A 13-year-old girl attends a party. A boy falls instantly in love with her. Within a week, the boy and girl are dead. It's the most famous love story ever told. But who is Juliet Capulet?

In Juliet, Oxford Shakespeare scholar Sophie Duncan shows us how drama's most famous teenage girl has been reshaped and repurposed throughout her long history. Juliet's legacy has stretched beyond her literary lifespan into an extensive cultural afterlife far greater than the history of her play. Duncan argues that our dangerous obsession with the beautiful dead girl and Juliet's meteoric rise as a defiant sexual icon have come to define the western ideal of romance.