Death and time

Before a character speaks, the Chorus gives away two deaths, a peace and a running time: the lovers ‘take their life’ in the line that introduces them, their love is ‘death-marked’, and the story is ‘the two hours' traffic of our stage’. Then the play almost withdraws death: Act 1 is built like a comedy, and death waits at the edges, in a father whose other hopes the earth has swallowed, in Romeo's dread of an ‘untimely death’, and in Juliet, before she knows his name, picturing her grave as her wedding bed. From the November 2020 extract leave by the Prince's ‘on pain of death’; June 2017's (1.1.34 to 52) has no death line, so go from its drawn weapon to 3.1, where the quarrel ends in ‘a grave man’. From Specimen 1 (1.2.6 to 19), leave by Capulet's 'Earth' that swallows; from the June 2019 sonnet, by the grave Juliet names minutes later.

• A pair¹ of star-crossed^2,3 lovers take their life⁴

  'Take their life' puts a whole lifetime, birth and death, into three words: the play's compression of time starts in its first description of the lovers, who will meet, marry and die within four days.

  In the exam

  Pair it with Juliet's words for Romeo's death, his 'timeless end' (5.3): a life taken in one phrase at the start, ended out of time at the close.

• The fearful¹ passage² of their death-marked³ love

  The love is marked for death before Romeo has met Juliet, so the audience hears his Rosaline sighs and the feast listening for the mark to show, and every light remark about death in Act 1 lands heavily.

  In the exam

  Use it to show the deaths framing the love before the lovers meet, then show the characters taking the Chorus's idea into their own mouths (1.4, 1.5).

• Earth hath swallowed¹ all my hopes but she;² / She's the hopeful lady of my earth.³

  The first deaths the play speaks of as already past come as an image of a mouth: the earth has 'swallowed' Capulet's other hopes, and Juliet is the one left outside it, which is why her marriage and her life weigh so much in his house.

  In the exam

  From the Specimen 1 extract, pair 'swallowed' with the tomb Romeo calls a 'detestable maw' (5.3): the earth that took Capulet's other children takes the last one.

• I fear too early, for my mind misgives / Some consequence yet hanging in the stars¹ / Shall bitterly begin his fearful date / With this night's revels, and expire the term² / Of a despisèd life closed in my breast / By some vile forfeit³ of untimely death.⁴

  Romeo is the first character to foresee his own death, and he foresees it in time words, a 'date' and a 'term': in this play death is a deadline before it is an event.

  In the exam

  Use it to show a lover sensing the ending from inside the play, so that for once a character shares the audience's dread.

• Beauty too rich for use,¹ for Earth too dear.^2,3

  Romeo's praise at first sight already prices Juliet as too precious to last. The compliment places her beyond the world before the plot does.

  Key word: ‘Earth’

  'Earth' meant the world of the living and the soil of the grave, a double sense M. M. Mahood finds in this line: Juliet is too dear for life and bound for the ground, which is exactly where the play ends.

  In the exam

  From the June 2019 extract, reach back fifty lines to show Romeo's first praise of Juliet already sounding like an epitaph.

• If he be marrièd,¹ / My grave² is like to be my wedding bed.³

  Juliet says it as an anxious exaggeration while the Nurse goes to ask his name: if this stranger is married, she will die unwed. It starts the theme's main thread, a figure of speech that others will repeat until the tomb makes it fact.

  In the exam

  Make it step one of a 'figure becomes fact' argument, then trace who says it next and with what feeling: desire, a curse, grief, love.

The Act 2 Chorus announces the new love as an heir at a ‘deathbed’, and from here the lovers speak of death as a price worth paying. In the orchard Romeo would rather be killed by her kinsmen than live unloved; Juliet fears a love ‘Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be’, and teases that she would ‘kill thee with much cherishing’. Each is a lover's exaggeration the play keeps for later. Next morning the Friar gives the theme its philosophy: the earth is both ‘tomb’ and womb, and one flower holds both ‘Poison’ and medicine. AQA has printed the orchard twice. From Specimen 3 (2.2.56 to 78), leave by ‘the place death’ and Romeo's reply, ‘I am proof against their enmity’, and show what the dare costs in 5.3; from June 2022 (2.2.2 to 26), leave by the sun that will ‘kill the envious moon’, already ‘sick and pale with grief’, and go to the vault Juliet's beauty makes ‘a feasting presence full of light’, where Romeo's light imagery meets the grave.

