It has been said that with his play, Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare is holding a mirror to his audience and telling them, “Look.” For this play was not only entertainment, but also a reflection of Elizabethan society. In it the audience saw themselves, and now it gives audiences today a glimpse of life in Shakespeare. By including the concept of arranged marriages and the role of women, Shakespeare portrays the faults in Elizabethan society in Romeo and Juliet. One of the aspects of the Elizabethan Age challenged in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was the negative side of arranged marriages, by introducing the reader to the characterization of Lord and Lady Capulet’s marriage and Juliet and Romeo’s. In many upper class families, like the Capulets, children would be married off based on “property and dynastic power” (Watts 77). It was believed that this would lead to a prosperous and fruitful marriage. Shakespeare contests this idea by presenting his audience with the strained marriage of Lord and Lady. Throughout the play, Lady Capulet insults her husband and references the fact that he is many years her senior: “A crutch, a crutch. Why call you for a sword” (I.i.70). Occasionally, there were marriages in which the husband was twice the age of his wife or more. For example Richard II married Isabella of France who was only six years old, King Henry IV married an eleven year old who then “produced a baby within a year”, and Lady Capulet wed a man many years older than herself (Watts 77). It can be assumed that these marriages were met with many unhappy years together. To prevent the same fate from occurring to his young daughter, Capulet delays the marriage between Juliet and Paris, and responds, “And too soon marred are those so early made”, implying the tension in his marriage (I.ii.13). On the other hand, Shakespeare includes the component of Romeo and Juliet’s love and marriage, to illustrate a str