Scholars agree that Shakespeare's plot had its origin in the literature of Renaissance Italy beginning with Luigi da Porto's Istoria Novvellamente Rivovata di Due Nobili Amante. This is based on the social and political conditions of the first half of Fourteenth Century documenting the violent life of some Italian City States in which bloody feuds between dominant clans, here the Montecchi and Cappellelli families were common. Da Porto's story was popularised by its re-telling in Matteo Bandello's collection of stories in 1554 and a French by Pierre Boaiastau five years later. This, in turn, inspired Arthur Brooke's 1562 long poem, The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet and the prose version "The goodly history of the true and constant love between Rhomeo and Julietta" in William Painter's The Palace of Pleasure. Shakespeare seems to have been familiar with these English-language versions, particularly Brooke's poem, from which he took the outline of every character except Mercutio, but he adapted the narrative further by, for example, reducing Juliet's age to fourteen.

Romeo & Juliet has been performed in an enormous variety of styles. It has been updated, relocated, and whole chunks of it rewritten. For two centuries it was played with a happy ending. In Shakespeare's day the play had, of course, been performed by an all-male cast but in the mid-Nineteenth Century, particularly in America, it became fashionable for Romeo to be played by a woman en travestie! Dance, too, has seen curious adaptations of the play. Vincenzo Galeotti's 1811 Copenhagen production was hampered by a 51-year-old Romeo and Bronislava Nijinska's 1926 surreal Romeo & Juliet saw hero and heroine elope in a plane. Various music, original compositions and adaptations, has been used but it was with Serge Prokofiev's score Romeo became part of the standard repertory of leading dance companies. As the 1930s Soviet authorities were dictating how Prokofiev's work should be developed, requesting reconciliations and group rejoicing as the finale, he agreed to the first performance of the work (then considerably shorter than it is now) being presented by Ivo Vâno Posta in Brüno in Czechoslovakia in 1938. This production combined classical and modern dance techniques avoiding pointe-work for Zora Semberov as Juliet as she felt conventional ballet would prevent her from expressing the emotional subtlety of Prokofiev's music.

The success of the Brüno production encouraged the Soviet authorities to accept a tragic Romeo & Juliet and Léonide Lavrovsky's 1940 Kirov ballet exerted an enormous influence on productions for the next three decades. The most widely performed version is Kenneth MacMillan's choreographed in 1965 which also derived many of its ideas from Franco Zefferelli's landmark 1960 staging of the play at the Old Vic. Similarly ideas, notably the comradeship between Romeo and his friends, Mercutio's fake death and the duel scene played for laughs, filtered into Nureyev's production from Trevor Nunn's 1976-77 Royal Shakespeare Company production. Dance versions of Romeo & Juliet have now moved further away from Kirov's 1940 portrayal. Recent productions, such as Robert North's for Geneva and Angelin Preljiocaj's 1990 version for Lyon Opera Ballet which presented Verona as an Orwellian world of terror and surveillance, have used more contemporary styles of choreography.

Like the original production of Prokofiev's Romeo & Juliet Nureyev's version incorporates a range of dance-styles, contemporary and classical, to enrich the production which is a remarkably literal re-telling of the play in dance. Nureyev, for example, does not rely on his audiences' familiarity with the plot and includes scenes such as those relating to Romeo's stay in Mantua, the failure of Friar Laurence's message to reach him and the tragic consequence of Benvolio bringing him news of Juliet's death. He is also aware that the play is more than a simple paean of romantic love. Nureyev's great achievement is his rich portrayal of Renaissance society and the symbolic imagery drawn from Shakespeare's text that he has meshed into his own Romeo & Juliet.