Fate

Before anyone walks on, the Chorus tells the audience how the story ends, in a sonnet, and gives three causes in fourteen lines without ranking them. One is the stars: the lovers come ‘From forth the fatal loins’ and are ‘star-crossed’. One is people: an ‘ancient grudge’ and ‘their parents' rage’. The third hides in a single word, ‘misadventured’: bad luck. From here the play's question is not whether the lovers die but how, and every hopeful line after it is heard as dramatic irony. AQA has never printed either Chorus, yet five of its nine live mark schemes point answers to them: whatever your extract, a fate argument starts here.

• From forth the fatal¹ loins² of these two foes³

  The first 'fatal' in the play describes the parents, not the sky: whatever is fated about these lovers reaches them through 'these two foes'. Fate and the feud arrive in one line.

  In the exam

  Use it in a 'stars or parents' answer: the Prologue never makes them rivals.

• A pair¹ of star-crossed^2,3 lovers take their life⁴

  This is the frame everything else is measured against: the one voice that knows the ending calls the lovers star-crossed. Every later appeal to fate is a character catching up, in fear or in blame, with what the audience already knows.

  Key word: ‘crossed’

  Crossing passes from the stars to people as the play goes on: Juliet calls her own state 'cross and full of sin' (4.3), the Friar warns her parents against 'crossing' heaven's 'high will' (4.5), and Paris asks whose foot comes 'To cross my obsequies' (5.3). By the end, the ones who cross are human.

  In the exam

  Use it to turn 'how far is it fate?' into 'how?': the ending is fixed at line 6, so weigh what the play shows bringing it about.

• Whose misadventured¹ piteous² overthrows / Doth with their death bury their parents' strife.³

  Not tagged with fate, it is here for 'misadventured': beside the stars and the feud the Prologue names a third cause, mischance, and the plot that follows is built from it: a guest list, a fight, a letter.

  In the exam

  Use 'misadventured' to give a thesis three causes instead of two, then show which of them the play's machinery actually uses.

After the Prologue, fate first speaks as a father's fear with a condition: Romeo's mood will prove ‘Black and portentous’, says Montague, unless counsel can cure it. Then chance takes over. Capulet's servant cannot read his master's guest list, asks a passing stranger to read it, and invites him in, ‘if you be not of the house of Montagues’. Romeo decides to go, though only to gaze at Rosaline, ‘to rejoice in splendor of mine own’; Juliet's first scene (1.3), about her marriage, has no fate in it at all. On the doorstep in 1.4 the theme peaks: Mercutio calls dreams nothing, and Romeo dreads the night, hands his course to another power and walks in. AQA's 1.1 and 1.2 extracts carry almost no fate, so reach it through the Prologue.

• Find them out whose names are written here! … I am sent to find those persons whose names are here writ,¹ and can never find what names the writing person hath here writ.² I must to the learned.

  Chance in this play has a human face: the story turns because a servant cannot read and asks a stranger who happens to be a Montague. Nobody is to blame, and no star is needed.

  In the exam

  Use it as the first link in the play's chain of messages that miscarry, and set it against the Prologue's stars as a cause the audience can watch happen.

• I'll go along,¹ no such sight to be shown, / But to rejoice in splendor of mine own.²

  Romeo's first decision is made for Rosaline and lands him in front of Juliet: what looks like destiny reaches him through a choice aimed somewhere else.

  In the exam

  On a Romeo question, use it to show that his first fateful step is taken for the wrong woman: the road to the 'star-crossed' meeting starts as devotion to someone else.

• True, I talk of dreams, / Which are the children of an idle brain,¹ / Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,² / Which is as thin of substance as the air / And more inconstant than the wind³

  Shakespeare gives the case against omens to the wittiest man in the play, and it is a good case: dreams come from the dreamer and mean nothing. Ten lines later Romeo's dread answers it, and the night's revels begin exactly what he fears.

  In the exam

  Use Mercutio as the foil in a fate answer: the play gives the sceptic the wit and the dreamer the truth, so weigh whether it stacks the evidence on fate's side.

• I fear too early, for my mind misgives / Some consequence yet hanging in the stars¹ / Shall bitterly begin his fearful date / With this night's revels, and expire the term² / Of a despisèd life closed in my breast / By some vile forfeit³ of untimely death.⁴

  The lover himself now speaks the Prologue's language, but as a fear, not a fact: he senses the ending without knowing it, and the dread changes nothing he does.

  Key word: ‘misgives’

  'Misgives' is a word of feeling, not knowledge: his mind suspects, as a stomach turns. Fate reaches Romeo as an inner warning he is free to ignore, which is what makes his next line a choice.

