Discuss whether shakespeare's adaptation of the historic love story romeo and juliet places an emphasis on moral behavior. use evidence from the text to support your response.

An emphasis on moral behavior (and the questioning of it) is at the core of "Romeo and Juliet". The main conflict revolves around it: how ethical it is to fall in love with my family's enemy? During the course of the drama, this moral question transforms into another one: How ethical it is to hate other people in the first place, based only on their surname?

The ethical question gets especially complicated when Juliet thinks about marrying Paris. To her, it seems as if she would betray Romeo, which she would never do; but the paradox is that if she betrayed Romeo, she would undo the betrayal of her family. In spite of that, she doesn't want to give up on her loyalty to Romeo. In Act 4, Scene 1, she says:

JULIET 
O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,
From off the battlements of yonder tower,
Or walk in thievish ways, or bid me lurk
Where serpents are. Chain me with roaring bears;
Or shut me nightly in a charnel house,
O'ercovered quite with dead men's rattling bones,
With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls.
Or bid me go into a new-made grave
And hide me with a dead man in his shroud
(Things that, to hear them told, have made me 
   tremble),
And I will do it without fear or doubt,
To live an unstained wife to my sweet love.