Summary

Bound to keep the peace

Later on the Sunday of the brawl. Capulet, taken off by the Prince after the fighting, walks on mid-conversation with the County Paris, a young nobleman. Montague, he says, is under the same penalty, death if the streets see another fight, and surely it is easy ‘For men so old as we to keep the peace’. Paris spends two polite lines regretting that the families ‘lived at odds so long’, then gets to his business: ‘But now, my lord, what say you to my suit?’

Too young to marry

Paris has asked before. Capulet begins 'But saying o'er what I have said before', and his first reason is not money or rank but his daughter's age:

Two more summers

He asks Paris to wait two years: ‘Let two more summers wither in their pride / Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.’ Paris answers with one line of Verona's custom: ‘Younger than she are happy mothers made.’ Capulet takes Paris's own rhyme word and turns it back on him: ‘And too soon marred are those so early made.’

Analysis: Juliet, whose future it is, is not even on stage: two men settle it between them in rhyme.

All my hopes but she

Then he explains why he guards her so carefully. A whole family history, which the play never tells in full, is packed into two lines:

Get her heart

Having said no, Capulet opens a door. Paris may court her himself, starting at tonight's feast, and the decision will be hers before it is her father's:

Her scope of choice

He spells out the order. Once she has agreed, ‘within her scope of choice / Lies my consent and fair according voice’: her yes first, his blessing after. AQA's specimen extract ends here.

Analysis: Nothing is arranged yet: Paris must wait and woo, and the match is fixed only in 3.4, after the secret wedding.

Stars at my poor house

The courtship can start tonight. Capulet invites Paris to ‘an old accustomed feast’ full of ‘Earth-treading stars that make dark heaven light’, young women as welcome as ‘well-appareled April’ treading on the heel of ‘limping winter’. Paris should look at them all, ‘Hear all, all see’, and prefer the best, even if Capulet's daughter proves one face among many: ‘May stand in number, though in reck'ning none’. Then he hands a servant the guest list and sends him off 'Through fair Verona'.

Names he cannot read

Alone, the servant has a problem. He must find the people ‘whose names are here writ’, and he cannot read: ‘I must to the learned’. The first learned men to come along are Benvolio and Romeo: two Montagues.

One fire burns out another

They are mid-argument. Benvolio is still prescribing a cure for Romeo's lovesickness: ‘one fire burns out another's burning’, so ‘Take thou some new infection to thy eye’. Romeo mocks the remedy: a plantain leaf, the herb pressed on grazes, would be 'excellent for that', he says. 'For what, I pray thee?' 'For your broken shin.' He is not mad, he insists, but ‘bound more than a madman is’, locked up, starved and whipped, until he breaks off in the middle of a line to say good evening to a stranger holding a piece of paper.

Can you read?

The servant asks if he can read. Romeo answers with a gloomy joke, ‘Ay, mine own fortune in my misery.’ then a quibble, 'if I know the letters and the language', which the servant takes for a no: 'Rest you merry.' Romeo calls him back, 'Stay, fellow. I can read', and reads the list aloud, a roll call of Verona's best families. Three names matter later: ‘Mercutio and his brother Valentine’, free to be invited because Mercutio belongs to neither house; 'his cousin Tybalt', read out by the man who will kill him in 3.1; and, in Capulet's own family, ‘My fair niece Rosaline’. Romeo's first love is a Capulet too.

If you be not a Montague

Romeo asks where the guests should come. 'Up.' 'Whither? To supper?' 'To our house.' 'Whose house?' 'My master's.' Grateful for the reading, the servant spells it out and invites the stranger in: ‘if you be not of the house of Montagues, I pray come and crush a cup of wine’.

Analysis: The audience laughs, and the feud's own door has been opened by accident, by a servant being grateful.

Thy swan a crow

Benvolio seizes his chance. Rosaline will be there, 'Sups the fair Rosaline whom thou so loves', so Romeo can test her against the other beauties: ‘Compare her face with some that I shall show, / And I will make thee think thy swan a crow’. Romeo is outraged, and swears an oath in the language of the Church:

I'll go along

Benvolio is unmoved: Romeo has only ever weighed Rosaline against herself, 'Herself poised with herself in either eye'. Weigh her in the 'crystal scales' of his eyes against another girl, and she will 'scant show well'. Romeo agrees to go, but for his own reason: ‘I'll go along, no such sight to be shown, / But to rejoice in splendor of mine own.’

Analysis: He goes to the feast to gaze at one Capulet girl. He will leave it in love with another.

Where's my daughter?

In 1.2 her father and Paris discussed Juliet's marriage without her. Now we meet her, among the women of her house, and the feud is not mentioned once. Lady Capulet comes looking for her: ‘Nurse, where's my daughter? Call her forth to me.’ The Nurse swears ‘by my maidenhead at twelve year old’ that she has called her already, and calls again with pet names: ‘What, lamb! What, ladybird!’ Juliet arrives asking 'How now, who calls?', and her first words to her mother are formal and obedient: ‘Madam, I am here. What is your will?’

We must talk in secret

Lady Capulet has something private to say, and cannot manage it alone. She sends the Nurse out and calls her straight back: ‘Nurse, give leave awhile. / We must talk in secret. Nurse, come back again’. The Nurse, she decides, should hear their 'counsel' after all. Then she edges towards the subject: Juliet, she says, is 'of a pretty age'.

She's not fourteen

The Nurse can ‘tell her age unto an hour’; her mother offers only ‘She's not fourteen.’ The Nurse bets 'fourteen of my teeth' on it (she has 'but four') and fixes the birthday. Lammas, 1 August, is 'A fortnight and odd days' away, and ‘Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen.’ Then, between two sentences about the date, a grief of her own: her daughter Susan was born at the same time as Juliet, and ‘Susan is with God; / She was too good for me’.

I never shall forget it

Her memory runs on her own landmarks, not the calendar: ‘'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years, / And she was weaned’. She remembers every detail: ‘I had then laid wormwood to my dug’, a bitter herb to put the child off the breast, while ‘My lord and you were then at Mantua’. The day before, the toddler had fallen on her face and cut her forehead, and the Nurse's husband picked her up with a joke:

Enough of this

'Enough of this,' says Lady Capulet. 'I pray thee, hold thy peace.' The Nurse cannot stop laughing and tells it all again, adding a bump 'as big as a young cock'rel's stone' (a young cockerel's testicle). Juliet stops her with her own first joke, a pun on that 'Ay': ‘And stint thou, too, I pray thee, nurse, say I.’ Quiet at last, the Nurse blesses the child she fed and names her one wish:

The very theme

Her mother seizes the word: ‘Marry, that “marry” is the very theme / I came to talk of’. Then the question, in the stiffest words she can find: ‘How stands your disposition to be married?’ Juliet's answer is perfectly correct, and gives nothing away:

Think of marriage now

The Nurse is delighted: ‘Were not I thine only nurse, / I would say thou hadst sucked wisdom from thy teat’. Her mother brushes the answer aside, ‘Well, think of marriage now’, and argues from custom: younger 'ladies of esteem' in Verona are mothers already. She offers herself as proof: ‘I was your mother much upon these years / That you are now a maid’. Then, 'in brief', the news: ‘The valiant Paris seeks you for his love’. The two women compete to praise him. He is ‘a man of wax’, says the Nurse, as perfect as a wax model; ‘Verona's summer hath not such a flower’, says the mother, and the Nurse can only echo her: 'Nay, he's a flower, in faith, a very flower.'

