STRATFORD, Conn.--In all literature there exists no more famous, more popular or more influential a love story than Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. And if one extends the field to music, only Wagner's Tristan and Isolde can rival it.

Yet for all the play's reputation I have to admit that I can't share the general enthusiasm for it as a stage vehicle. Shakespeare was still an immature playwright when he wrote it, and the quality of the result soars and plunges like a fever chart. Much of the work is too artificial, much of the punning too protracted, much of the diction rhetorically overwrought.

Shakespeare was repeatedly showing off. There are numerous setpieces that, while lovely poetry in themselves, impede the dramatic flow. And he imposes on his dialogue a number of traditional forms from outside the theater. For instance, the lovers' first meeting is cast in the mold of one complete Elizabethan sonnet and part of a second; their postnuptial parting is a Provencal alba (which the Bard may have known through Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and which reaches its peak of effectiveness in the second act of the aforementioned Tristan); Juliet declaims a Classical epithalamium; and Paris delivers an elegy.

Shakespeare ends his entrancing balcony scene by giving Juliet a godawful valedictory couplet; and, when she is discovered apparently lifeless, the Nurse's "O woeful day" speech is embarrassing. Then there are those two short consecutive scenes that inflict the words "banished" and "banishment" on us no less than 26 times. Not even General St. Pe's repeated references to his "seventeen years" of marriage in Waltz of the Toreadors can come close to the numbing annoyance of this portion of Romeo.

Still and all, the play was the finest tragedy yet written in English, and it provided us with Shakespeare's first great female role. But I suspect even the dramatist himself had some doubts about his ability to handle tragedy at this stage of his career, for he lay the genre aside for some years and turned his efforts to penning a slew of histories and comedies. By no means would I wish to do without the play; it contains plenty of things to cherish, in addition to serving as the material for three masterpieces far greater than the play itself: Berlioz's "dramatic symphony," Prokofiev's banst and Bernstein's West Side Story, which remains to this day the high point in the history of the American musical.

The stage history of Romeo and Juliet is unusually curious. For a time the ending was changed to keep Romeo and Juliet happily alive (for a century and a half King Lear was performed with a similar happy ending). Then for 165 years Juliet was made to revive before Romeo's death, to permit the two a teary dialogue of farewell.

In the Elizabethan period the role of Juliet was played by a young boy, Mary Saunderson in 1662 being the first woman to assume the part. But in the 19th century the original practice was stood on its head, and there was quite a vogue of giving the role of Romeo to such women as Lydia Kelly, Priscilla Horton, Ellen Tree, Mrs. H.B. Conway, and Charlotte Cushman (playing opposite her sister's Juliet until she herself switched to the female part). One year George Rignold was advertised to give a performance of Romeo with seven different Juliets, but the promise fell one short when an actress defected.

The chief curiosity in the current Stratford version is director Michael Kahn's decision to relocate the play in 1866. Personally I'd prefer a Rinascimento Romeo to a Risorgimento one. But first love, youthful rambunctiousness and the generation gap (a favorite theme with Shakespeare, as witness Lear, Cymbeline, Othello, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest among others) are universal, and Kahn's choice is perfectly defensible. Shakespeare specified a Verona summer. In 1866, Verona, the episcopal see of the Venetia region abutting Austria, was a hotbed of turmoil, a pawn in the seven-week Austro-Prussian War, during which it was finally ceded by Austria to Italy.

It is undeniably a treat to look at Jane Greenwood's 19th-century costumes--the young men's informal garb, jackets slung over their shoulders during the sultry daytime hours; the spruce blue military uniforms with epaulets and fourrageres; the servants' red velvet cutaways at the ball.

John Conklin has designed a versatile buff-colored unit set. There is a balconied building to the right, with a console-supported bust ornamenting one wall. To the rear stands a gateway and wall. In the center is a rectangular cistern, which, with the dropping from the grid of a canopy or crucifix, can be covered in a trice to become Juliet's bed or Friar Laurence's altar. A few chairs and round tables turn the building into a sidewalk cafe, with an organ-grinder on hand to increase authenticity.

The dominating image in the play's text is light--in all its manifestations. And Marc Weiss, outdoing himself, has obviously labored with love to provide a succession of beautifully lit scenes. Particularly charming are the flickering rows of multicolored candleglasses that grace the upstairs windows overlooking the Capulets' ball. To preserve the flavor of 19th-century Italy, Roland Gagnon has rounded up his bits of incidental music from the works of Verdi.

Romeo and Juliet is unique in Shakespeare's output for containing, in the Chorus' Prologue, the playwright's own view of the overall import of the sad outcome, which he attributes to evil destiny and the parents' feud. Romeo and Juliet themselves are not tragic figures in the classical sense. It is the parents who exhibit a "tragic flaw," and thus are made to suffer through the needless loss of their children.

While this is a play of love and violence, it is also a play about haste. Almost all the characters, young and old, behave impetuously without giving thought to the implications of their actions. Friar Laurence voices the lesson: "They stumble that run fast."

The work, along with Macbeth, is one of the two most swiftly moving in the whole canon; Shakespeare compressed the nine months of the original source into a mere five days. Kahn has generally kept things going at a good clip. The show has a playing time of exactly three hours. Kahn has cut less from the text than what we find in many productions. He includes the Chorus' opening prologue (with the final death-scene mimed behind), as well as the prologue to Act II.

Shakespeare failed to carry through as he did in Henry V, where the Chorus frames all five acts. And since the prologues in Romeo are both formal sonnets, Kahn has compensated by fleshing out the scheme through having the Chorus speak Sonnets 116 and 55 later on, as further commentary on the play. At other times, the strawhatted, bespectacled Chorus (the reliable Philip Kerr) wanders in and out, or leans against a column reading a newspaper--a silent observer of Verona life. A felicitous solution.