• My life were better ended by their hate¹ / Than death proroguèd,² wanting of thy love.

  Romeo's first answer to danger is to welcome it: on the night he meets her he already values his life below her love. The tomb carries out this sentence.

  In the exam

  Argue that the lovers choose death long before they are forced to it, then test whether that is devotion or recklessness in 3.3 and 5.3.

• It is too rash, too unadvised², too sudden,¹ / Too like the lightning,³ which doth cease⁴ to be

  Juliet's image for the love's speed is also an image of its ending, a light that 'doth cease to be'. Romeo feared his own life would be cut short (1.4); Juliet is the first to give the love itself the brevity of a death.

  In the exam

  Pair 'cease to be' with Romeo's 'light'ning before death' in the tomb (5.3): the flash Juliet feared in the orchard is the one he names as he dies.

• The Earth that's nature's mother is her tomb;¹ / What is her burying grave, that is her womb;²

  The Friar sets out calmly the rule the plot will follow: what buries also breeds. His cycle is slow and seasonal, and the play will run it in four days, from a wedding to a tomb.

  In the exam

  Quote it as the play's own philosophy of death, then test it against the ending: does a peace grow out of the grave, or does the 'womb of death' (5.3) only take?

On the wedding day the theme becomes central for the first time since the Prologue, and it arrives through time. Mercutio tells the Nurse that ‘the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon’; Juliet, alone, counts ‘three long hours’ and jokes that old people ‘feign as they were dead’. In the Friar's cell, minutes before the wedding, Romeo prizes ‘one short minute’ in her sight above any sorrow and dares death to do its worst, and the Friar answers that such joys ‘in their triumph die’. The wedding itself happens offstage. AQA's June 2024 extract (2.5.1 to 18) is Juliet's wait: its clock and its joke about the 'dead' old are both routes to Act 4, where she will feign death herself and the old will hurry the day.

• The clock struck nine¹ when I did send the Nurse. / In half an hour² she promised to return.

  A bride waiting for news makes the clock her enemy: time is felt here as delay, and by that afternoon it runs the other way, too fast for anyone to catch.

  Key word: ‘clock’

  A striking clock is public and exact, nothing like the lovers' private sense of time ('in a minute there are many days', 3.5). Juliet's day is ruled by it, as the whole tragedy will be: a wedding day fixed and then moved, 'two and forty hours' of borrowed sleep, a letter that never leaves Verona.

  In the exam

  From the June 2024 extract, start a time thread here: the hours she counts become the Friar's hours (4.1, 5.2) and end as minutes in the tomb.

• But old folks,¹ many feign as they were dead,² / Unwieldy, slow, heavy,³ and pale⁴ as lead.⁵

  Juliet's joke treats death as something the old pretend to. The next day she will pretend to it herself, on the Friar's instructions: youth mocks a likeness of death it is about to borrow.

  In the exam

  From the June 2024 extract, go further than the foreshadowing AQA's 2024 report credits: follow the joke to the plan the Friar gives her the next day, 'this borrowed likeness of shrunk death' (4.1).

• Do thou but close our hands with holy words,¹ / Then love-devouring death² do what he dare,³ / It is enough I may but call her mine.⁴

  On his wedding day Romeo names death as love's enemy and challenges it. Death is no longer a lover's figure of speech but an opponent invited by name, and the play accepts the challenge.

  In the exam

  Follow the mouth from 'devouring' to the tomb's 'maw' (5.3) to show the dare answered: the monster Romeo challenges on his wedding day is the vault he forces open.

