In her essential text, Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us from 1935, Caroline Spurgeon thoroughly examines the causes and effects of Shakespeare's visual references. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, he keeps returning to images of light and darkness: "In Romeo and Juliet the beauty and ardour of young love are seen by Shakespeare as the irradiating glory of sunlight and starlight in a dark world. The dominating image is light, every form and manifestation of it: the sun, moon, stars, fire, lightning, the flash of gunpowder, and the reflected light of beauty and of love; while by contrast we have night, darkness, clouds, rain, mist and smoke."

Re-reading the play with this statement in mind is an enjoyable experience, and it led me to another understanding: It's for this reason that many of the most powerful Shakespeare performances that I've seen have been done on thrust stages (like the Globe, of course), with no scenery or backdrops of any kind, except for the mental ones provided by the poetry.