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.

Ultimately, of course, any production succeeds or fails on the strength of its Romeo and its Juliet. Every director must confront a wellnigh insuperable difficulty: Shakespeare presents not just a tale of young love, but of adolescent love. The two lovers are teenagers, and they speak and act as teenagers; the dramatist left no doubt about this. Originally there was no special problem, since Juliet was played by a young boy, and great care was taken in the training of young performers generally.

In Bandello's novella, Juliet was 18 years old. In Brooke's poem, which was Shakespeare's immediate source, she became 16. The playwright, however, for reasons never convincingly argued, makes Juliet a couple weeks short of her fourteenth birthday, and underlines her age several times. Romeo is some years older, but still an immature teenager.

In modern times, performers almost never acquire the necessary technique and experience to cope with these roles until they have ceased to look the part. Stages have teemed with Romeos and Juliets old enough to be the lovers' parents and even grandparents. Mature-looking players, spouting these lines and perhaps affecting a few adolescent mannerisms, wind up unconvincing and often just plain silly.

Bernard Shaw once saw the two roles played by Esme Percy at 17 and Dorothy Minto at 14, and said the work "for the first time became endurable." And I found a reference to a Pasadena Playhouse production in 1937 with an unidentified Romeo of 16 and Juliet of 14. These players turn out to have been Robert Willey and Anita Denniston--thanks to the Harvard Theatre Collection, which (bless it!) happens to have a playbill of the show in its holdings. The record would seem to go to the celebrated Fay Templeton, who a century ago had played Puck at the age of seven, and did Juliet at nine, opposite Bijou Heron's juvenile Romeo--a production I am just as happy to have missed.

Juliet is the more acute problem of the two, but on rare occasions a teenage actress has conquered the role. The redoubtable Fanny Kemble began a long Shakespearean career with a triumphant debut as Juliet at 19. Adelaide Neilson made her debut in the part at 17 and became the most popular Juliet of the latter half of the 19th century. And in our own century Phyllis Neilson-Terry started playing the role at 18, to wide acclaim.

The current version is the third here at Stratford. The 1959 production's Juliet was Inga Swenson, who was then in her late twenties but did manage to seem consistently adolescent as well as unfailingly musical; her Romeo, however, was deficient. Six seasons later the situation was reversed: Terence Scammell was an absolutely gorgeous Romeo, with an inadequate Juliet. It is the 1965 combination that faces us again this summer.

Roberta Maxwell, who has had considerable Shakespearean experience both here and elsewhere, is a pretty enough Juliet. But she does not make a sufficiently youthful impression. Furthermore, her vocal range is far too narrow for a part that is above all else lyrical and musical to an extreme. And sometimes her pace is too leisurely. She does have two fine moments: in her "Come, night" speech, her anticipation of Romeo's arrival erupts into an unabashedly erotic embracing of her bed; and she effectively manages the psychological changes in her phial soliloquy. On the whole, though, this "fair Juliet" is only fair.

David Birney, a star of that awful TV comedy series Bridget Loves Bernie, is no longer a teenager; but he proves able to act like one throughout the show. His small size is a help here, and he's good-looking to boot. He is as lithe and exhibitionistic as a highschool athlete, easily scaling a locked eight-foot gate, dashing up the wall to Juliet's balcony, and dangling from it by one hand.

There is the ring of truth to his delivery, even when he makes sudden shifts of pitch or volume, along with a host of neat touches, like his affectionate farewell tug at Balthasar's cap near the end. In the tomb, he picks Juliet up from her bier and cradles her body on the floor during his final soliloquy (the finest speech Shakespeare gave him). In a departure from custom, at his last words--"Thus with a kiss I die"--he is able to move forward only part way toward Juliet's lips before he falls back dead, thus showing that the apothecary's drugs not only "are quick" but are a good deal quicker than he expected. To the very end this Romeo lacks the experience to deal with everything that arises. Birney's is a performance of beauty, ardor, and passion. Who would have thought the young man to have had so much blood in him?

For all the play's lyricism and innocence, it is at the same time one of the dirtiest in its diction. It teems with smutty puns that would get the work banned by highschool teachers and boards of education if these folks were really up on their Elizabethan lingo. The bulk of the bawdry issues from the mouths of Mercutio and the Nurse, who are the foils to Romeo and Friar Laurence. Kahn has a lot of the phallic and other ribaldry indicated through gesture or mime.

David Rounds' Mercutio just doesn't cut the mustard. I suppose it's all right for him to be half-sighted, with a black patch over one eye. But he must not talk at half speed; after all, he "will speak more in a minute than he will stand to in a month." Yet Rounds delivers his delicate and dazzling "Queen Mab" aria in a leaden manner, with lots of pauses. Vivace has become andante. I've said before--and I repeat--that the best guide here is the Queen Mab vocal scherzetto and orchestral scherzo from Berlioz's symphony. Furthermore, for a man who revels so in words, Mercutio should know that "lamentable" is accented on the first syllable. It is a clever idea, though, for his dying curse--"A plague a' both your houses!"--to be treated as an ironic toast, with a raised glass of rose.

Though the part would benefit from a little more coarseness, Kate Reid has the Nurse fully under control. And well she might, for she has been doing the role for at least 14 years. The touchstone remains Dame Edith Evans, however, who polished her interpretation continuously for 36 years. Similarly, Jack Gwillim first played the Friar long ago, and imbues the eccentric cleric with exemplary kindness and geniality.

Michael Levin's Tybalt lacks sufficient fire until he gets to the duel with Romeo, which is fast, furious and fanatical. A cheer for Patrick Crean, who has coached every trace of timidity and amateurism out of all the fencers.

As Romeo's sidekick Benvolio, whom Shakespeare strangely allows to vanish completely from the play at the half-way point, Larry Carpenter lacks naturalness of speech. Theodore Sorel hoots his way through Prince Escalus, Wyman Pendleton is a hoarse Montague, and Donald Warfield's Paris is a proper stuffed shirt.

As Juliet's mother--who, it should be remembered, is herself only 28 years old--Carole Shelley is not yet entirely at ease in her lines; but she looks fine in her red-and-black gown, and her straight back speaks a thousand words. Juliet's father, Lord Capulet, is a man in his sixties. William Larsen, sporting a white beard, makes this well-meaning crank fully human; he does admirably with the blustering scene in which he sputters torrents of monosyllables at his headstrong daughter.

Romeo's servant Balthasar, though seen, has nothing to say until near the play's end, when he comes into his own. Franklyn Seales, a recent Juilliard graduate, brings marked talent to the part. He is a chap who clearly bears watching.