  In the exam

  Use it to separate the audience's knowledge from Romeo's dread: the Prologue tells, Romeo only feels.

• But he that hath the steerage of my course¹ / Direct my sail.² On, lusty gentlemen.³

  Spoken on the Capulets' doorstep, it is the last moment at which staying away was possible: the dread could have kept Romeo out, and this sentence takes him in, so every meeting the Prologue promised can now happen.

  In the exam

  On a Romeo question, use it to mark the last point at which he could have turned back, then ask what carried him over: a power he prays to, or his own 'On'.

• Too early¹ seen unknown, and known² too late!³

  Romeo, learning her name earlier in the scene, called his life his 'foe's debt'; Juliet, learning his, speaks of when she saw and when she knew. Both lovers meet the trap within minutes of meeting each other, and neither reaches for the stars Romeo feared on the doorstep.

  In the exam

  From the June 2019 extract, leave the sonnet by this line: it shows the lovers caught by what they did not know, which a fate answer can call chance as easily as destiny.

Through Act 2 the lovers stop fearing the stars, and the silence is evidence: while they are happy, nobody does. The second Chorus credits their passion, not the stars. In the orchard the stars are compliments, outshone by Juliet's eyes; she lays ‘all my fortunes at thy foot’, and their fears are of speed and of waking (Romeo fears it is all ‘but a dream’). At dawn the Friar holds up a flower in which ‘Poison hath residence and medicine power’, and how it is used decides which. Juliet runs to her wedding crying ‘Hie to high fortune!’: fortune as luck at its height. The audience, who heard the Prologue, does the fearing for them, so the irony is sharpest exactly where the lovers feel least fated. From the June 2022 extract, follow Romeo's stars forward. From June 2024's waiting speech (2.5.1 to 18), leave by her cry at the end of the same scene, the top of Fortune's wheel, and follow Fortune down to 'Fortune's fool' (3.1) and her plea to Fortune (3.5); the mark scheme credited foreshadowing linked to the Prologue's fate.

• But passion¹ lends² them power, time means,³ to meet, / Temp'ring⁴ extremities with extreme sweet.⁵

  This couplet is the last thing the Chorus ever says: from here no narrator tells us what is fated, only characters guessing, fearing and excusing.

  In the exam

  From June 2019's sonnet, go to this couplet, spoken as soon as the feast ends: the narrator's comment on the meeting you have just analysed gives the lovers 'power' of their own.

• Two of the fairest stars¹ in all the heaven, / Having some business, do entreat her eyes / To twinkle in their spheres till they return.

  Fate's own image becomes a lover's compliment: the stars ask Juliet's eyes to stand in for them.

  In the exam

  From the June 2022 extract, set this compliment against 'star-crossed': the sky that lights her eyes has already crossed them.

• Within the infant¹ rind of this weak flower / Poison hath residence and medicine power:^2,3

  Where the Prologue's stars settle the end in advance, the Friar's flower settles nothing until someone uses it: his first speech gives the play a rival account of how things turn out, and his own plan in Act 4 will be its test.

  In the exam

  On a Friar question, set it beside his vial (4.1) and his 'Unhappy fortune!' (5.2) to ask whether the plan failed by chance or by his own handling of a dangerous remedy.

• So smile the heavens¹ upon this holy act² / That after-hours with sorrow³ chide us not.

  This is where the Friar's heaven starts: a smile asked for at a wedding he arranged himself, to end the feud. Follow his heaven and it frowns in 4.5 and thwarts in 5.3, always in his voice.

  In the exam

  Pair it with his 'greater power' in 5.3 to trace how the Friar's heaven moves from a blessing he asks for to a cause he blames.

At the play's centre fate is named again and again beside a choice: before it as prophecy, after it as blame. Mercutio draws on Tybalt, is wounded under Romeo's arm and, dying, curses not himself but both houses. Romeo speaks the play's only 'fate' over his friend's death, chooses fury aloud, kills Tybalt and, thirteen lines after choosing, calls himself Fortune's fool. Benvolio reports ‘this fatal brawl’ to the Prince as bad luck. In the two live 3.2 extracts (November 2021's oxymorons, June 2023's ‘three-hours wife’) Juliet is reacting to a choice she only hears about: weigh fate against free will by going back to what she never saw, fury chosen and Fortune blamed, and forward to her appeal to the clouds in 3.5. AQA has not printed 3.1 in any published paper, but the June 2017 mark scheme already sends answers on to its fighting.

