Peter Holland sees Shakespeare’s story of the suicidal lovers Romeo and Juliet as a ‘tragedy of incompletion’ and points to the array of broken sonnets in the play as part of a larger pattern of gaps and errors which drives and crashes the plot.1 Holland cites these ‘teasing games’ with the sonnet shape as evidence of the ‘tension between the possibilities of patterning and order and the recognition of the temporary and evanescent nature of such possibilities’, but this tension erupts in more searing ways as well, bringing down other lives in the process. Not merely interested in those accidents and interruptions which delay or derail what happens on Verona’s streets, Shakespeare also concerns himself with the skill exquisitely deployed in the project of destroying young lives. He maps out in Romeo and Juliet the workings of a deeper, unerring logic insisting that young people in this world grow up to die.