As Romeo and Juliet developed in time, changing from figments derived from lyric poetry into sentimental adolescents, they also migrated through space, returning to the Romance languages from which they came. Shakespeare had found the characters and plot in a long, edifying poem by Arthur Brooke, who in turn had inherited the story from a number of French and Italian sources; but when, in the eighteenth century, Romeo and Juliet returned to their native lands, they came speaking an English accent, at once familiar and strange.

For the most influential Continental critic of the eighteenth century, Voltaire, Shakespeare was the enemy of dramatic art. Voltaire lived for a time in England, and had far more experience with Shakespeare than most of his European contemporaries. What he found in Shakespeare was simply chaos—a barbarous disregard for the unities of time and place, and a vulgar love for mixing the noble and the ignoble. Voltaire cringed to hear the jokes of Roman cobblers in a scene from Julius Caesar where Brutus and Cassius discoursed; and he was sickened by the gravediggers in Hamlet, singing ballads as they dug up old skulls. According to Voltaire's Letters Concerning the English Nation (1734), Shakespeare was a genius of disgust:

But in a century's time, these censures would start to sound like praise.