Romeo and Juliet are far from the first example of star-crossed lovers within media, but this particular story has been upheld through centuries because of the elements of the narrative. “What Shakespeare gives us,” Katherine Dalismer argues, “is the subjective experience of adolescent passion.” That trope, that adolescent passion, is so innate to being young and in love (even if the “love” young teenagers experience is simply lust), that it transcends from the 1500s until now.

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The love that Romeo and Juliet have for one another is encouraged and goaded by other characters in the narrative. This adds to the tragedy because there are trusted adults—the Nurse and Friar Laurence, for example—who should be protecting these children are instead moving them closer and closer to their untimely end. Under the guise of helping Romeo and Juliet, the adults who are aware of their relationship are undermining them—through disguising it as support. The Nurse’s dynamic with Juliet, her closeness, her proximity, is integral in Juliet rising to her adolescence. Juliet’s “Your consent gives strength to make it fly” signals a metamorphosis in her move toward teenagerhood and a step closer to falling into the love that will eventually be her demise. Romeo, in his lust for Rosaline and his shifting feelings toward Juliet, also showcase a feeling inherent to adolescence—everything both demanding and fleeting.

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Romeo and Juliet’s adolescence is central to this narrative, and is exactly why their story is as relevant today in the 21st century as it was when it was first written. Their star-crossed and doomed love is as applicable centuries down the line because of the universal appeal—a paradigm of modern tragedy, as Paul A. Kottman hypothesizes. These narrative devices of forbidden love are heightened and highlighted by the other elements at play—war, family, society, and desire. Because the original text is as explicit in showing the violence of the war between the Capulets and Montagues as well as showcasing the elements of the society of the population of Verona, it creates a narrative that informs the main plot of Romeo and Juliet’s demise. And, as we see in the original text and these teenager-centric remixes, the self-destruction of these lovers is tied to the society and populus of everyone else around them—a deadly domino effect that is just as vital to human nature today as it was in the late 1500s.

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“Romeo & Juliet,” Kottman writes, “raises a dialectical tension between individual subjects and social ‘reality’ into a fever pitch—unto death. And the play does this by showing sexual love to be the proper horizon of this conflict, searing our vision of love to our self-awareness as modern subjects.” This is the crux of why Romeo & Juliet is so transcendent—humans, in all our multitudes, are still driven by love and desire, years and years after the play was written. When we see Leo and Claire’s characters glitter and flail against the modern, gun-ridden background of their Verona, it brings a current punch to the narrative that Shakespeare wrote centuries before. In Now or Never, we see the violence between two warring gangs, intercut and interluded with the soft scenes of Luna and Solis against a backdrop of honeyed warmth. In Taylor Swift’s music video, the back-and-forth of a college campus versus a version of Verona that looks similar to the original text showcases just how transcendent this narrative is. And in Warm Bodies, the tension is upped a notch by subverting the ultimate demise of death—because R is already undead, and trying to come back to life by loving Julie. All of the remixes in this hypertext are hinged upon that wicked, desperate allure of forbidden love within adolescence—and, with varying deadliness, they take the melodrama and modernize it, proving the transcendent nature of Shakespeare’s narrative, and proving Romeo and Juliet’s story to be just as applicable to modern teenagers in modern society as it was in Shakespeare’s time.