To what extent is Romeo and Juliet a tragedy?

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy about a couple who stake everything on the pleasure of “one short minute”. Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Romeo and Juliet is unusually full of words relating to time and specific days of the week, giving us “a sense of events moving steadily and inexorably in a taut temporal framework”, as Blakemore argues. Indeed, Monday is mentioned twice, Wednesday thrice, and Thursday fourteen times, with other time references totalling one hundred and three. Romeo and Juliet is a play obsessed with the time, “the devourer of things”, as Ovid’s famous dictum tempus edax rerum puts it. The play starts on Sunday morning and ends on dawn of the following Thursday. It is a play about the tragic destructiveness of time. The forces of love are annexed by the forces of death - a common trope of tragedy. Mercutio’s mention of Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Hero and Thisbe in Act 2 Scene 4 might be in jest but all five of these figures are tragic legendary lovers. We are made to think the same of Romeo and Juliet. After all, from the opening chorus we are told that they are “death-marked”. They are not shapers of their destiny, as the active word “take” in the line “a pair of star-crossed lovers take their life” might suggest, rather victims of fate. Family loyalties and a concatenation of accidents ensure that their lovers would never flourish. Perhaps even more depressing is that Shakespeare suggests they may not even be together in death. On realising Romeo has committed suicide, Juliet thinks that by taking the poison it will “make [her] die with a restorative” - thus rejoining her with her dead husband. However, according to vows of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, lovers are one “till death us depart”. We are presented with a “love-devouring death” - a death that love cannot overcome.