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There's not a huge corpus of responses out there to Shakespeare's plays and poems taken from typical audience members of the 1590s (though I wish there were) but we can at least touch on one example of how the play's characters and themes were understood in their own decade. One of the few contemporary references to Romeo & Juliet, in a 1599 sonnet by John Weever, ranks Romeo right alongside that most famous sexpot of the Elizabethan stage, Richard III.

Romea, Richard, more whose names I know not

Their sugred tongues and power attractive beuty

Say they are Saints, althogh that S[ain]ts they shew not

For thousands vowes to them subjective dutie:

They burn in love, [...]

These lines play on the language of saints and pilgrims in Act 1 Scene 5; Romeo is identified first and foremost as a sweetly-spoken lover. As a lover Romeo falls into a pre-established contemporary literary type influenced by contemporary stereotypes about the psychology of young men -- first as an unhappily rejected lover, poem-writing and somewhat insufferable, and later as a more compelling lover and a more active belligerent. Some of the lovers' reckless behaviors would have been understood in terms of a contemporary idea of love-melancholy -- both a general sense that young people are more easily swayed by their passions than older people, thanks to their tender years and hot dispositions, and a specific sense that rejected lovers behave in certain ways and their melancholy can be remedied by certain means. (In Romeo's case, by going to a party and promptly swapping out an unattainable and unfeeling lady love for one who very much returns his feelings.) In general, audience perceptions of Romeo & Juliet would have been colored by contemporary opinions regarding gender, nationality, and politics, as well as contemporary conventions of the stage -- but we don't have many firsthand accounts of exactly what audience takeaways from this specific play were. The only real way to get a sense of what those attitudes might have been is to look through the lens of other contemporary plays and writings that touch on similar themes.

Shakespeare's Verona has the built-in excuse of being an Italian setting, where politics are presumed to straight-up work differently and the Veronese locals in Shakespeare's play (as hot-blooded Italians and superstitious Catholics) are presumed to have a fundamentally different disposition from the English men and women sitting in Shakespeare's audience. The rashness of the play's young characters would have been understood in light of the play's Mediterranean setting, but likewise the rashness of the play's adults, who even apart from their actions toward their own offspring incite civil unrest and participate firsthand in feud-motivated brawling. Prince Escalus is positioned as a reasonable figure of authority with the best political traits of an idealized Renaissance prince -- mediating between Montague and Capulet factions, providing a neutral meeting-space, doling out punishments impartially to preserve civil peace -- and the Montague-Capulet feud is conspicuously ungrounded in a particular political or social conflict that would have been contemporary to Elizabethan viewers.

Adaptations of R&J often frame the Capulet-Montague divide in terms of contemporary-to-the-staging social conflicts (like specific racial differences) but this aspect is scarcely present in the play itself -- the source materials from which the play was drawn might provide vague thematic ties to real-world conflicts (like Dante's Guelphs and Ghibellines) but the feud isn't grounded in contemporary English political issues likely to steer clear of unwanted implications for the play's performers. Plays drawing on real-life English history weren't thin on the ground (see: Shakespeare's own history plays) but contemporary partisan conflicts were a volatile topic on the stage and it seems purposeful that the play's conflicts are couched in terms of a more generic feud that could be condemned by the figure of Escalus for its results (civil brawls, family patriarchs taking up arms against one another, the fruitless deaths of young men and women) rather than arguing the morality of the feud's cause. The Montague-Capulet feud isn't over anything, it's not a series of battles fought over who has the rightful claim to a certain title or even a scuffle over territory. Contemporary Elizabethan audiences would have understood pointless bloodshed and civic unrest to be a bad thing, and couching this particular depiction of bloodshed in terms of a political evil that contemporary audiences understood to be typically-Italian (overbearing pride, hot tempers, and urban vendettas) would have made it easier for English audiences to condemn the fictional feud that propagated it. These weren't good old English street brawls or even the Wars of the Roses; they were somebody else's problem, and that might have made the title characters' familial disobedience and reckless behaviors more palatable.

The most compelling evidence that Shakespeare intended Romeo and Juliet to be seen as more than simply feckless horny young people worthy of public condemnation might be that the primary source material from which Shakespeare drew the structure of his play, Arthur Brooke's Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet pulled zero punches in saying just that. Brooke describes his history of Romeus and Juliet as the story of

[...] a couple of unfortunate lovers, thralling themselves to unhonest desire; neglecting the authority and advice of parents and friends; conferring their principal counsels with drunken gossips and superstitious friars (the naturally fit instruments of unchastity); attempting all adventures of peril for th' attaining of their wished lust; using auricular confession the key of whoredom and treason, for furtherance of their purpose; abusing the honourable name of lawful marriage to cloak the shame of stolen contracts; finally by all means of unhonest life hasting to most unhappy death.

Brooke's presentation of the play's basic ur-narrative has a very different set of values than Shakespeare's. The story he's presenting is not romantic, not sympathetic, roundly condemned, and very much in line with the more negative reading of Romeo and Juliet's actions -- the lovers are guilty of not listening to their elders, taking bad advice, attempting stupid gambits to satisfy their lust passed off as love, and then dying young due to their own mistakes. (The anti-Catholic element is also pretty palpable here.) Brooke doesn't bother justifying the division between Montague and Capulet either, ascribing it to a grudge borne of envy between two otherwise-equal factions. So a more negative reading of Rome[o/us] and Juliet's same basic actions was out there, but this isn't the unambiguous depiction we receive from Shakespeare's play by a long shot. Why does Shakespeare make those alterations to inject more ambiguity?

Shakespeare's plays often appear to entertain opposite and mutually-contradictory premises at the same time-- that's certainly an aspect that's compelling to modern audiences (is Henry V a pro-war play, or an anti-war play? is Richard III attractive or repulsive?) and I don't think we have any reason to think that contemporary audiences weren't sensitive to these tensions and aware of them on-stage even if they didn't couch that understanding in the same language as 21st century commentators. If Shakespeare's audiences were meant to view the events of the play as purely the consequence of unfettered lust and bad decision-making, there were plenty of less ambiguous ways for Shakespeare the playwright to convey such resounding condemnation. (Up to and including having allegorical figures representing key concepts appear onstage to explicitly state the play's intended moral lesson, or if the play were being written a few decades later, a proper Jacobean bloodbath ending.) The fact that Shakespeare suspends such devices with respect to youthful folly and allows for a more ambiguous reading of both lovers' actions is a conscious device to achieve a certain effect on audience-members, and it would be difficult to say that the effect of that was entirely lost on contemporary readers. And again, back to Weever's poem -- Romeo isn't characterized as a naive innocent but rather as an attractive and compelling figure, burning with love, and his ardor for a beautiful girl is entertaining and engaging even as it causes him to make reckless, even fatal decisions. Both young lovers might have been seen by contemporary Elizabethan audiences as more active in their own downfall than in later more idealized readings of the play, but that wouldn't necessarily negate the culpability of their respective heads of house and the more general framing of violent vendetta as a negative.