During the 16th century, many English dramatists and poets adapted a wide range of Italian stories and poetry to create their own material. The availability of these sources reflects the English interest in Italian culture during this period as the influence of the Italian Renaissance spread. The term Renaissance means "rebirth" and refers to the period after the Middle Ages when a revival of interest in classical Roman and Greek culture emerged. Beginning in the mid-14th century in Italy, the Renaissance was a period of rapid discovery and development, gradually moving northwards across the rest of Europe.
One Italian source that Shakespeare draws upon in Romeo and Juliet is Francesco Petrarch, 1304-1374, an Italian scholar and poet, who was responsible for developing the sonnet. The poems, which Petrarch wrote for the lady he admired, describe the process of falling in love and courtship, according to medieval ideas of courtly love and chivalry. Translated into English and published in 1557, the sonnets were extremely popular, so English sonnet writers imitated and developed Petrarch's conventions.
A sonnet is a poem made up of 14 lines of iambic pentameter. That is, each line consists of ten syllables with a regular rhyme scheme. Both the prologues to Act I and Act II in Romeo and Juliet, as well as Romeo and Juliet's first exchanges in Act I, Scene 5, are sonnets. The sonnet can be traced by identifying the rhyme at the end of each line, starting, for example, with Romeo's line: "If I profane with my unworthiest hand" down to: "Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take." The first rhyming line may be called A and the second B, until the pattern ABAB CDCD EFEF GG is completed.
