During the course of the play, Romeo grows to manhood. When we first meet him he is a stereotype of the lover: cherishing solitude and night, pensive, pale and sad. He assumes all the attitudes of a rejected suitor, he writes poetry; his speech is a series of contradictory exclamations. At this moment, Romeo knows no more about love than what he has read in the books he emulates, and he is actually in love with love. His posturing makes him the brunt of much joking on the part of his friends, Mercutio and Benvolio. These two worldly, witty men have loved Romeo for his own devil-may-care brilliance, and they sense that his present hang-dog attitudes are not true to him. Their judgment is correct, for all Romeo's mooning about ceases when he meets Juliet, and in loving her he discovers that joy, not sadness, is part of love. After arranging for his marriage to Juliet, Romeo meets Mercutio and Benvolio. His wit is all air and fire, and he parries each of Mercutio's verbal thrusts so brightly that Mercutio is wholly charmed, and welcomes back the true Romeo.
But the true Romeo has not yet fully emerged. He is not only a courtly, carefree young man. He is capable of the deepest passions of love. In his initial courtship of Juliet, at her father's party and in the orchard, Romeo's entrancement is still, though feelingly, expressed in somewhat typical gestures of holy adoration. His comparison of Juliet to the source of all light is not wholly new either. For Romeo is not an original lover; he is the epitome of all romantic lovers, the consummate lover. In the love duets, the heights of his imagination and expression are equaled by Juliet. It is the thoroughness of his loving, his complete lack of conflict or hesitation in any matter that concerns Juliet, the utter commitment with which he abandons himself to the intense, swift passion, which distinguishes him as a lover. Romeo is not practical or realistic, but his preoccupation is not necessarily indicative of dreamy absent-mindedness.