Read o'er the volume

Then the question she has circled all along: ‘Can you love the gentleman?’ Juliet will ‘behold him’ tonight at the feast, and her mother tells her how to look, in a polished set piece that settles into rhyming couplets and turns Paris into a book:

Only lacks a cover

She works the conceit line by line. Every feature of his face is 'married' to the next, and whatever the face leaves unclear is explained in 'the margent of his eyes', like the notes printed in the margin of a book. Only one thing is missing:

No less? Nay, bigger

A fine binding wins a book admiration, the book ‘That in gold clasps locks in the golden story’, and the conclusion is about property: ‘So shall you share all that he doth possess / By having him, making yourself no less.’ The Nurse cannot resist turning 'no less' into a pregnancy joke: ‘No less? Nay, bigger. Women grow by men.’

Analysis: Two ideas of a wife meet in one couplet and its reply: a costly binding and a growing body. Neither leaves room for what Juliet feels.

If looking liking move

'Speak briefly,' says her mother, who has not. 'Can you like of Paris' love?' Juliet's longest speech in the scene is three lines, and every line of it is hedged:

Everything in extremity

The household breaks in. A Servingman rushes on, gabbling in prose: the guests have come, supper is served, the Nurse is being 'cursed in the pantry', and 'everything in extremity'. Lady Capulet tells Juliet that Paris is waiting, 'Juliet, the County stays', and the Nurse has the last word: ‘Go, girl, seek happy nights to happy days.’

Without apology

Sunday night, outside the Capulet house. Romeo, Benvolio and Mercutio arrive as maskers, with torchbearers and a drummer. Maskers could call on a feast uninvited, so the only question is how to go in: ‘shall we on without apology?’ Benvolio wants no old-fashioned ceremony: ‘The date is out of such prolixity.’ Romeo has come to see Rosaline. Mercutio, the Prince's kinsman, is on Capulet's guest list; the two Montagues are walking into the enemy's house behind masks.

A soul of lead

Romeo will not dance. He takes a torch, ‘Being but heavy I will bear the light’, to watch from the edge. His friends have nimble soles, but ‘I have a soul of lead’. Told to borrow Cupid's wings, he says Cupid's arrow went in too deep: ‘Under love's heavy burden do I sink’.

Analysis: Too heavy to dance, he dances with words: the Rosaline style of 1.1.

Rough with love

Mercutio hears a sex joke in 'sink' and 'burden': Romeo would be ‘Too great oppression for a tender thing’. Romeo picks up the phrase and denies it: ‘Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, / Too rude, too boist'rous, and it pricks like thorn.’ Mercutio's reply turns the thorn round and gives the scene its other view of love:

A candle holder

Mercutio calls for his mask, 'A visor for a visor', a false face for one he jokes is ugly enough already. Romeo will still only watch, and quotes two old proverbs: ‘I'll be a candle holder and look on; / The game was ne'er so fair, and I am done’. Mercutio tries to hurry them: ‘Come, we burn daylight, ho!’ Romeo drags his feet: ‘But 'tis no wit to go’. Why not? ‘I dreamt a dream tonight.’

Dreamers often lie

'And so did I,' says Mercutio, and they trade rhymes. His dream is that ‘dreamers often lie’; Romeo answers that they lie ‘In bed asleep while they do dream things true’. Mercutio caps the rhyme and takes the stage:

Night by night

Mab's coach is a toy, its spokes made of 'long spinners' legs', its body an empty hazelnut. In it she gallops ‘Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love’, over lawyers who ‘dream on fees’, over ladies dreaming of kisses, whose lips she ‘with blisters plagues’. Everyone dreams of what they already want.

Into nightmare

Then the fantasy darkens. She ‘driveth o'er a soldier's neck’, and he dreams ‘of cutting foreign throats’, wakes to drums and swears a prayer or two. Mab bakes hair into elflocks which, untangled, ‘much misfortune bodes’. And she is no longer a fairy but ‘the hag’ who presses down on sleeping girls and ‘learns them first to bear’. Mercutio starts again, 'This is she', and Romeo stops him: ‘Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace. / Thou talk'st of nothing.’ Mercutio cheerfully agrees, and says why in the speech's most quotable lines:

Too late, too early

Benvolio has had enough: ‘This wind you talk of blows us from ourselves’, and supper is over, so ‘we shall come too late’. Romeo answers with the opposite fear, and at last says what has been troubling him all night:

Direct my sail

Then one word, 'But', turns dread into decision. He has just foreseen his own death, and in the same breath he hands his life to someone else's steering:

Strike, drum

'Strike, drum,' says Benvolio. The maskers march about the stage, as the 1599 Quarto directs, and (in a direction the Folger edition adds) withdraw to the side. Nobody exits: servingmen bring napkins, the feast is set up around them, and the premonition walks straight into the party.

Analysis: Some fifty lines later, Romeo sees Juliet.

Clearing the hall

Sunday night, and supper is over. In Capulet's great chamber the servants rush to clear the tables for dancing, grumbling about a colleague who is never there when the plates need moving: ‘He shift a trencher? He scrape a trencher?’ One begs a friend to save him some marzipan and get the porter to let in Susan Grindstone and Nell; another hurries the rest along with a cheerful proverb: ‘Be brisk awhile, and the longer liver take all.’ Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio, masked, marched in with their drum at the end of 1.4. They are already inside the enemy's house.

Welcome, gentlemen

Capulet sweeps in with his household and guests to greet the maskers. He teases the ladies (any who refuses to dance, he jokes, must have corns) and, watching the masks, remembers being young himself: ‘I have seen the day / That I have worn a visor and could tell / A whispering tale in a fair lady's ear’. The music starts. He shouts for room and ‘More light’, has the fire put out because ‘the room is grown too hot’, then settles an old cousin into a chair: ‘For you and I are past our dancing days’. The two old men cannot even agree when they last went masking. Thirty years ago, says the cousin; Capulet insists it was only ‘Some five and twenty years’.

Analysis: Capulet is at his warmest here, joking about corns and sighing for his youth. Hold on to this host: within minutes he is calling his nephew 'goodman boy'.

What lady's that?

Across the hall Romeo, masked and not dancing, sees a girl partnering another guest and stops a servant: ‘What lady's that which doth enrich the hand / Of yonder knight?’ The servant does not know. Romeo will not learn who she is until after he has kissed her. What comes out of him first is light:

A snowy dove

The images pour out in rhyming couplets. She hangs upon the night ‘As a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear’, ‘Beauty too rich for use, for Earth too dear’; among the other women she shows like ‘a snowy dove trooping with crows’. He makes a plan: when the dance ends he will find where she stands and, by touching her hand, ‘make blessèd my rude hand’. Then he asks the question everyone watching wants to ask him:

By his voice

Someone else has been listening. Tybalt, Lady Capulet's nephew, knows the voice behind the mask, and his answer to Romeo's love speech is a call for his sword: ‘This, by his voice, should be a Montague. / Fetch me my rapier, boy.’ He takes the mask as an insult to the feast, ‘What, dares the slave / Come hither covered with an antic face’, and swears on his family's name: ‘Now, by the stock and honor of my kin, / To strike him dead I hold it not a sin.’

Analysis: The mask was meant to hide him; love gives him away. Romeo is betrayed by his own voice in the act of praising Juliet.

