What do you think is the reason for the bad blood between the Montagues and Capulets?

Answer 1

Shakespeare's play doesn't say any more than it is an "ancient grudge". From the point of view of the play, the reason for the enmity is irrelevant. However, from a strictly academic standpoint, it is interesting to note that one of the Italian versions of the story, that of Luigi da Porto in 1530, altered the previous versions of the story by setting it in Verona and naming the main characters Guiletta Capuletti and Romeo Montecchi. The Capuletti and Montecchi families were real families referred to in Dante's Inferno, although the Capuleti were from Cremona, not Verona. The Montecchi were Ghibellines and the Capuleti were Guelfs, members of two bitterly opposed factions in Italian politics from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. In broad terms, the Ghibellines held that the ultimate source of political authority was the Holy Roman Emperor, whereas the Guelfs held that the ultimate source of political authority was the Pope. The Ghibellines tended to be aristocratic; the Guelfs bourgeois. Ultimately the rivalry became as bitter, silly and irrelevant as it is shown to be in Shakespeare's play. Indeed in 1325 Guelfs in Bologna declared war on Modena because some Ghibellines from Modena had stolen a wooden bucket belonging to the city of Bologna. Luigi da Porto's story specifically sets the tale in the early years of the fourteenth century, about the same time as the war of the bucket and is clearly the direct ancestor of Arthur Brooke's poem, Shakespeare's source for the play.