The story of these two lovers was popular in England and other parts of Europe long before Shakespeare wrote the famous play. Shakespeare’s chief source was a poem written by Arthur Brooke in 1562, titled ‘The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet’. Brooke’s poem was in fact a free translation of a French story by Pierre Boaistuau (1566). The source for this story, in turn, was another story by an Italian writer named Mateo Bandello. Several variations of this tale existed long before that, but it was a writer named Da Porto who first named the lovers as Romeo and Giulietta, and set the action in Verona.
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