Let him alone

Capulet sees the storm on his nephew's face: 'Why, how now, kinsman? Wherefore storm you so?' Tybalt reports a Montague come to scorn the feast; his uncle guesses who it is, 'Young Romeo is it?', and Tybalt confirms it with an insult: ‘'Tis he, that villain Romeo’. The old man who called for his long sword in the street that morning (1.1) will not let anyone touch him. Romeo has a good name: ‘Verona brags of him / To be a virtuous and well-governed youth’. And this is Capulet's party: ‘I would not for the wealth of all this town / Here in my house do him disparagement’. He orders his nephew to smile: ‘It is my will, the which if thou respect, / Show a fair presence and put off these frowns’. Tybalt says he will not endure him, and his uncle's temper snaps:

A saucy boy

Capulet mocks the swagger behind the anger, ‘you'll be the man!’, and goes on scolding Tybalt in snatches between cheerful shouts to the dancers and calls for more light: ‘You are a saucy boy. Is 't so indeed? / This trick may chance to scathe you’. A host keeps up appearances and a grudge is swallowed in the same breath. Tybalt gives way, and his body shakes with it: ‘Patience perforce with willful choler meeting / Makes my flesh tremble in their different greeting.’ His exit line is a vow:

This holy shrine

He goes. In the very next line Romeo, who has found Juliet as the dance ends, takes her hand. Neither seems to have heard Tybalt. Neither knows who the other is. Juliet came to this feast to study Paris's face, as her mother told her (1.3), but Paris has no line and no named entrance in the scene; the stranger holding her hand is a Montague. Romeo speaks the first four lines of a sonnet:

Good pilgrim

Juliet does not blush and fall silent, as the lady of a love poem was supposed to. She answers with four lines of her own and gently corrects him:

Saints do not move

Now they trade single lines. He presses: ‘Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?’ She parries: ‘Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.’ He turns her own word against her, ‘let lips do what hands do. / They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair’. The closing couplet is split between them. She consents without moving, ‘Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake’, and he finishes her rhyme and kisses her: ‘Then move not while my prayer's effect I take.’

Analysis: The play's other sonnets, the Prologue and the Act 2 Chorus, are spoken by one voice and warn of danger; this one takes two.

Give me my sin again

The poem will not stop. A new quatrain begins at once, in the same pattern: ‘Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged.’ Juliet has her answer ready, ‘Then have my lips the sin that they have took’, and he takes the cue: ‘Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged! / Give me my sin again.’ A second kiss. She finishes his line, and the new quatrain's rhyme, with a teasing verdict: ‘You kiss by th' book.’ Four lines into the second sonnet, the Nurse breaks in: ‘Madam, your mother craves a word with you.’

Is she a Capulet?

Juliet goes to her mother, and Romeo asks the Nurse who her mother is. 'Her mother is the lady of the house,' the Nurse tells him, and she nursed the daughter herself. Then she adds a tip for any young man: ‘he that can lay hold of her / Shall have the chinks’. Romeo has kissed the enemy's only daughter:

The sport is at the best

Benvolio hurries him towards the door: 'Away, begone. The sport is at the best.' Romeo hears a darker meaning in it: ‘Ay, so I fear. The more is my unrest.’ Capulet tries to keep the young men for a last course of sweets, then thanks them, calls for more torches and heads for bed.

Go ask his name

As the guests file out, Juliet holds the Nurse back and asks about three young men, hiding the one she cares about at the end of the list: ‘What's he that follows here, that would not dance?’ The Nurse does not know. Juliet sends her to ask, and says as she goes:

His name is Romeo

The Nurse comes back with the answer: ‘His name is Romeo, and a Montague, / The only son of your great enemy.’ Juliet replies in two rhyming couplets, the last love lines of Act 1, and the first line is the whole scene in eight words:

Known too late

The next line sees the timing, ‘Too early seen unknown, and known too late’, and the second couplet turns the love into an omen: ‘Prodigious birth of love it is to me / That I must love a loathèd enemy.’ 'What's this? What's this?' asks the Nurse, and Juliet tells her first lie: ‘A rhyme I learned even now / Of one I danced withal.’ Someone calls for Juliet from inside, and the Nurse leads her off: 'The strangers all are gone.'

Analysis: The Nurse can tell Juliet's age 'unto an hour' (1.3), and she is the first person Juliet keeps a secret from. By the next day the Nurse is carrying her messages; by 3.5 Juliet shuts her out for good.

Turning back

Romeo has slipped away from his friends, but he gets no further than the dark street outside the Capulet house. The girl he loves is his enemy's daughter, and still he cannot make himself go: ‘Can I go forward when my heart is here?’ He calls his own body ‘dull earth’ and orders it to ‘find thy center out’, as a falling stone finds the ground. The centre is Juliet. Then he is over the orchard wall and out of sight.

Analysis: His first act in the new love is to turn back, towards his enemy's house, and to hide.

Nay, I'll conjure too

His friends come looking. Mercutio guesses he has sensibly gone home to bed, but Benvolio saw him leap 'this orchard wall'. Told to call, Mercutio will do more: he will conjure him, like a magician raising a spirit. He summons not his friend but a type, the moping lover, ‘Romeo! Humors! Madman! Passion! Lover!’, and asks for the proof any such lover could give: ‘Cry but “Ay me,” pronounce but “love” and “dove.”’ He mocks Venus's ‘purblind’ son, whose arrow once made a king love ‘the beggar maid’. No answer: ‘He heareth not, he stirreth not, he moveth not.’ So he tries the strongest spell he knows, the beloved's name and body, part by part:

In his mistress' name

Benvolio warns that this will anger Romeo if he hears it. Not at all, says Mercutio. What would anger him is a rival's magic, a stranger's spirit raised ‘in his mistress' circle’ and left standing there, with every word of the conjuror's trade doubling as a sexual joke. His own invocation, he insists, is 'fair and honest', made only 'In his mistress' name' and only 'to raise up him', which is no cleaner. It is the wrong mistress.

Blind love

Benvolio gives up. Romeo, he says, has hidden among the trees to keep company with 'the humorous night', the moody dark: ‘Blind is his love and best befits the dark.’ Mercutio cannot leave a proverb alone. He caps it with a rhyme, ‘If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark’, then pictures the lover moping under a ‘medlar tree’, a fruit with a rude slang name, and ends on the crudest pun of the night.

Good night

Mercutio began by guessing that Romeo had gone home to bed, and ends by going himself: ‘Romeo, good night. I'll to my truckle bed’. Benvolio closes the scene: ‘'tis in vain / To seek him here that means not to be found’. They leave a stage they believe is empty. It is not: the man who 'heareth not' is still there in the dark.

He jests at scars

Romeo has not gone home. Hidden inside the Capulet orchard, he has heard every one of Mercutio's bawdy jokes about Rosaline, and his first line answers them: ‘He jests at scars that never felt a wound.’ Then a light appears at a window above him, and Mercutio is forgotten. AQA's June 2022 extract begins here:

Kill the envious moon

Romeo builds the image as he goes. If Juliet is the sun, let her rise and ‘kill the envious moon’, the virgin goddess whose ‘maid’ she is, already ‘sick and pale with grief’ at being outshone. He urges her to leave the moon's service and take off its uniform: ‘Her vestal livery is but sick and green, / And none but fools do wear it. Cast it off.’ Then he sees her plainly, and a title gives way to a feeling: ‘It is my lady. O, it is my love! / O, that she knew she were!’

Her eye discourses

Her lips move without a sound. He almost calls out, ‘Her eye discourses; I will answer it’, then stops himself: ‘I am too bold. 'Tis not to me she speaks.’ So he goes on talking to the night. Her eyes could stand in for ‘Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven’, and up there they would shine so brightly ‘That birds would sing and think it were not night’. Then the stars shrink to a single touch, and AQA's 2022 extract ends: ‘O, that I were a glove upon that hand, / That I might touch that cheek!’

Analysis: Two dozen lines of worship, and Juliet has heard none of them.

Ay me

Juliet's first words are a sigh, the very sigh Mercutio mocked as the lover's cliché a few minutes ago: ‘Ay me.’ Romeo, still unheard, makes her a messenger from heaven: ‘O, speak again, bright angel’, as glorious ‘being o'er my head’ as an angel to mortals gazing up. Then Juliet, sure she is alone, says what she is thinking:

'Tis but thy name

'Wherefore' means why, not where. Below, Romeo wonders ‘Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?’ He keeps listening, and Juliet argues her case step by step: ‘'Tis but thy name that is my enemy. / Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.’ A name is not part of a body, ‘It is nor hand, nor foot, / Nor arm, nor face’, so what is it worth? Her answer has become a proverb:

Take all myself

Romeo would be just as perfect by any other name, she reasons, so let him give the name away and take her in exchange: ‘Romeo, doff thy name, / And, for thy name, which is no part of thee, / Take all myself.’ It is the boldest offer in the scene, and it was never meant for his ears. Romeo steps out of the dark and accepts it inside her own line of verse: ‘I take thee at thy word. / Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized. / Henceforth I never will be Romeo.’