• These¹ violent² delights have violent ends³

  The Friar's warning predicts not only death but its timing: such joys end at their height, in 'triumph', which is exactly where the lovers die.

  In the exam

  Argue that the lovers die at the height of their love rather than in its decline, quoting the next line, 'in their triumph die', to show the play choosing that timing.

Romeo has been Tybalt's kinsman for ‘an hour’ when death stops being imagined and starts happening. Mercutio dies offstage after a joke, Romeo kills Tybalt in front of us, and the play turns from comedy to tragedy at its exact centre. Shakespeare then places Juliet's wedding song after the killings, so even her happiest wish, ‘when I shall die’, is heard as a warning, and the news turns her bridal bed into death's. In the next scene Romeo hears the same word, 'banishèd', calls it worse than death, throws himself down ‘Taking the measure of an unmade grave’ and turns a dagger on himself, and the Friar names the sin. AQA has printed 3.2 three times; the June 2023 passage (3.2.106 to 137) is the most death-filled, with grief measured in slain Tybalts and a marriage measured in hours.

• Ask for me tomorrow,^1,2 and you shall find me a grave³ man.

  The first death of the action comes on the wedding afternoon, within the hour of the marriage ('that an hour / Hath been my cousin'), and it comes with a date, 'tomorrow': death arrives as an appointment, the shape Romeo will give his own ('tonight', 5.1).

  In the exam

  Use it to show death arriving on the wedding day itself, beside the lovers rather than to them, then set its 'tomorrow' against the hours Juliet counts that evening ('thy three-hours wife', 3.2).

• Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name¹ / When I, thy three-hours wife,² have mangled³ it?

  This line belongs to the time half of the theme: Juliet measures her whole marriage in hours, on the evening its ending begins.

  In the exam

  From the June 2023 extract, use it to show time and loss pressing together, then reach the Friar's 'two and forty hours' (4.1) and the minutes in the tomb.

• “Romeo is banishèd.” To speak that word / Is father, mother, Tybalt, Romeo, Juliet,¹ / All slain, all dead.²

  Juliet measures loss in deaths: exile, to her, is a massacre of everyone she loves, herself included. Death becomes her unit of feeling, so the plot's real deaths sound like her words coming true.

  In the exam

  On a Juliet's-feelings question (June 2023), argue that from here her feelings for Romeo are spoken through death, and follow that measure to the dagger.

• I'll to my wedding bed,¹ / And death, not Romeo,² take my maidenhead!³

  At the feast the grave was a fear; now, believing the marriage over before it has begun, she gives Death the bridegroom's place by her own choice. The image has moved from what might happen to her to what she would rather have.

  In the exam

  From the June 2023 extract, carry the scene on a few lines to this couplet: the girl who measured her grief in deaths now chooses one, so her feelings for Romeo are spoken as a decision.

• Hast thou slain Tybalt? Wilt thou slay thyself,¹ / And slay thy lady that in thy life lives,² / By doing damnèd hate³ upon thyself?

  The play's one explicit religious verdict on taking one's own life is spoken here, by a priest trying to stop a desperate young man, and it works: in 3.3 someone is in the room to stop him, as no one will be in Mantua or in the tomb.

  In the exam

  On a Romeo's-feelings question, set this attempt beside 5.1 and 5.3 and weigh what has changed: the despair is the same, but this time an adult is there to answer it.

Capulet shrugs off Tybalt's death, ‘we were born to die’, and in the same scene fixes the wedding day, laughing: from here the play counts days. At dawn the lovers part in an aubade, a dawn song in which daylight means death, ‘let day in, and let life out’, and Juliet looks down at Romeo and sees him dead. Then her image from the feast spreads to parents who know nothing of the marriage: her mother wishes her married to the grave, her father threatens her with a death in the streets, and Juliet begs for delay or a bridal bed in Tybalt's tomb. With no adult left on her side, she ends the scene holding death in reserve. Both AQA extracts from 3.5 (June 2018, 3.5.142 to 162; June 2025, 3.5.187 to 210) contain a parent's death-wish: leave either by it, to 4.5, where the parents mourn the death they wished and threatened.

