Romeo and Juliet is a play created by William Shakespeare to conceptualize his idea of the highest form of love. This play is meant to show, through example, what real love is; and the desperate measures one would take to maintain such love. Love through Shakespeare's vision is meant to be the ultimate emotion, the one feeling which one would risk their very being to possess. Shakespeare captures that feeling in the final scene of the play when Romeo and Juliet both end their own lives when they believe they will never feel such powerful love again. However, this "suicide impulse" that both Juliet and Romeo exhibit does not relate to the play's theme of the highest form of love, but it relates to another theme in the play: the theme of young, desperate love.
             Not "young" as in the adolescent minds of Romeo and Juliet, but "young" in the sense that these two lovers have only known each other for such a small period of time. Throughout the entire play, which is based on the relationship of these two characters, Romeo and Juliet only have four encounters. The first at Capulet's feast; where the two first meet each other (1.5, 94-111), the second in the Capulet courtyard, in front of Juliet's window (2.2), the third encounter is in the secret garden where Romeo and Juliet are wed (2.6), and the final encounter, before their deaths, is in Juliet's bedroom, when they make love for the first time (3.5, 1-59). Basically, these two youths have fallen in the "highest form of love" with each other with only using a few lines of dialogue, as they had already known they were in love at their first encounter.
             As for their age, Romeo is in his late teens or early twenties (the text is not specific on Romeo's age) and Juliet is still only a child at age thirteen (1.3, 18). Although it is obvious that Romeo and Juliet certainly are exceptional people, with exceptional...