Analysis: The eavesdropper becomes the suitor. Everything Juliet says from now on, she says knowing he has heard the rest.

What man art thou?

AQA's Specimen 3 extract begins here. Juliet is startled, and her first question is a fair one for a girl alone at night: ‘What man art thou that, thus bescreened in night, / So stumblest on my counsel?’ Romeo cannot answer with his name, because ‘By a name / I know not how to tell thee who I am’. ‘My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself’, he says, and if it were written down ‘I would tear the word’. She knows his voice already, though her ears ‘have yet not drunk a hundred words’ of it, and asks the question that matters: ‘Art thou not Romeo, and a Montague?’ He will be ‘Neither, fair maid, if either thee dislike’.

High and hard to climb

Juliet speaks facts. How did he get in, and why? The walls are high, and for a Montague ‘the place death, considering who thou art, / If any of my kinsmen find thee here’. Romeo answers the practical question with poetry:

No stop to me

His conclusion comes in one confident line: ‘Therefore thy kinsmen are no stop to me.’ She tells him more bluntly still, ‘If they do see thee, they will murder thee’, and he turns the feud's weapons into a compliment: ‘Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye / Than twenty of their swords. Look thou but sweet, / And I am proof against their enmity.’ There the Specimen 3 extract ends. He has the dark on his side, ‘I have night's cloak to hide me from their eyes’, and without her love he would rather be found: ‘My life were better ended by their hate / Than death proroguèd, wanting of thy love.’

Analysis: Every warning she gives, he answers with a risk.

I am no pilot

Still practical, Juliet asks ‘By whose direction found'st thou out this place?’ ‘By love’, he answers, and describes a bargain struck with Love himself: ‘He lent me counsel, and I lent him eyes’. If she were on the far side of the farthest sea, he would sail there: ‘I should adventure for such merchandise’.

The mask of night

Now Juliet takes the scene over, in a long speech AQA has never printed. She knows he has heard everything, and she knows what a well-brought-up girl is supposed to do about it:

Farewell compliment

She would like to play the courtship game properly, ‘Fain would I dwell on form’, and pretend she never said it. Instead she drops the game in two words and asks the plainest question of the night: ‘Dost thou love me?’ She does not want him to swear, because ‘At lovers' perjuries, / They say, Jove laughs’. If he thinks her ‘too quickly won’, she will ‘frown and be perverse and say thee nay’, but only to please him.

Too fond

Her real defence is honesty: ‘In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond, / And therefore thou mayst think my havior light. / But trust me, gentleman, I'll prove more true / Than those that have more coying to be strange.’ She would have kept her distance, she admits, ‘But that thou overheard'st ere I was ware / My true-love passion’. So he must not mistake her frankness for ‘light love’: it was the dark, not she, that gave her away.

By yonder moon

Romeo does what lovers in poems do. He starts a vow by the moon, the moon he wanted killed a few minutes ago: ‘Lady, by yonder blessèd moon I vow’. He does not get to finish it:

The god of my idolatry

What should he swear by, then? ‘Do not swear at all’, she says, or by himself, ‘Which is the god of my idolatry’. He tries again, 'If my heart's dear love', and again she stops him: ‘Well, do not swear. Although I joy in thee, / I have no joy of this contract tonight.’ Then she says why:

This bud of love

Against the lightning she sets a slower image, ‘This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath, / May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet’, and says goodnight in a rhyming couplet: ‘Good night, good night. As sweet repose and rest / Come to thy heart as that within my breast.’ Romeo protests, ‘O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?’ and Juliet's reply makes him say what he means: ‘What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?’ He means only ‘Th' exchange of thy love's faithful vow for mine.’ She gave him hers, she says, ‘before thou didst request it’, and would gladly give it again, because her love has no limit:

Anon, good nurse

The household breaks in. The Nurse calls from inside the house, and Juliet answers two people in one line: ‘Anon, good nurse. Sweet Montague, be true.’ Alone below the window, Romeo can hardly believe his luck: ‘O blessèd, blessèd night! I am afeard, / Being in night, all this is but a dream, / Too flattering sweet to be substantial.’ She comes back with 'Three words, dear Romeo', and turns the vows into a plan:

Madam!

Her messenger will bring back where and when he will 'perform the rite', and then she will lay ‘all my fortunes at thy foot’ and ‘follow thee my lord throughout the world’. The Nurse calls 'Madam' twice, and Juliet's sentence breaks around her: if he means no good, ‘I do beseech thee … To cease thy strife and leave me to my grief’. 'Tomorrow will I send,' she promises, and goes in with 'A thousand times good night'. Romeo finishes her couplet, ‘A thousand times the worse to want thy light’, and drags himself away like a schoolboy: ‘But love from love, toward school with heavy looks’.

Hist, Romeo, hist!

She is back again, whispering because she has to: ‘Hist, Romeo, hist! O, for a falc'ner's voice / To lure this tassel-gentle back again!’ She is the falconer, he the hawk she lures home. Her father's house will not let her shout, ‘Bondage is hoarse and may not speak aloud’, or she would make Echo herself hoarse ‘With repetition of “My Romeo!”’ The name she wanted him to throw away is now the one she longs to cry aloud, and to Romeo it is music: ‘It is my soul that calls upon my name’.

Twenty year till then

Then one line of verse is split three ways, 'Romeo.' 'My dear.' 'What o'clock tomorrow', and the hour is fixed: her messenger will come by nine. For Juliet the wait is already too long: ‘'Tis twenty year till then’. She forgets why she called him back. He offers to stand there till she remembers; she will keep forgetting, to keep him there; and he will stay, ‘Forgetting any other home but this’.

A wanton's bird

‘'Tis almost morning’. She wants him gone for his own safety, but no farther than a spoilt child lets a pet bird go, on a string: ‘And with a silken thread plucks it back again, / So loving-jealous of his liberty.’ Romeo would gladly be her prisoner, ‘I would I were thy bird’, and she finishes his line of verse with the darkest words in the scene, said as tenderly as any:

Sweet sorrow

She leaves on a rhyme that turns pain into pleasure: ‘Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow / That I shall say “Good night” till it be morrow.’ Romeo blesses her sleep, ‘Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace in thy breast’, and as the sky lightens he heads not home to his father but to his confessor: ‘Hence will I to my ghostly friar's close cell, / His help to crave, and my dear hap to tell.’

Analysis: It began with a light at a window in the dark, and it ends as the real light comes.

First light

Monday, dawn. Romeo left the orchard saying he would go straight to his 'ghostly friar' for help, and the play gets there before him. Friar Lawrence comes on alone with a basket and greets the day in rhyme: ‘The gray-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night’. Darkness staggers off ‘like a drunkard’ out of the path of the sun god's chariot. He must be quick, before the sun burns off the dew, and fill his ‘osier cage’, a willow basket, ‘With baleful weeds and precious-juicèd flowers’: deadly plants and healing ones, side by side.

Analysis: Before we see him as a priest, we see him as a herbalist: the man who knows what heals and what kills.