• A plague¹ o' both your houses!²

  A curse is a prophecy spoken in anger: Mercutio makes the feud, not the fighters, the cause of his death, and the rest of the play seems to fulfil him.

  In the exam

  Use it to show how characters turn a chosen fight into a doom on others, then weigh whether the play agrees with the dying man.

• This day's black fate¹ on more days doth depend. / This but begins the woe others must end.²

  Romeo uses fate to predict, in a couplet that sounds like a Chorus. Four lines later he makes the choice that makes his prediction come true.

  Key word: ‘depend’

  'Depend' here means hang over, as the consequence was 'hanging' in the stars in 1.4; it also carries its ordinary sense, rely on. The future that hangs over Romeo now depends on what he does in the next minute.

  In the exam

  Use it with 'fire-eyed fury' to show a prophecy that the prophet himself fulfils.

• Away to heaven, respective lenity,¹ / And fire-eyed² fury³ be my conduct⁵ now.⁴

  Even as he chooses, Romeo speaks of powers outside himself: gentleness is sent 'to heaven' and fury appointed his guide. In his mouth, choosing and being driven sound like the same thing.

  In the exam

  Use it to argue that Romeo's choices are made in the language of being led, which is why both fate and free will can claim this killing.

• O, I am Fortune's fool!^1,2

  Seconds after the killing he chose, Romeo names the culprit as Fortune. The audience hears the gap between what it has just watched and what he says about it.

  In the exam

  Use it as the clearest case of the play's pattern, choice first and blame on a power second, then argue whether the play takes his side.

• Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die,¹ / Take him and cut him out in little stars²

  Straight after Romeo blames Fortune in the street, Juliet, not yet knowing, puts him in the stars herself. In the lovers' mouths the sky is still a place for love, not a power over it.

  In the exam

  From Specimen 2's extract (3.2.17 to 36), set her stars against the Prologue's: one word as love's wish and as the frame's doom.

• Romeo, come forth; come forth, thou fearful man.¹ / Affliction is enamored² of thy parts, / And thou art wedded to calamity.³

  The Friar's first words after the killings make misfortune a suitor that has chosen Romeo; later in the scene he says Romeo is sulking at a kind Fortune.

  In the exam

  Use the Friar's two accounts in one scene (calamity courts you; you pout upon your fortune) to show fate used as persuasion rather than belief.

That night a father puts the day down to bad luck and then makes a choice of his own; at dawn the lovers sense the end. In one short scene Capulet sets Juliet's wedding for Thursday, laughing at the date. At dawn Juliet looks down at Romeo leaving and sees him ‘As one dead in the bottom of a tomb’, then asks Fortune to be fickle and send him back. When her father has threatened to disown her and stormed out, she turns first to the sky, then to her mother, who will not speak to her. To the Nurse she says heaven itself is playing tricks, ‘practice stratagems’, on her; left alone, she stops appealing and claims ‘power to die’. AQA has printed 3.5 twice, on adults and young people and on parents and children: from either, a family answer can turn to fate here and reach the tomb she foresaw.

• Things have fallen out,¹ sir, so unluckily² / That we have had no time to move³ our daughter.

  A luck-word opens the very scene in which Capulet fixes the wedding: in one short scene the talk runs from chance blamed to a date chosen, and that date starts the clock that the potion and the letter will have to beat.

  In the exam

  Use it to show the elders sharing the young men's habit: 'unluckily' turns choices into accidents.

• O God,¹ I have an ill-divining² soul!

  Romeo's dread lived in the stars; Juliet's lives in her own soul. She finds the knowledge of the end inside herself, and from this scene on she treats foresight as a reason to act, not to wait.

  In the exam

  Pair it with Romeo's 'hanging in the stars' (1.4): one premonition for each lover, so fate is felt from both sides of the relationship.

• O Fortune, Fortune,¹ all men call thee fickle.² / If thou art fickle, what dost thou with him / That is renowned for faith?³ Be fickle, Fortune, / For then I hope thou wilt not keep him long, / But send him back.

  Where Romeo was Fortune's fool, Juliet makes Fortune an argument: its famous fickleness becomes her reason to hope. She is the one character who tries to talk fate round to her side.

  In the exam

  On a Juliet question, use it to show her meeting fate with wit and hope rather than despair, set against Romeo's 'Fortune's fool'.

• Is there no pity sitting in the clouds¹ / That sees into the bottom of my grief?²

  When her father casts her off, the first power Juliet turns to is heaven, and nothing on stage answers. What heaven is for changes with the speaker: a schemer to Juliet moments later, a judge to the Friar in 4.5 and, only after the deaths, a scourge on the fathers' hate in the Prince's mouth.

