Possibly Shakespeare's best-known play. Everyone knows the story of star-crossed lovers who defied their families, the feuding Capulets and Montagues, and ended their lives tragically. Romeo and Juliet is a play with something for everyone — romance, intrigue, sword-fighting, wonderful poetry, comedy and tragedy. But it's the romance between the youngsters that Romeo and Juliet is most remembered for. The word Romeo has become a synonym for lover. Everyone can quote a few lines from the balcony scene.

I have little to say about this. It's simply beautiful and heart-breaking.

It's just a terrifically well constructed, felt and written play. Probably the first drama in which it all came together perfectly for Shakespeare. His first truly great play. He'd write many more even greater, but never another like Romeo and Juliet. Perhaps because it's a great play by a very young man (he was about 22). He would never in a later play be quite so exuberantly self-righteous in his proclamation of right. Never again so innocent in tragedy — Romeo and Juliet are the only tragic figures in Shakespeare's canon I can think of who are not done in by their own fatal flaws. Unless love is a character flaw, and Shakespeare is several years short of that kind of cynicism in Romeo and Juliet. 

In fact, you could map out the play as detailing Shakespeare's early maturation. Something of this sort is done in the recent film Shakespeare in Love, which show events in the struggling young bard's life that helped inspire the play. It's all made-up of course and at least one of my friends considers the film a travesty. But, with the majority of filmgoers, I think it captures the spirit of Romeo and Juliet itself.