Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra are, obviously, both plays about love. But there are many striking differences. Romeo and Juliet's protagonists are extremely young (Juliet is "not fourteen" and Romeo cannot be much older), while Antony and Cleopatra's lovers are unmistakably middle-aged. Romeo and Juliet bubbles with joie de vivre and romantic wonder; Antony and Cleopatra is riddled with cynicism and world-weariness. Given only this information, we might well guess that Romeo and Juliet confirms a youthful belief in everlasting romantic passion, while Antony and Cleopatra exposes the frailty and impermanence of love. But, ironically, just the opposite is the case. Love in Romeo and Juliet is fragile, vulnerable, and ultimately doomed; in Antony and Cleopatra it is enduring, inexorable, and ultimately transcendent.
The earlier play, Romeo and Juliet, owes its continuing popularity to the fact that it is about the universal experience of young love. The play makes the reasonable assumption that its audience has experienced adolescent attraction at one time or another. It also implicitly assumes that we have put such attraction behind us. Shakespeare himself was in his early thirties when he wrote this play: young enough to be infatuated by his own powers with language, and old enough to look back upon young love with more than a trace of nostalgia.
Hence, the tone of the play is sympathetic but slightly superior. Shakespeare gives us a wink and a nudge when, in Act I, he shows us a Romeo infatuated with Rosaline. When Benvolio and Mercutio persuade Romeo to go to the Capulets' ball, they challenge him to compare Rosaline's beauty to others. We are meant to be amused by Romeo's too-confident reply: "I'll go along, no such sight to be shown,/ But to rejoice in splendor of mine own."
This irony is not an invitation to cynicism. Were never meant to believe that Romeo's affections for Rosaline and...