to be dominated by his passion. Instead of perceiving Juliet as a demonstration of how little he actually loved Rosaline, he allows himself to fall deeper into the rabbit-hole of his lover’s delusion. In the balcony scene, before saying farewell to Juliet, Romeo asks her for an “exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine” (II, ii, 127). Romeo asked Juliet to vow eternal love to him in return for his, after less than a day of knowing her – this is in no way a rational action and is too spontaneous to be a wise decision to make. Romeo kills Tybalt in Act 3 Scene 1; he does so out of fury, another type of passion. Moments before, he had been willing to stop his best friend Mercutio to protect his new cousin-in-law; however, after seeing his friend killed under Tybalt’s arm, Romeo is enveloped by rage and the need to avenge him. Romeo, unaware of the plan Juliet and the Friar had arranged, later sees Juliet’s seemingly lifeless body. Seeking relief from the pain of thinking he had lost Juliet, Romeo pronounces these final words: “Here’s to my love! [Drinks.] O true apothecary! / Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die. [Falls.]“  (V, iii, 119-120). Romeo impulsively chooses to buy and drink poison, and this decision permanently solves the problem of his grief. Had Romeo pondered his options and decision longer, he may have utilized a less drastic method of coping with Juliet’s “death,” prolonging his own life and also preventing Juliet’s suicide.

      Romeo and Juliet had the ability to make choices that would have impeded their deaths, but chose not to follow the expectations they knew that their society had of them and instead decided to pursue their love for each other.  The feud between the Capulet and Montague families is a big part of the society of which Romeo and Juliet are a part.  Their society expects the two families to hate each other and to spill each other’s blood, and does not expect them to be friends, let alone to marry a member of the rival family. In Act 2 Scene 3, Romeo asks Friar Lawrence to marry him and Juliet. Romeo is a Montague and Juliet is a Capulet; because of their two families’ ongoing feud, their society would never approve of their choice to associate with each other, let alone fall in love and get married. Neither Romeo nor Juliet hesitate to think about what they are doing and so demonstrate their adolescent haste. Upon awakening from the induced coma she had been put in by the Friar’s potion, Juliet sees the dead corpse of Romeo next to her. She immediately decides to kill herself for real. Her last words are: “O happy / dagger! [Snatches Romeo's dagger.] / This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die” (V, iii, 168-170). Deciding to end her life immediately is an extreme example of how Juliet acts with much haste, blinded by her passion to be with Romeo, dead or alive.

      Romeo and Juliet do not follow the advice of their parents and do not incorporate the wisdom their parents obtained in their own lives.  Young children are born without much information about the world in which they live. They learn from their parents. Romeo and Juliet decided not to follow the advice of their parents and instead chose to make their own decisions. In response to Romeo’s request of a vow of eternal love, Juliet explains to him, “I gave thee mine before thou didst request it” (II, ii, 128). Juliet’s parents arranged ahead of time for Juliet to be married to Paris. Knowing this, she allows herself to fall for Romeo. She accepts being eternally in love with him, before she knows or even questions the strength and validity of his love, in return, for her. This is another eye-opening view into the hasty teenage mind of the young Capulet. In Act 3 Scene 3, Romeo decides to run away with Juliet. Seeing as he had already been banished at this point, it is not so much a decision, as an inevitability, for him. However, the fact that he knows he can rightly assume that Juliet will be willing to follow him reveals much about the haste with which they got into and built up their relationship. In Act 4 Scene 4, when Juliet is alone in her room the night before her arranged wedding day, she drinks the pseudo-death potion given to her by Friar Lawrence. Even after she begins having doubts about the Friar’s motives and intentions she decides to be imprudent and drink it nonetheless, showing quite clearly how she consciously overrides her mind’s sense of danger.

      Romeo and Juliet were two teens, who being impulsive by nature, brought on their own destruction by failing to heed the advice of their families and society. Young people in general tend to hastily react to events, failing to consider the possible risks and consequences of their actions.