• Monday,¹ ha ha!² Well, Wednesday is too soon.³ / O' Thursday let it be.

  The same scene that shrugged off one death sets the date that leads to the tomb. Capulet treats death as a proverb and the wedding as a matter of days, and the play ties the two together.

  In the exam

  Use it to show death and the wedding scheduled in one scene: Capulet opens 3.4 shrugging off Tybalt's death ('we were born to die') and closes it on the date the tomb will keep.

• Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low,¹ / As one dead² in the bottom of a tomb.³

  Juliet's vision reverses the window of the orchard: the man below her, once a lover gazing up at her window, is now a body at the bottom of a tomb. Death has moved into the lovers' eyes; each will see the other dead before it is true.

  In the exam

  From either 3.5 extract, reach back to this dawn: the last sight the lovers have of each other alive is already a picture of death.

• I would the fool¹ were married to her grave.^2,3

  Juliet's own image from the feast comes back in her mother's mouth as a curse, spoken in front of her. The wedding-and-grave thread has passed from a girl's fear to a parent's anger.

  In the exam

  From the June 2018 extract, hear the curse as dramatic irony: the mother does not know her daughter is already married, and wishes on her a second marriage that the tomb will grant.

• An you be mine,¹ I'll give you to my friend.² / An you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets³

  Both of Capulet's alternatives are a kind of death for Juliet: a marriage she cannot make, or the streets. The next morning he will mourn her in the language of a will.

  Key word: ‘die’

  The list falls to its last verb, and the father who says it will say 'I will die / And leave him all' over her body (4.5). He imagines her death as a punishment a day before he mourns it as the end of his line.

  In the exam

  From the June 2025 extract, use 'die' to link the father's threat to his grief in 4.5, and ask how far his haste helps to make the death he laments.

• I'll to the Friar to know his remedy. / If all else fail,¹ myself² have power³ to die.

  With every adult gone, Juliet's last resource is death, and she claims it calmly, in a couplet. The theme turns from something said about her to something she holds.

  In the exam

  Use it to show Juliet's death as a decision made long before 5.3, then trace the power through the knife (4.1) to the dagger.

In Act 4 death is used to escape death. Juliet comes to the Friar with a knife and a list of horrors she would sooner face, ending in a ‘new-made grave’, and he answers with a vial: a death on loan, for a fixed term. Then Capulet moves the wedding forward a day, so she must drink a night earlier than planned. Alone, she imagines every way the plan could fail, from poison to waking ‘before the time’ beside Tybalt's body, and drinks. Next morning the household performs a whole funeral in stacked cries, ‘O woeful, woeful, woeful day’, for a girl who is alive, and, as Capulet says, ‘Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse’. No printed extract has come from Act 4, so bring 4.3 into any answer on Juliet's feelings or difficulties.

• And in this borrowed likeness¹ of shrunk death / Thou shalt continue two and forty hours² / And then awake as from a pleasant sleep.³

  The Friar's cure for a forced wedding is a funeral: the morning the bridegroom comes to wake her, she is to be found dead in her bed ('thy bed, there art thou dead', 4.1), so the plan itself joins the wedding bed to the grave.

  Key word: ‘shrunk’

  'Shrunk' makes death smaller than itself, a shrivelled copy that looks like the real thing. The plan's comfort is that this death is lesser and temporary; in the tomb the copy lies beside the real thing, and only the audience can tell them apart.

  In the exam

  Argue that the plan turns death into a timetable, then show the timetable breaking: Capulet's Wednesday, the sealed house, the minutes in the tomb.

• My dismal¹ scene² I needs must³ act alone.⁴

  In 3.5 death was wished on Juliet and then held in reserve; here she takes on its likeness as a part she must play. This is the step from imagining death to acting it, and she takes it with no one beside her.

  In the exam

  On a courage question, show that Juliet faces death knowingly, then weigh what the scene's isolation costs her.

