Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare's most well known plays.

It's also largely a retelling of an Italian novella by Matteo Bandello, translated with a rather adroit spoiler in the title as "Of the sad end of two hapless lovers, one dying of poison, and the other of grief; together with sundry events". You can buy it as part of a collection on bookshop.org.

A lot of Bandello's works were in turn inspired by fabliaux, stories circulated in the late middle ages by minstrels touring France and later spread across Europe, who entertained their audiences with comedic and dramatic verse with musical interludes.

The format of these fabliaux were also direct inspiration for several of the Canterbury Tales.

A precis of the cast members in a fabliau helps explain why they, and Chaucer and Shakespeare, are still so relevant today:

Typical fabliaux contain a vast array of characters, including cuckolded husbands, rapacious clergy, and foolish peasants, as well as beggars, connivers, thieves, and whores.