  In the exam

  From June 2025's extract (3.5.187 to 210), use it to bring fate into a family answer: Juliet turns from her father to heaven to her mother, and none of them answers.

• I'll to the Friar to know his remedy. / If all else fail,¹ myself² have power³ to die.

  Juliet has asked Fortune to turn and the clouds for pity, and nothing answered; her couplet at the scene's end stops asking and names a power she need not ask anyone for.

  In the exam

  On a Juliet question (November 2021, June 2024), use it to show her answering the powers above her with one of her own.

In Act 4 an old man tries to rewrite what 'must be'. Paris presses for Thursday and Juliet answers with a proverb that commits her to nothing; then the Friar gives her a vial and a timetable that depends on one messenger reaching Mantua. Capulet, delighted by her false submission, brings the wedding forward to Wednesday, so she must drink a night earlier than the Friar planned. On the night of the potion Juliet asks to be left alone to pray, ‘To move the heavens to smile upon my state’, then imagines the plan failing (‘I wake before the time’) and drinks. Fate is silent in 4.4 as the house bustles round a drugged bride, and in 4.5 the Friar who mixed the 'death' tells the mourners ‘The heavens do lour upon you for some ill’. No extract has come from Act 4: bring it to a fate answer as the act in which people try to manage chance.

• What must be shall be.¹

  Spoken between two plans for her, Paris's Thursday and, less than fifty lines later, the Friar's plan: the play's plainest sentence of necessity comes just as people set about arranging what will happen.

  In the exam

  Use it to show that the language of fate is often a tool characters use on each other, here to keep a secret from Paris.

• Hold, daughter,¹ I do spy a kind of hope,² / Which craves as desperate³ an execution / As that is desperate which we would prevent.

  Here the Friar's hope becomes a script: the vial, the timetable and the letter that follow are all his, so the chance that later undoes the lovers runs through a design he chose.

  In the exam

  On a Friar's-plans question, make this the plan's starting point, so that his later cry of 'Unhappy fortune!' can be judged as an author's, not a bystander's.

• I'll send a friar with speed¹ / To Mantua with my letters to thy lord.

  The whole plan now hangs on one messenger, unnamed and unseen, and the audience is shown the weak link with no way to warn anyone.

  In the exam

  Use it to argue that the tragedy's chance is built into a human plan: the Friar chose a scheme with a single point of failure.

• I'll have this knot knit up¹ tomorrow morning.²

  Not tagged with fate, this line is here because it moves the clock: the wedding comes forward a day, Juliet must drink a night early, and the plan has a day less in which to reach Romeo. A father's choice works on the plot like an accident.

  In the exam

  Use it in the fate-against-choice judgement as a choice that behaves like chance: nobody on stage can see that it is fatal, and it shortens the Friar's plan by a night.

• How if, when I am laid into the tomb,¹ / I wake before the time² that Romeo / Come to redeem³ me? There's a fearful point.⁴

  Alone with the vial, Juliet weighs the plan's odds without naming any star or Fortune: this fear is about timing, and she drinks with the risk in full view, a choice made against chance, not in ignorance of it.

  In the exam

  Set her 'before the time' beside the Friar's 'some minute ere the time' (5.3) to argue that fate in this play is measured in minutes, then ask whose choices shortened them.

Act 5 is fate's act, and it opens with a dream that comes true backwards: ‘I dreamt my lady came and found me dead’, Romeo says, and her kisses brought him back to life. Then Balthasar brings the news all Verona believes, and Romeo answers in a breath: he refuses the stars, orders horses, asks a second time for the Friar's letters and, told there are none, says ‘No matter’. He buys poison from a man whose poverty, not his will, consents. In 5.2 the audience learns why no letter came: Friar John never left Verona, because the town's searchers sealed him into a house suspected of plague, and the Friar cries ‘Unhappy fortune!’. Here choice and chance run side by side and never meet: Romeo's speed and the sealed house each do half the work. No extract has come from Act 5, so a fate answer must arrive here from memory.

• I dreamt my lady came and found me dead¹ / (Strange dream that gives a dead man leave to think!)² / And breathed such life with kisses in my lips³ / That I revived and was an emperor.⁴

  This omen arrives garbled, like the play's messages: right in its picture, wrong in its meaning. Romeo read his dread in 1.4 rightly and went in anyway; this time the dream comforts him and misleads him.

  In the exam

  Set the true dread of 1.4 against this false comfort: the omen Romeo trusts is the one that lies.

