A note on the text -- The text of Romeo and Juliet (based on Q2) -- Textual variants. Sources, contexts, and early rewritings -- Luigi da Porto: The unfortunate death of two most wretched lovers -- Matteo Bandello: Of two lovers -- Pierre Boaistuau: The story of two lovers -- Arthur Brooke: Romeus and Juliet -- William Painter: The Goodly history of the love between Rhomeo and Julietta -- Karren Seidler: Romio und Julieta: a case study of an early German Shakespeare adaptation; excerpts from Romio und Julieta -- Thomas Otway: The History and fall of Caius Marius -- Criticism and later rewritings. Stanley Wells: The challenges of Romeo and Juliet -- Pre-twentieth century responses. Samuel Johnson: On Romeo and Juliet -- William Hazlitt: Characters of Shakespear's plays -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge: On Romeo and Juliet -- Helena Faucit: On Shakespeare's female characters -- Twentieth- and twenty-first-century responses. Harley Granville Barker: On Romeo and Juliet -- Susan Snyder: Romeo and Juliet: comedy into tragedy -- Gayle Whittier: The sonnet's body and the body sonnetized -- Jill l. Levenson: Shakespeare's phrasing -- Lloyd Davis: Desire and presence -- Wendy Wall -- Joseph A. Porter: Mercutio -- Dympna C. Callaghan: The ideology of romantic love -- Sasha Roberts: Constructing identities -- Niah Cusack: Juliet -- David Tennant: Romeo -- Courtney Lehmann: Shakespeare with a view: Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet -- Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce: From William Shakespear's Ro-meo & Juliet -- Barbara Hodgdon: Everything's nice in America? -- Susan Bennett: Romeo & Juliet in Baghdad.