The plot concerns three families and two codes of conduct. Everyone remembers the Capulets and the Montagues, but it is important to remember that there is another family as well, the family that comprises Prince Escalus, Mercutio, and Paris (3.1.145; 5.3.75, 295); we’ll see soon that the kinship of these three disparate men is significant. Similarly, everyone remembers that there is a code that governs the behavior of the elders of the play, but it is important to remember that there is another code, the code of Romeo and Juliet, which assaults the first code. The code of the young lovers is subversive, but the protocols of its subversion are wholly formalized and articulate. It is as if there were Ten Commandments for the ordinary folk, and ten more commandments—written in smaller print—for those who chose to disobey the first set of rules. The world of Verona has many possibilities for transgression, but all lawbreakers are caught up in some minuet or other, for transgression is itself a dance. First we’ll examine the social code, then the code of love.

The tenets of the Veronese social code are many and complicated, regulating everything from table manners to the construction of rituals for marriage and burial; and the code is made still more complicated by the existence of subcodes, since the upper and the lower classes, the young and the old, the clergy and the laity, all live by slightly different rules, within a general field of agreement. The decorum of the older upper classes can be gathered from the speeches and behavior of Capulet and Lady Capulet. They are a pair of ceremonious tribalists, who believe that true intimacy is a direct function of the immediacy of family relation. Here the chief rule is: blood is thicker than water. Honor, therefore, is essentially familial, not personal, and an insult to one Capulet is an insult to all; as Mervyn James puts it, “a man's very being as honourable had been transmitted to him with the blood of his ancestors, themselves honourable men. Honour therefore was not merely an individual possession, but that of a collectivity.”