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Your Dad hates that guy you’re dating. Your Mom can’t stand the “tramp” you just took to the Prom.

Sound familiar? Then you understand the enduring appeal of The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. But Shakespeare has more in mind than a story about teen lovers from opposite sides of the railroad tracks. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare considers the price of bigotry, and offers a sobering morality tale-for-the-ages.

Video Transcription:

Have you ever fallen for a guy—or girl—whom you knew your parents were totally going to hate? Stinks, right? Romeo and Juliet thought so. Turns out that their story’s not so different than yours.

So if you thought your parents were tough on your boyfriend or girlfriend, imagine being a member of the Montague or Capulet families. Shakespeare spells out the problem in the first four lines of the play:

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

In other words, the Montagues and Capulets have a years-long feud going, and having their kids fall in love is not going to make things better.

So then the big question of this play is: Who’s at fault?

Is it the passionate young lovers, Romeo and Juliet, who meet one night and, get this, are married the next day?

That’s a little hasty.

Then again, isn’t the problem that their parents are feuding? The blood in this play is spilled as a result of the Montague-Capulet conflict. And the lovers eventually kill themselves because the feud would otherwise keep them apart.

It’s not until half of the central characters are dead that the Montagues and Capulets decide to reconcile.

So what’s Shakespeare’s point? Keep watching to find out.