• Is it e'en so?¹ Then² I deny³ you, stars!⁴

  Romeo's first cry at the news is not to Juliet or to God but to the stars: his grief comes out as a quarrel with fate, and the quarrel is already a plan.

  In the exam

  Use it with the dream that opens the scene: in about twenty lines Romeo goes from trusting an omen to refusing the stars, so 5.1 shows his relation to fate reversed in a single scene.

• My poverty,¹ but not my will,² consents.³

  The last human link in the chain says he is not choosing at all: need, not will, sells the poison.

  In the exam

  Use it to set two kinds of agency side by side in one sale: Romeo claiming his choice, the Apothecary handing his to hunger.

• the searchers¹ of the town, / Suspecting² that we both were in a house / Where the infectious pestilence³ did reign, / Sealed up the doors⁴ and would not let us forth

  This is the one link that nobody in the lovers' story could prevent: officials following plague rules shut a friar in a house. Taken alone it is chance; it becomes the fated reading's strongest evidence only as one of a run of accidents that all fall one way.

  In the exam

  Use it as the counter in a 'choices' thesis: here no one's choice is at fault, so concede chance its part before you weigh it.

• Unhappy fortune!¹ By my brotherhood, / The letter was not nice but full of charge,² / Of dear import, and the neglecting it / May do much danger.³

  After the cry he resolves to write again, though the audience has just watched Romeo set out for Juliet's grave with poison: the old man's answer to a failed letter is another letter, and Act 5 becomes a race he does not know he is losing.

  In the exam

  Use it to show the old making the young man's move: a plan fails, and Fortune is named before any thought of fault.

In the tomb the names for fate move from the stars to heaven as the speakers grow older. Romeo kills Paris, takes his hand as one ‘writ with me in sour misfortune's book’, and drinks poison to be rid of the stars. The Friar arrives minutes late, blames ‘an unkind hour’, tells Juliet that a greater power has thwarted them, and runs when he hears the Watch. Juliet names no power at all: she refuses to go and stabs herself with Romeo's dagger. At the inquest the Friar calls the sealed house an accident and offers his life if anything ‘Miscarried by my fault’. The Prince's verdict finds causes in heaven, the feud and the ruler together. Bring 5.3 into every fate answer: this is where the play judges.

• O, here / Will I set up my everlasting rest¹ / And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars^2,3 / From this world-wearied flesh!⁴

  The dread of 1.4 returns fulfilled, in a new grammar: there the stars' 'consequence' did all the acting; here Romeo is the subject of every verb ('Will I set up', 'shake'). The lover who once let fate act on him now acts, and the act is the one the Prologue foretold.

  In the exam

  Pair it with 'hanging in the stars' (1.4) to argue that Romeo takes the ending into his own hands.

• Come, bitter conduct,¹ come, unsavory guide! / Thou desperate pilot,² now at once run on / The dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark!³

  Moments after shaking off the stars, Romeo's sentence is all commands ('Come', 'run on'), and the one thing left to command is the poison: in the tomb the grammar of fate is the imperative, and every order is his.

  Key word: ‘desperate’

  'Desperate' means beyond hope, and it is the word the Friar used for his own remedy in 4.1, a hope that 'craves as desperate an execution'. The old man's desperate plan and the young man's desperate act meet in the tomb, minutes apart.

  In the exam

  Use it to end a Romeo-and-fate argument on agency, not surrender.

• A greater power than we can contradict¹ / Hath thwarted our intents.² Come, come away. / Thy husband in thy bosom there lies dead,³ / And Paris, too.

  Its listener is the one person who has just woken into its results: told in one breath that a power has intervened and that her husband is dead, Juliet answers neither the theology nor the news, only the order to leave, and refuses it.

  In the exam

  On a Friar question, test his faith against his conduct: in one speech he names a greater power, warns that the Watch is coming and goes, and Juliet stays.

• Where be these enemies?¹ Capulet, Montague, / See what a scourge² is laid upon your hate, / That heaven⁴ finds means to kill your joys with love³

  In the Prince's line heaven's 'means' is love; in the play we watched, the means were a guest list, a fight, a moved wedding and a sealed house. He gathers them into one design after the event, which is how the play's elders read fate.

  In the exam

  Use it to close the frame: the Prologue's stars and parents return as heaven and 'your hate', so the ending joins the two causes the opening left unranked.

• And I,¹ for winking² at your discords too, / Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punished.³

  Not tagged with fate, it is here because it follows heaven at once: the ruler who has just named heaven's means names his own fault, 'winking at your discords'.

  In the exam

  End a fate essay here: the play does not choose between heaven and people, so let your judgement weigh both.