Even Capulet tries to encourage Count Paris, a wealthy suitor, to wait a little longer before even thinking of marrying his daughter, feeling that she is still too young; "She hath not seen the change of fourteen years, Let two more summers wither in their pride, Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride". However, in the English poem the story is based on (Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke)The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, Arthur Brooke. Juliet is approaching her sixteenth birthday and Romeo is the same age whereas in the Bandello novella she is nearly eighteen with Romeo about twenty. The common English people of that age were very rarely in their teens when they married and even among the nobility and gentry of the age, brides 13 years of age were rare, at about one in 1,000 brides; in that era, the vast majority of English brides were at least 19 years of age when they first married, most commonly at about 23 years, and most English noblewomen were at least 16 when they married. That the parts of young women were played by pre-adolescent boys in Shakespeare's day also cannot be overlooked; it is possible that Shakespeare had the physique of a young boy in mind during composition, in addition to the fact that Romeo and Juliet are of wealthy families and would be more likely to marry earlier than commoners. At the time, English noblewomen married on average at 19–21 years (compared to 24–26 years for English noblemen) while the average marriage age in England was 25–26 years for women and 27–28 for men; Sir Thomas More wrote in his Utopia that, in Utopia, women must be at least 18 years of age when they marry and men at least 22 years.
