From the famous prologue of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to the Prince's closing statement at the play's end, fate weaves its way through the title characters' lives. Not only does the audience find out in the play's opening lines that Romeo and Juliet take their lives at some point during the play--which is admittedly ill-fated--but they are also forewarned that the young people are "star-crossed lovers," which implies that their destinies cannot converge successfully. From the moment they are born into feuding families, Romeo and Juliet's fate is to die in order to bring about peace. Shakespeare writes that "the continuance of their parents' rage, / Which, but their children's end, naught could remove" (Prologue, Lines 10-11), meaning that the grudge between the Capulets and Montagues is so strong that absolutely nothing other than each family's loss of a child could stop the feud.
During Acts II-IV, Romeo and Juliet seemingly cannot take a step without their family backgrounds hindering their relationship. Whether a scene involves Juliet's hotheaded cousin Tybalt insulting and causing trouble for Romeo and his friends, or the Nurse and Friar Laurence entangling themselves in the secretive relationship between the teens, or Romeo killing Tybalt and being banished, one cannot deny that none of these actions would have been necessary had not the pair been born into families which hate each other.
Finally, at the play's end, the Prince blames the Capulets and Montagues' hate for the deaths of their children and states that "heaven finds means to kill your joys with love!" (5.3.293)--thus, even true love between the young couple could not disrupt "heaven's" plan to end the ancient feud. After his admonishment of the families of the dead, the Prince acknowledges that even elements of nature such as the sun mourn the lovers' dreadful fate and closes by claiming that
"never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo" (5.3.309-310).
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