summarise this text as bullet points: The key point should become clear if we turn to one of Shakespeare’s earliest tragedies, Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare’s immortal couple have become a global byword for lovers driven unjustly to their doom because they belong to warring factions that refuse to tolerate their love. During the last four centuries the play has inspired countless adaptations and offshoots on stage and screen, as well as operas, symphonies, fiction, poetry and paintings. But Romeo and Juliet couldn’t have acquired its enduring resonance, if the significance and value of the tragedy were trapped in the time when Shakespeare wrote it. If the play made sense and mattered only in terms of that time, it wouldn’t be able to reach across the centuries and speak with such urgency to so many different cultures now. That Romeo and Juliet is rooted in the age of Shakespeare, and can’t be fully understood without some knowledge of the world it sprang from, hardly needs demonstrating. But no critical account or production can do justice to Romeo and Juliet, if it’s not alert to the ways in which it was far ahead of Shakespeare’s time and is still far ahead of ours too.