Tomb and womb

As he picks, he thinks aloud. The earth feeds every plant and takes every plant back, and he puts the thought in a couplet that turns back on itself, so that the place of burial and the place of birth become one:

Some special good

Out of that womb come ‘children of divers kind’, plants of every sort, and he marvels at the ‘powerful grace’, the healing power, hidden in ‘plants, herbs, stones’. His moral cuts both ways. Nothing is so vile that it does no good at all: ‘For naught so vile that on the Earth doth live / But to the Earth some special good doth give’. And nothing is so good that it cannot go wrong when ‘strained from that fair use’: then it ‘Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse’. He sums it up in a couplet that could stand over the whole play:

Enter Romeo, unseen

Here, in the 1599 Quarto's placing, Romeo walks on. The Friar has not seen him and goes on talking to himself. He holds up a single flower and, with Romeo standing by unseen, explains what it holds:

Grace and rude will

Smelt, the flower revives you; tasted, it ‘stays all senses with the heart’, stopping the pulse as death does. Then the Friar turns from plants to people. In every man, as in every herb, two kings are camped for battle: ‘grace and rude will’, God's gift against raw desire. Where desire rules, ‘Full soon the canker death eats up that plant’, like a grub eating a rosebud from the inside.

Analysis: He thinks he is talking to himself about desire. The audience can see who has just walked on.

Good morrow, father

Romeo steps forward at last. He has come straight from Juliet's window without going to bed, and his first words to the Friar are three of the most telling in the scene:

Up before the sun

'Benedicite': bless you. The Friar wonders whose 'early tongue' this is, then sees, and reads the visit the way a doctor reads a symptom: ‘Young son, it argues a distempered head’ to be up so soon. Old men lie awake with worry, ‘Care keeps his watch in every old man's eye’, but a young man with nothing on his mind should sleep like a king: ‘there golden sleep doth reign’. So either Romeo is ill, or, the Friar guesses with a fond 'Our', ‘Our Romeo hath not been in bed tonight’. Romeo happily owns up to the second guess: ‘That last is true. The sweeter rest was mine.’

That name's woe

The Friar jumps to the obvious conclusion, and the sinful one: ‘God pardon sin! Wast thou with Rosaline?’ Romeo is almost offended: ‘With Rosaline, my ghostly father? No. / I have forgot that name and that name's woe.’ Yesterday he went to the Capulet feast to look at Rosaline; this morning she is 'that name'. The Friar approves before he even knows why: ‘That's my good son’.

A riddle for a priest

Romeo, giddy after the night, answers in a riddle: ‘I have been feasting with mine enemy’, where someone wounded him whom he wounded too, and the cure for both lies in the Friar's ‘holy physic’, his medicine. He even claims a kind of peace, ‘I bear no hatred, blessèd man’, since what he asks will help his 'foe' as much as himself. The Friar wants it straight: ‘Be plain, good son, and homely in thy drift. / Riddling confession finds but riddling shrift.’

Then plainly know

So Romeo says it plainly: ‘Then plainly know my heart's dear love is set / On the fair daughter of rich Capulet.’ And she loves him back, ‘As mine on hers, so hers is set on mine’: everything between them is agreed except what only a priest can do, join them ‘By holy marriage’. The story of how they met can wait. What cannot wait is the request:

What a change is here!

The Friar is staggered, and swears by the founder of his own order: ‘Holy Saint Francis, what a change is here!’ Rosaline, whom Romeo loved 'so dear', ‘So soon forsaken?’ Then he draws the lesson:

Salt water thrown away

Then he teases. Think of ‘what a deal of brine’ Romeo wept for Rosaline, ‘How much salt water thrown away in waste’ on a love she never cared to taste. The sighs still hang in the sky, he says, and the groans are ‘yet ringing in mine ancient ears’. The evidence is even on his face: ‘here upon thy cheek the stain doth sit / Of an old tear that is not washed off yet’. The Friar presses home: ‘If e'er thou wast thyself, and these woes thine, / Thou and these woes were all for Rosaline.’ If Romeo has changed, he can recite a proverb for him: ‘Women may fall when there's no strength in men’.

Doting, not loving

Romeo protests: 'Thou chid'st me oft for loving Rosaline.' The Friar corrects one word, and the correction goes to the heart of every argument about Romeo:

Grace for grace

'And bad'st me bury love,' says Romeo. Yes, but ‘Not in a grave / To lay one in, another out to have’. So Romeo plays his best card. This time the love is returned: ‘Her I love now / Doth grace for grace and love for love allow. / The other did not so.’ The Friar answers that Rosaline saw through him all along: ‘Thy love did read by rote, that could not spell’.

Analysis: Arguably the pupil wins the argument: the teacher has no answer to 'grace for grace' except a jibe about the old love, and he changes the subject to the feud.

In one respect

Then, abruptly, he gives in, still teasing: ‘But come, young waverer, come, go with me.’ And he gives a reason of his own for helping, one that has more to do with the feud than with Romeo's happiness:

Sudden haste

Romeo cannot wait another minute: ‘O, let us hence. I stand on sudden haste.’ The Friar finishes the couplet and has the scene's last word:

Where is Romeo?

Monday, late morning, in the street. Mercutio and Benvolio are hunting for Romeo, who has not been home since the feast. Mercutio blames ‘that same pale hard-hearted wench, that Rosaline’, though Romeo forgot her the moment he saw Juliet. Benvolio has worse news: ‘Tybalt, the kinsman to old Capulet, / Hath sent a letter to his father's house.’ 'A challenge, on my life,' says Mercutio, and Benvolio is sure Romeo ‘will answer the letter's master, how he dares, being dared’. Mercutio doubts it. A lover, he says, is in no state to fight:

The prince of cats

Then the question that will matter by the afternoon: ‘And is he a man to encounter Tybalt?’ Benvolio asks what Tybalt is, and Mercutio answers with mock titles: ‘More than prince of cats’, the ‘courageous captain of compliments’, a master of the ceremonies of the duel. His parody of Tybalt's fencing turns it into music:

The immortal passado

Tybalt is ‘the very butcher of a silk button’, ‘a duelist, a duelist’, schooled in every rule of ‘the first and second cause’, and fluent in Italian thrusts: ‘the immortal passado, the punto reverso, the hay!’ 'The what?' asks Benvolio. Then, calling Benvolio 'grandsire' as if the two of them were old men, Mercutio grumbles at ‘these fashion-mongers’ who ‘stand so much on the new form’.

Analysis: Hold on to 'passado'. In 3.1 Mercutio draws on Tybalt with 'Come, sir, your passado' (3.1.86), the jargon he mocks here.

Without his roe

Romeo arrives, and Mercutio greets him as a wasted lover: ‘Without his roe, like a dried herring’. Now, he jeers, Romeo is ‘for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in’, and his lady outshines every heroine of love poetry: ‘Laura to his lady was a kitchen wench’, ‘Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a gypsy, Helen and Hero hildings and harlots, Thisbe a gray eye or so’. Then he greets him in French, 'bonjour', and accuses him of giving them the slip last night.

Analysis: Dido, Cleopatra, Hero and Thisbe each kill themselves after losing a lover. Mercutio is laughing at the company Romeo and Juliet are about to join.

A match of wits

But this Romeo answers back. The two trade puns on courtesy, curtsies, pumps and soles until Mercutio begs Benvolio to part them and gives up the race: ‘if our wits run the wild-goose chase, I am done’. He is delighted to be beaten:

A sail, a sail!

Mercutio caps his cheer with a crude picture of love: ‘this driveling love is like a great natural’, an idiot looking for somewhere to hide his 'bauble'. Benvolio stops him. Then the Nurse sails in with her servant Peter. 'A sail, a sail!' cries Romeo. She calls for her fan, and Mercutio approves: it will hide her face, and the fan's is the fairer. When she wishes them good morning, he corrects her:

Himself to mar

'What a man are you?' she gasps, and Romeo answers for his friend: ‘One, gentlewoman, that God hath made, himself to mar.’ She asks for young Romeo, and he owns up to being ‘the youngest of that name, for fault of a worse’. She turns to him: ‘I desire some confidence with you’. She means a private word, and Benvolio mocks the slip: 'She will indite him to some supper.'

