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Romeo and Juliet was written by Shakespeare around 1594 or 1595. During
much of the twentieth century, critics tended to use 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).
Shakespeare's primary source for Romeo and Juliet was
Arthur Brooke's Romeus and Juliet, first published in 1562, two years before Shakespeare's birth, and reprinted
in 1587, about eight years before the first performance of Romeo and Juliet.
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