In speaking with director Amanda Dehnert about her production of Romeo and Juliet, an interesting question arose: is his sentence of banishment as bad as Romeo makes it out to be? Is it, in fact, a fate worse than death?

In our contemporary society, banishment probably does not seem all that bad. People leave their homes all the time these days. If someone gets kicked out of town, it's inconvenient certainly, definitely no fun, but moving from one place to another is relatively simple—and new places hold new possibilities. How many times do we long to buy a ticket on the next plane heading out of town, to leave our present life and all its troubles behind, to go on an adventure? But Shakespeare was writing in a different time when wanderlust would have been quite dangerous. To move between towns, one needed a letter of introduction. Without that letter, no one except peddlers could even enter a new town legally.

After he kills Tybalt in Act 3, Romeo is facing more than the inconvenience of not being in the same town as his girlfriend. He's been cast out, which, in Shakespeare's time had very real consequences. A banished man was forced to live outside the protection of the law; he became quite literally a wanderer, a man without a country. As Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, "Conviction [after committing a serious crime] did not always result in sentence of death, but often the punishment involved transportation or exile for the offender, thereby completely stripping him of the benefits of his native land." And a sentence of banishment was for no less than the rest of one's life.

So, when Romeo says in Act 3, scene iii, "There is no world without Verona walls, / But purgatory, torture, hell itself. / Hence banishèd is banished from the world, / And world's exile is death: then banishèd /Is death mistermed," he is not far off. Guest director Amanda Dehnert puts a lot of stock in this concept when speaking about her interpretation of the text and the severity of the Prince's punishment. (Take a look at the interview with the director also on this website for more of her perspective, and review Act 3, scene iii for more of Romeo and the Friar's reactions to the Prince's "mercy.")

This statue and plaque in Verona immortalize Romeo's words about life outside the city

–Contributed by the CST Education Department