A bawd, a bawd

Mercutio hails her with a hunter's cry, ‘A bawd, a bawd, a bawd. So ho!’ He sings a bawdy song about an old hare, then leaves with Benvolio for dinner at Romeo's father's house. 'I will follow you,' Romeo promises, but the next time we see him he is at the Friar's cell, waiting to be married. Mercutio's parting shot is for the Nurse: ‘Farewell, ancient lady. Farewell, lady, lady, lady.’

Analysis: These are Mercutio's last words before 3.1.

Saucy merchant

The Nurse demands to know what 'saucy merchant' that was. Romeo's answer is fond: ‘A gentleman, nurse, that loves to hear himself talk and will speak more in a minute than he will stand to in a month.’ She vows to take Mercutio down, insists ‘I am none of his flirt-gills’, and turns on Peter for standing by while she was insulted: ‘thou must stand by too and suffer every knave to use me at his pleasure’. Peter protests that he saw no one wrong her: ‘If I had, my weapon should quickly have been out’. He would draw, though only on his own terms: ‘a good quarrel, and the law on my side’.

A fool's paradise

With Mercutio and Benvolio gone, the Nurse tells Romeo that Juliet sent her to find him, but keeps the message back. First, like a parent questioning a suitor, she gives him a warning:

Shrived and married

Romeo starts to swear his good faith, and she promises to tell Juliet before he has finished: 'Lord, Lord, she will be a joyful woman.' For the plan he moves from prose into verse: ‘Bid her devise / Some means to come to shrift this afternoon’, and at the Friar's cell she will ‘Be shrived and married’. He presses money on her; she refuses, and he insists. Then the night: within the hour his man will meet her behind the abbey wall with ‘cords made like a tackled stair’, a rope ladder to climb, in his words, ‘to the high topgallant of my joy’.

Is your man secret?

The Nurse checks the plan for leaks: ‘Is your man secret? Did you ne'er hear say / “Two may keep counsel, putting one away”?’ Romeo swears his man is 'as true as steel', and she rambles on. There is ‘a nobleman in town, one Paris, that would fain lay knife aboard’, though Juliet ‘had as lief see a toad, a very toad, as see him’. The Nurse admits she teases her: ‘I anger her sometimes and tell her that Paris is the properer man, but I'll warrant you, when I say so, she looks as pale as any clout in the versal world.’ Then a riddle: ‘Doth not rosemary and Romeo begin both with a letter?’ 'Both with an R,' says Romeo, and she bustles off with Peter, 'Before and apace.'

The clock struck nine

Monday, noon. Last night Romeo named the hour Juliet should send to him, 'By the hour of nine', and she sighed that it was 'twenty year till then' (2.2). Now, alone on stage for the first time in the play, she counts the hours since: ‘The clock struck nine when I did send the Nurse. / In half an hour she promised to return.’ Three hours on, there is still no Nurse. Juliet tries out a reason and knocks it down herself, ‘Perchance she cannot meet him. That's not so.’ Then she settles on one she prefers: ‘O, she is lame!’

Analysis: AQA printed this speech in June 2024 and asked about 'the difficulties faced by Juliet'. The first is the simplest: she can do nothing but wait.

Love's heralds

Lameness gives her an argument. If the Nurse is slow, the fault lies with the messenger, and love deserves better. Its messengers ought not to walk at all; they ought to travel at the speed of thought, faster than light itself:

Doves and Cupid's wings

She backs the claim with the classics and a double 'therefore': ‘Therefore do nimble-pinioned doves draw Love, / And therefore hath the wind-swift Cupid wings.’ The goddess of love rides in a chariot drawn by doves, and Cupid has wings, because love is meant to be fast. Then she looks up at the sky and does the arithmetic:

Warm youthful blood

The real fault, she decides, is age. ‘Had she affections and warm youthful blood’, the Nurse would fly between the lovers like a tennis ball: ‘My words would bandy her to my sweet love, / And his to me.’ Then 'But' turns on the old, and the speech closes on a rhyming couplet:

O God, she comes!

On 'lead', as if summoned by the insult, the old woman herself walks in, with her servant Peter. AQA's extract stops at Juliet's cry, ‘O God, she comes!’, and she is at the Nurse at once: ‘O, honey nurse, what news? / Hast thou met with him? Send thy man away.’ The Nurse sends Peter to wait at the gate. Juliet searches her face for the news and finds it long: ‘O Lord, why lookest thou sad?’ Bad news should be told merrily, she says, and good news is spoiled ‘By playing it to me with so sour a face’.

My bones ache

The Nurse takes her time: ‘I am aweary. Give me leave awhile. / Fie, how my bones ache! What a jaunt have I!’ Juliet would trade bodies for the news: ‘I would thou hadst my bones, and I thy news.’ 'Good, good nurse, speak', she begs, and the Nurse plays the slow old woman Juliet has just been mocking: ‘Jesu, what haste! Can you not stay awhile? / Do you not see that I am out of breath?’ Juliet turns the complaint on itself: ‘How art thou out of breath, when thou hast breath / To say to me that thou art out of breath?’ The excuse, she points out, ‘Is longer than the tale thou dost excuse’. She asks for one word only: ‘Let me be satisfied; is 't good or bad?’

A simple choice

Then the Nurse drops into prose and pretends to disapprove: ‘Well, you have made a simple choice. You know not how to choose a man.’ Her 'No, not he' turns at once into praise of Romeo's body: his face, his leg, his hand and foot. The review ends with a pat on the head, ‘as gentle as a lamb’, and then, from nowhere, 'What, have you dined at home?' Juliet waves the body away. She wants his words: ‘What says he of our marriage? What of that?’

My back, my back

Now it is the Nurse's head, then her back, and all of it Juliet's fault: ‘Beshrew your heart for sending me about / To catch my death with jaunting up and down.’ Juliet, who began the scene mocking the old as good as dead, says she is sorry, and her coaxing climbs to three 'sweet's: ‘Sweet, sweet, sweet nurse, tell me, what says my love?’ At last the message begins, in a heap of compliments, ‘Your love says, like an honest gentleman, and a courteous, and a kind, and a handsome’, and breaks off just short of the point: 'Where is your mother?' Juliet can hardly believe her ears:

Are you so hot?

The Nurse puts on injured dignity: ‘Are you so hot?’ Is this, she asks, ‘the poultice for my aching bones?’ And she threatens to resign as go-between: ‘Henceforward do your messages yourself.’ 'Here's such a coil' (what a fuss), says Juliet. 'Come, what says Romeo?' At last the Nurse comes to business, starting with the cover story: ‘Have you got leave to go to shrift today?’ Juliet already has it: 'I have.' Then the news, in two lines:

Scarlet straight

Juliet blushes, and the Nurse, who misses nothing about a body, says so: ‘Now comes the wanton blood up in your cheeks; / They'll be in scarlet straight at any news.’ Then the Nurse divides the afternoon's errands. Juliet goes to church; the Nurse goes ‘To fetch a ladder by the which your love / Must climb a bird's nest soon when it is dark’. Then she sums up the whole arrangement in a bawdy couplet, the servant's-eye view of a wedding night:

Hie to high fortune

'Go. I'll to dinner. Hie you to the cell.' Juliet takes the Nurse's rhyme and runs with it: ‘Hie to high fortune! Honest nurse, farewell.’ The next time we see her she is in the Friar's cell, greeting Romeo.

Analysis: Four times in the last eleven lines someone says 'hie', hurry. A scene that began with three hours of waiting ends at a sprint.

