Juliet

At a glance

Juliet, Capulet's only child, is Shakespeare's test of how much a daughter can choose in Verona: the play's freest voice belongs to its most constrained person.

• Role in the plot: she weds Romeo in secret, refuses Paris, takes the Friar's sleeping draught and kills herself in the tomb.
• Defining traits:
  • Guarded: "It is an honor that I dream not of" (Act 1, Scene 3).
  • Clear-sighted: "swear not by the moon, th' inconstant moon" (Act 2, Scene 2).
  • Quick-witted: "Villain and he be many miles asunder" (Act 3, Scene 5).
• Themes she carries: love; gender and honour; youth; family and authority; fate; death and time.
• Relationships and foils: Romeo, her equal; parents, Nurse and Friar, who fail her. Foils: Lady Capulet, a mother at about her age (Act 1, Scene 3), the pattern she refuses; Rosaline, silent and chaste where Juliet speaks.

Their journey

1. The dutiful daughter (Act 1, Scene 3). "What is your will?" waits on her mother, and "I'll look to like" stops at her mother's "consent".
2. The equal (Act 1, Scene 5; Act 2, Scene 2). She matches Romeo quatrain for quatrain in their sonnet; in the orchard she checks his oath and speed, then names marriage first.
3. The wife (Act 3, Scene 2). She rails at Romeo in oxymorons ("Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical!"), but when the Nurse curses him ("Shame come to Romeo!") she curses the Nurse: "Blistered be thy tongue".
4. Abandoned (Act 3, Scene 5). In their aubade (a lovers' song against dawn) she argues for night until Romeo welcomes death, then sends him away. She sees him "As one dead in the bottom of a tomb"; mother, father and Nurse fail her in turn. Alone, she resolves "myself have power to die": the turning point.
5. Acting alone (Act 4, Scenes 1 to 3; Act 5, Scene 3). She shows the Friar a knife, feigns obedience and drinks alone; in the tomb she sends the Friar off ("I will not away") and stabs herself.

She began with "What is your will?"; her last free choice is death.

Key quotations

• "My only love sprung from my only hate!" (Act 1, Scene 5). Antithesis (balanced opposites) and a doubled "only" lock love and hate into one line the moment she learns his name: her love is born inside the feud.
• "What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet" (Act 2, Scene 2; "name" in the 1597 Quarto). The rhetorical question expects "nothing": a name is a label, not a self. The play answers her: Romeo would cut his name from "this anatomy" (Act 3, Scene 3).
• "It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden, / Too like the lightning" (Act 2, Scene 2). Four "too"s (anaphora) measure a love already past its limits; lightning is brilliant and gone. AQA's mark schemes read it both ways: young love's haste (June 2019), and her caution against Romeo's "more impulsive/risky attitude" (November 2021).
• "Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars" (Act 3, Scene 2; AQA's Specimen 2 prints "when he shall die"). In her own wedding song (an epithalamium), the Prologue's fatal stars become her gift to "all the world": Romeo "cut" into them, a tender, violent image.
• "I never shall be satisfied / With Romeo till I behold him, dead, / Is my poor heart" (Act 3, Scene 5). "Dead" can belong to Romeo or to her heart: her mother hears hatred, we hear grief. This equivocation (a deliberate double meaning) keeps faith with Romeo.
• "Romeo, Romeo, Romeo! Here's drink. I drink to thee." (Act 4, Scene 3). The tripled name (repetition) echoes "O Romeo, Romeo" (Act 2, Scene 2): the name she wished away is the one she calls on, once she imagines Tybalt's ghost "Seeking out Romeo". The toast is a frightened girl's bid for courage, or Penny Gay's "masculine gesture".
• "O, happy dagger, / This is thy sheath. There rust, and let me die." (Act 5, Scene 3). "Happy" is joyful, and lucky, "there, to hand" (Hester Lees-Jeffries); "sheath" turns death into union, and her grave into the "wedding bed" she foresaw (Act 1, Scene 5). With Paris dead, she dies for Romeo, or in despair, with no adult left.

How Shakespeare builds them

• Soliloquy and length. She speaks alone in five scenes; bar four one-line replies, she speaks only verse. Love gives her a voice: seven lines in Act 1, Scene 3, then 115 to Romeo's 88 in the orchard and 125 in Act 3, Scene 2.
• Imagery. Romeo's images keep her distant ("snowy dove trooping with crows", Act 1, Scene 5); hers reach for touch ("Leap to these arms", Act 3, Scene 2). She plays the falconer ("tassel-gentle", Act 2, Scene 2); her parents' words make her the hawk, caged ("mewed up", her mother, Act 3, Scene 4), then tamed ("reclaimed", her father, Act 4, Scene 2).
• Staging. She kneels to her father twice: in earnest (Act 3, Scene 5), then to deceive (Act 4, Scene 2). Her last ten lines, broken by the Watch, follow Romeo's thirty-seven over her body (Act 5, Scene 3): he lingers; she wastes no words.
• Where the play places her. Her wedding song, "Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds" (Act 3, Scene 2), comes straight after Tybalt's death and Romeo's banishment, news we know and she does not (dramatic irony).

Context

• Made younger. In Arthur Brooke's poem (1562), Shakespeare's source, she is nearly sixteen; his Juliet is "not fourteen" (Act 1, Scene 3), which sharpens her daring and the adults' haste.
• Modesty. Juliet names the code conduct books taught girls ("form", "compliment", "strange", "light", Act 2, Scene 2), breaking its rule of silence, not of chastity: she asks for marriage first.
• Duty. The 1559 Prayer Book catechism taught "To love, honour, and succour my father and mother". In Act 4, Scene 2 she performs that duty to deceive: "ever ruled by you".

Interpretations

• The dominant voice. Marjorie Garber: in the orchard "she remains the dominant figure". Penny Gay: as a poet, Juliet "may be seen to be claiming a masculine role"; arguing with her father earns his sneer, "Chopped logic?" (Act 3, Scene 5).
• Still in her father's power. For Lynda Boose, the secret marriage skips the rite that frees a bride from her father, so Capulet gives her away on the night it is consummated ("O' Thursday, tell her", Act 3, Scene 4). Her words win arguments; his decide events.

How to write about them

Three arguments a grade 9 answer could build:

1. Her strength is control of speech, and its limit is solitude. She checks Romeo and deceives her parents; only alone does fear take over.
2. She is the freest and most trapped character, and spends her freedom choosing death. The June 2024 report sets "trapped" beside love as "a way of escaping".
3. She speaks love in her world's terms: the feud's "only hate" (Act 1, Scene 5) and the market's "bought" and "sold" (Act 3, Scene 2): she is buyer and goods at once, "chattel" in AQA's Specimen 2 mark scheme.

Moments to reach for:

• "The relationship between Romeo and Juliet" (June 2019): the sonnet's "extended Christian metaphor" (mark scheme), where her "palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss" (Act 1, Scene 5) steers him from lips to hands. Its "sin" is the metaphor's, not the feud's: neither yet knows the other's family (the report).
• "A female character with strong emotions" (November 2021): read "strong" as intense and strong-minded, then judge how far she governs it: "My dismal scene I needs must act alone" (Act 4, Scene 3).
• "Juliet's feelings towards Romeo" (June 2023): link "Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?" (Act 3, Scene 2), as the report praised, "to the start and end of their relationship".
• "The difficulties faced by Juliet" (June 2024): follow the time imagery ("three long hours") through the play, and the report's chosen line, "many feign as they were dead" (both Act 2, Scene 5): in Act 4 she does.