Discuss the themes of love and hate in 'Romeo and Juliet'

‘Romeo and Juliet’ is a play that shows true love conquering hate. Shakespeare’s tragic drama of the ‘star-crossed’ young lovers is seen to be an extraordinary work and was probably written in about 1594 or 1595. During much of the twentieth century, critics tended to disparage this play in comparison to the four great tragedies that Shakespeare wrote in the first decade of the seventeenth century (‘Hamlet’, ‘King Lear’, ‘Macbeth’, and ‘Othello’). Appraised next to Shakespeare’s mature works, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ appears to lack the psychological depth and the structural complexity of Shakespeare's later tragedies. But over the past three decades or so, many scholars have altered this assessment, effectively upgrading its status within Shakespeare's canon.

The play opens with a prologue spoken by a Chorus in the form of a fourteen-line sonnet. This is appropriate because it is a very structured play about love, and sonnets represent love. In this concis...