Amen, amen

Romeo is waiting for his bride, and the Friar opens with a prayer that already has a shadow in it: ‘So smile the heavens upon this holy act / That after-hours with sorrow chide us not.’ Romeo answers 'Amen, amen', then outbids any sorrow the future can bring: it ‘cannot countervail the exchange of joy / That one short minute gives me in her sight’. Then he goes further, and dares Death by name:

Violent delights

The Friar does not say amen to that. Romeo has just challenged Death on his wedding day, and the old man answers the dare with a warning that sounds like a proverb:

Fire, powder and honey

He explains with two images. Joys like these ‘in their triumph die, like fire and powder, / Which, as they kiss, consume’: a spark meets gunpowder, and the instant they touch, both are gone. Then a gentler picture from the table: ‘The sweetest honey / Is loathsome in his own deliciousness’, and too much of it ‘confounds the appetite’. So he closes his lesson on a rhyme:

So light a foot

Juliet arrives on the rhyme, too late to hear a word of the sermon, and the Friar watches her come: ‘O, so light a foot / Will ne'er wear out the everlasting flint’. A lover, he marvels, could ride the drifting cobwebs of a summer breeze ‘And yet not fall, so light is vanity’. Juliet greets him formally by his spiritual title, the role that is also her excuse for leaving home: ‘Good even to my ghostly confessor.’ He passes the welcome to the bridegroom: ‘Romeo shall thank thee, daughter, for us both’. She returns as much to Romeo, 'else is his thanks too much'.

Too rich for words

Romeo asks her to put their happiness into poetry: if her joy is ‘heaped like mine’ and her skill greater ‘To blazon it’, let her voice sweeten the air. Juliet declines the performance: ‘Conceit, more rich in matter than in words, / Brags of his substance, not of ornament.’ Real feeling, she says, is proud of what it is, not of how it is dressed. Then, without knowing it, she answers the warning she missed:

Short work

The Friar cuts the duet short. He will not leave the couple alone together before the wedding: ‘Come, come with me, and we will make short work’, and they ‘shall not stay alone / Till Holy Church incorporate two in one’. The three go out to be married, and the wedding itself is never shown.

Alone, and waiting for dark

The scene before this one ended with Mercutio and Tybalt dead and Romeo exiled from Verona. Juliet knows none of it. She was married this afternoon, she is alone, and the only thing wrong with her world is that the sun is still up. What follows is her wedding song, and it begins with the sun:

Spread thy close curtain

She wants a faster driver for the sun, ‘Such a wagoner / As Phaëton’, the sun god's reckless son who lost control of the chariot and was struck down. Then she turns from the day to the night, and asks it to draw a curtain round the marriage bed: ‘Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night, / That runaways' eyes may wink, and Romeo / Leap to these arms, untalked of and unseen.’ Lovers need no light, she reasons, since they ‘can see to do their amorous rites / By their own beauties’. Night is a ‘sober-suited matron all in black’ who must teach her ‘how to lose a winning match / Played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods’: both of them are virgins, and she wins by losing. Until shyness grows bold, night's black cloak should hide her blushes: ‘Hood my unmanned blood, bating in my cheeks’.

Analysis: A bride's desire, spoken frankly and inside marriage.

Come, night. Come, Romeo.

As the speech reaches its height, her calls to night turn into calls to Romeo, both summoned in the same breath, and he becomes the light inside her dark:

Little stars

‘Come, gentle night; come, loving black-browed night’, she calls again, and asks night to give Romeo to her and, when she dies, to keep him in the sky:

The garish sun

Romeo in the sky ‘will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night / And pay no worship to the garish sun’. Then she comes down from the stars to the plainest fact of her day: she is married, and still waiting.

An impatient child

She ends with a simile any child in the audience would know: ‘So tedious is this day / As is the night before some festival / To an impatient child that hath new robes / And may not wear them.’ Then she sees the Nurse coming, and with her, she thinks, good news, since ‘every tongue that speaks / But Romeo's name speaks heavenly eloquence’.

He's dead

The Nurse comes in with the cords, the rope ladder Romeo sent for the wedding night, and she is wringing her hands. Juliet asks for news and gets a wail with no name in it: ‘Ah weraday, he's dead, he's dead, he's dead! / We are undone, lady, we are undone.’ Juliet can think of only one man. 'Can heaven be so envious?' she asks, as if heaven had taken Romeo. The Nurse's answer makes it worse: ‘Romeo can, / Though heaven cannot. O Romeo, Romeo’. She means that Romeo has killed; Juliet hears that Romeo is dead. 'What devil art thou that dost torment me thus?' she cries at the Nurse, and asks the question she dreads: ‘Hath Romeo slain himself?’ One syllable, 'Ay', would poison her more surely than ‘the death-darting eye of cockatrice’, the legendary serpent that killed with a look. She demands a plain 'Ay' or 'No': ‘Brief sounds determine my weal or woe.’

I saw the wound

Still the Nurse names no one. She saw the wound 'here on his manly breast': ‘A piteous corse, a bloody piteous corse, / Pale, pale as ashes’. Sure now that Romeo is dead, Juliet tells her heart to break and her body to go back to the earth: ‘O break, my heart, poor bankrout, break at once!’ She wants only to lie beside him: ‘thou and Romeo press one heavy bier’.

O Tybalt, Tybalt

Only now does the Nurse name the dead man, and he is someone else: ‘O Tybalt, Tybalt, the best friend I had!’ Juliet, bewildered, thinks she has lost both: ‘Is Romeo slaughtered and is Tybalt dead? / My dearest cousin, and my dearer lord?’ If so, let the last trumpet sound the end of the world, ‘For who is living if those two are gone?’ At last the Nurse says it straight: ‘Tybalt is gone and Romeo banishèd.’

Analysis: It has taken the Nurse more than thirty lines to deliver one sentence.

O serpent heart

'O God, did Romeo's hand shed Tybalt's blood?' 'It did, it did, alas the day, it did.' Juliet, a wife of three hours, turns on the man she married, and AQA's November 2021 extract begins: ‘O serpent heart hid with a flow'ring face! / Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?’ The insults come in pairs that cannot both be true:

Dove-feathered raven

‘Dove-feathered raven, wolvish-ravening lamb!’ Sixty lines earlier Romeo was ‘Whiter than new snow upon a raven's back’; now he is the raven, dressed in white feathers. Every line sets a holy or lovely outside against something damned within: ‘Despisèd substance of divinest show!’ ‘A damnèd saint, an honorable villain.’ She asks nature how it could ‘bower the spirit of a fiend / In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh’, and ends the list with a book: ‘Was ever book containing such vile matter / So fairly bound?’

Shame come to Romeo!

The Nurse takes her side and goes further: not just Romeo, but every man. ‘There's no trust, / No faith, no honesty in men. All perjured, / All forsworn, all naught, all dissemblers.’ She calls for her servant and a drink of spirits ('Give me some aqua vitae'), complains that these sorrows make her old, and then says aloud the very thing Juliet has been saying: ‘Shame come to Romeo!’ Juliet turns on her at once:

Analysis: She can say it of him. Nobody else may.

What a beast was I

The rage is spent as fast as it came: ‘O, what a beast was I to chide at him!’ There AQA's November 2021 extract ends. The Nurse cannot follow the turn: 'Will you speak well of him that killed your cousin?' Juliet turns the question round, and the June 2023 extract begins:

That villain cousin

Now she argues it out, questioning and answering herself. First she blames herself: ‘Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name / When I, thy three-hours wife, have mangled it?’ Then she puts the charge to Romeo, ‘But wherefore, villain, didst thou kill my cousin?’, and answers it with the insult moved to the other man: ‘That villain cousin would have killed my husband.’ She orders her tears home, ‘Back, foolish tears, back to your native spring’, since they belong to grief and she is spending them on good news, and does the sum: ‘My husband lives, that Tybalt would have slain, / And Tybalt's dead, that would have slain my husband. / All this is comfort. Wherefore weep I then?’

Analysis: AQA's June 2023 mark scheme names 'Juliet's use of questioning in her speech'. The questions are the method: she cross-examines Romeo, then herself, and reaches a verdict.

