Romeo and Juliet, please help

We (me and my brother) have been trying to find out the meaning of the line in the prologue "Whole misadventured piteous overthrows" His homework is to paraphrase the prologue, he has the previous line - 2 lovers commit suicide - and the next line - by thier death they stop their parents struggle - (and he has done the rest) But I really can't help him with this line. Can anyone explain or direct us to a site where we can find out. We did google it but that hasn't been much help.

Thanks in advance.

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.

I believe:

The whole quote would then be: "Whose misadventured piteous overthrows do with their death bury their parents' strife."

So,
Their overthrows do, with their death, bury their parents strife.

If I am correct in #2, then, you can interpret:

misadventured = ill-fated; piteous = deserving of pity; overthrows (noun) = ruins / downfalls, etc.

That really helps, looking at the two lines as one sentance, i've been looking at them as two, it explains why all the other explanations seem to skip that line. It's a whole lot of long words to say nothing much. Thankyou Christi.

The key to that problem, musereader, is to note that there are no punctuation marks at the end of overthrows, which means Shakespeare wanted you to directly connect that line with the next one. Have fun. k4k

If you can get access to it (and if the assignment is large enough to make it worthwhile), you might want to see if you can find Shakespeare's Words: A Glossary and Language Companion. It's incredibly helpful for translating the plays into modern speech, and it has a lot of useful appendices and things, too.