When Berlioz came to write Roméo et Juliette, he therefore faced a twin problem: first, to tell an exciting story; second, to untell the story, to move into a region beyond narrative and drama. He read Shakespeare's play (in French translation, and haltingly in the original) in order to seek clues for achieving the peculiar dramatic rhythm he sought; and he may have pondered a number of operas on the Romeo and Juliet theme, by Daniel Steibelt (1793), Nicolas-Marie Dalayrac (1792), Niccolò Zingarelli (1796), Nicola Vaccai (1825), and, of course, Bellini (1830). (We know that Berlioz had heard Bellini's opera by 1831; he mentioned the other operas in a feuilleton of 1859, and it isn't certain that he knew them before writing his own Roméo et Juliette.) He found little to please him in any of these works, grumbling at the general absence of Mercutio, the Nurse, and Rosaline—all the jejune or grotesque peripheral characters who were to Berlioz (as to Hugo) the hallmarks of Shakespeare's art. Furthermore, he detested the decision, by all three Italian composers, to assign the role of Romeo to a female voice:

Berlioz preferred an explicit contrast of gender—though a partisan of Bellini might point out, first, that Shakespeare's own theatre had a Romeo and Juliet of the same gender, and second, that the Romeo of Bellini and his librettist, Felice Romani, is a far more masculine and warlike character than Shakespeare's— Romani's Romeo is an experienced commander of troops who plans to snatch Juliet by force of arms from the bosom of the Capulets. In any case, when Berlioz came to write his own version of the tale, he dispensed with human voices entirely for the roles of Romeo and Juliet, and allowed them to be portrayed by orchestral instruments that could assume different registers or the same register, thereby heightening or flattening the contrast between the lovers at the composer's pleasure.