Some word there was

But the sum does not stop the tears, and she knows why: ‘Some word there was, worser than Tybalt's death, / That murdered me’. She would forget it, but it presses on her memory ‘Like damnèd guilty deeds to sinners' minds’. She repeats the Nurse's sentence almost word for word, 'Tybalt is dead and Romeo banishèd', and the word takes over:

All slain, all dead

Tybalt's death would have been grief enough. If more had to follow, she asks, why did the Nurse not follow 'Tybalt's dead' with ‘“Thy father” or “thy mother,” nay, or both’? That would have called only for ordinary mourning. Instead the news came with 'a rearward', a rearguard marching behind Tybalt's death, and to speak that one word ‘Is father, mother, Tybalt, Romeo, Juliet, / All slain, all dead’. The grief has no floor: ‘There is no end, no limit, measure, bound, / In that word's death. No words can that woe sound.’ There the June 2023 extract ends, on a rhyming couplet.

Poor ropes

Her parents, the Nurse tells her, are 'Weeping and wailing over Tybalt's corse'. Juliet will spend her tears elsewhere: ‘Wash they his wounds with tears? Mine shall be spent, / When theirs are dry, for Romeo's banishment.’ She has the Nurse pick up the cords and speaks to them as fellow victims: ‘Poor ropes, you are beguiled, / Both you and I, for Romeo is exiled.’ Romeo made them ‘for a highway to my bed’, and now ‘I, a maid, die maiden-widowèd’. Then a couplet gives her wedding night to another bridegroom:

A ring for her true knight

The Nurse cannot bear it. She knows where Romeo is hiding and promises to bring him to her: ‘Hark you, your Romeo will be here at night. / I'll to him. He is hid at Lawrence' cell.’ Juliet's answer is a ring and a message: ‘Give this ring to my true knight / And bid him come to take his last farewell.’

Wedded to calamity

Monday night. Since the killing, Romeo has been hiding in Friar Lawrence's cell, and the Friar calls him out with a figure of speech borrowed from that afternoon's wedding: ‘Affliction is enamored of thy parts, / And thou art wedded to calamity’. Romeo greets him as a son greets a father, ‘Father, what news?’, and the Friar answers 'my dear son'. Romeo fled before the Prince arrived, so he braces for the worst: ‘What less than doomsday is the Prince's doom?’ The Friar thinks he brings good news: ‘Not body's death, but body's banishment’.

Worse than death

Romeo hears the sentence the other way round. To the Friar exile is the 'gentler judgment'; Romeo begs for the death the Prince spared him:

The world is broad and wide

The Friar offers the patience of age, ‘Be patient, for the world is broad and wide’, and Romeo shrinks that wide world to one city:

A golden axe

Then he argues it like a proof: ‘Hence “banishèd” is “banished from the world,” / And world's exile is death’. To call death by a kinder name is to behead him with a smile: ‘Thou cutt'st my head off with a golden ax’. The Friar is appalled ('O deadly sin, O rude unthankfulness!'). The Prince, he says, ‘hath rushed aside the law’ to spare him: ‘This is dear mercy, and thou seest it not.’

Heaven is here

Romeo answers mercy with religion: ‘'Tis torture and not mercy. Heaven is here / Where Juliet lives’. Every ‘cat and dog / And little mouse’ in Verona may look at her, ‘But Romeo may not’. Even ‘carrion flies’, feeders on the dead, may settle on ‘the white wonder of dear Juliet's hand’ and steal kisses from her lips. The complaint ends, of all things, in a pun: ‘Flies may do this, but I from this must fly. / They are free men, but I am banishèd.’

That word

Why not kill him cleanly? ‘Hadst thou no poison mixed, no sharp-ground knife’, he asks. The word belongs in hell, ‘the damnèd use that word in hell’, and it wounds more coming from a man who is ‘a ghostly confessor, / A sin absolver, and my friend professed’.

Hang up philosophy

The Friar tries again ('Thou fond mad man, hear me a little speak'), offering ‘Adversity's sweet milk, philosophy’, as armour against the word. Romeo throws it back: ‘Hang up philosophy. / Unless philosophy can make a Juliet’, it is no use. 'O, then I see that madmen have no ears,' sighs the Friar, and Romeo snaps back, 'How should they when that wise men have no eyes?' Then he says the line at the heart of the scene:

An unmade grave

Then he does what he says the Friar cannot. He throws himself on the floor, ‘Taking the measure of an unmade grave’: a bridegroom lying in the shape of a grave. Someone knocks. The Friar begs him to hide; Romeo will not move. The knocks keep coming, and the Friar's lines break into pieces as he turns between the door and the floor, until the voice outside says it comes from Lady Juliet.

Analysis: Every knock could be the watch. If Romeo is found in Verona, the Prince has ruled, that hour is his last.

Even so lies she

It is the Nurse. ‘There on the ground, with his own tears made drunk’, says the Friar, pointing, and she knows the sight at once: ‘O, he is even in my mistress' case, / Just in her case’. Juliet too lies ‘Blubb'ring and weeping, weeping and blubb'ring’. Where the Friar argued, the Nurse gives orders, as if to a fallen child: ‘Stand up, stand up. Stand an you be a man. / For Juliet's sake, for her sake, rise and stand’. And Romeo rises.

As if that name

His first thought is how Juliet must see him now: ‘Doth not she think me an old murderer, / Now I have stained the childhood of our joy’? What does ‘My concealed lady’ say ‘to our canceled love’? She says nothing, the Nurse tells him, but weeps, falls on her bed, starts up, and ‘“Tybalt” calls, and then on Romeo cries’. Romeo hears only his own name, fired across the city like a shot: ‘As if that name, / Shot from the deadly level of a gun, / Did murder her’. If the name kills, he will cut it out:

Hold thy desperate hand!

He draws his dagger on himself. The Friar cries out to stop him, and then, for nearly forty lines, tells him what a man is and is not:

Damnèd hate

The rebuke goes on. Romeo is a man in shape only, ‘Unseemly woman in a seeming man’, and the Friar is amazed: ‘I thought thy disposition better tempered’. Then he names what Romeo was about to do, and what it would cost: ‘Wilt thou slay thyself, / And slay thy lady that in thy life lives’? Romeo's body is ‘but a form of wax’, his love, sworn that afternoon, 'but hollow perjury', and his wit, meant to guide him, has gone off in his own hands: ‘Like powder in a skilless soldier's flask, / Is set afire by thine own ignorance’.

There art thou happy

Then the sermon turns from blame to blessings: ‘What, rouse thee, man! Thy Juliet is alive’. The Friar counts them off, each ending on the same refrain: ‘Tybalt would kill thee, / But thou slewest Tybalt: there art thou happy’. A 'pack of blessings' sits on Romeo's back, and still he sulks at his luck ‘like a misbehaved and sullen wench’. The rebuke ends with a warning the play will keep to the letter: ‘Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable.’

The plan

Now the remedy: ‘Go, get thee to thy love, as was decreed. / Ascend her chamber’. The wedding night will happen after all. But Romeo must be gone before the night watch takes its posts, ‘For then thou canst not pass to Mantua’, and wait there while the Friar finds a time ‘To blaze your marriage, reconcile your friends, / Beg pardon of the Prince, and call thee back’.

A ring

The Friar sends the Nurse ahead to tell Juliet that Romeo is coming, and she is lost in admiration: ‘O Lord, I could have stayed here all the night / To hear good counsel’. Romeo adds a message, ‘bid my sweet prepare to chide’, and as she goes she hands him a ring from Juliet. It revives him as no argument has. The Friar promises that Romeo's servant will send news of ‘Every good hap to you that chances here’, and Romeo leaves on a couplet: ‘But that a joy past joy calls out on me, / It were a grief so brief to part with thee. / Farewell.’

Analysis: It is the last time Romeo and the Friar meet. When the Friar next sees him, in the Capulet tomb, Romeo is dead.