• Romeo, Romeo, Romeo!¹ Here's drink.² I drink to thee.³

  What finally makes her drink is not an argument but a vision of Tybalt's ghost hunting Romeo: fear for his life outweighs fear of her own death, and she answers it with his name.

  In the exam

  On a courage question, argue that her courage comes from love as much as resolve: she drinks the moment she imagines Romeo in danger.

• Death lies on her like an untimely frost^1,2 / Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.³

  Capulet's first image of her death is gentle and seasonal, frost on a flower; within a dozen lines it has become Death the bridegroom and heir, so the parents' language of death changes as fast as the lovers' did.

  In the exam

  Set 'untimely' beside Romeo's fear of an 'untimely death' (1.4) and the Friar's 'untimely' dead in the tomb (5.3): the play's word for a young death, feared at the start and true at the end, is spoken here over a girl who is alive.

• Death is my son-in-law;¹ Death is my heir.² / My daughter he hath wedded. I will die / And leave him all.³ Life, living, all is Death's.

  The image Juliet made at the feast arrives in her father's mouth as plain statement, and it is still false: she is alive.

  Key word: ‘heir’

  In the Act 2 Chorus young love 'gapes to be his heir' at an old desire's deathbed; here Death is heir to an old man's line. The inheritance runs the wrong way: death inherits the young, and the old are left with nothing to pass on.

  In the exam

  On a Capulets' grief question, set it beside his wife's 'married to her grave' (3.5): the curse spoken in anger returns as a lament, a day later, over a daughter the audience knows is alive.

• Accursed, unhappy, wretched, hateful day!¹ / Most miserable hour that e'er time saw / In lasting labor of his pilgrimage!²

  The mourners blame time for the death: Lady Capulet curses the 'hour', and a few lines later Capulet asks 'Uncomfortable time, why cam'st thou now'. It is the excuse the Friar will reach for in the tomb, spoken here by the parents who chose the wedding day.

  In the exam

  On a Capulets' grief question, name the form (lists, repeated cries, mourners taking turns) and weigh it against what the audience knows, that she is alive; then set it beside the few lines her parents speak over her real body in 5.3.

• She's not well married that lives married long,¹ / But she's best married that dies married young.²

  The priest who knows she is alive consoles her parents with a proverb that makes an early death the best marriage. Within a day the proverb is literally true, and he will have helped to make it so.

  In the exam

  Use the Friar as a foil to the grieving parents: his consolations are neat and false, and beside the real deaths they sound hollow.

Romeo wakes in Mantua cheerful, after a dream in which Juliet found him dead and kissed him back to life. Then the wrong news arrives first: Balthasar saw her laid in the vault and rode straight to Mantua, while the Friar's letter never set out. Romeo decides in a single line to lie with her that night, asks for the fastest poison he can describe, ‘As violently as hasty powder fired’, and calls gold ‘worse poison to men's souls’. In Verona the plan breaks on public routine, not a storm: the plague searchers sealed Friar John into a house. The Friar turns to the clock, sure he has three hours before she wakes. No printed extract has come from Act 5, so carry it from memory: the dream, the decision and the stopped letter make the timing argument in a few words.

• I dreamt my lady came and found me dead¹ / (Strange dream that gives a dead man leave to think!)² / And breathed such life with kisses in my lips³ / That I revived and was an emperor.⁴

  In the dream death can be undone by a kiss, and Romeo wakes cheered by it: the last act opens with death at its most reversible, hours before it becomes final for both lovers.

  In the exam

  Pair it with 'Thy lips are warm!' (5.3) to show the play granting the dream's details and refusing its hope.

• Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee¹ tonight.² / Let's see for means.³

  Romeo speaks of his death as a night with his wife, not as an ending: the grave is simply where she now sleeps, so he will go and lie beside her. Death has become a meeting he arranges rather than a fate he suffers.

  In the exam

  From a 5.3 extract, reach back to this line to show that Romeo's death is decided before he reaches the tomb: the vault carries out a plan made in Mantua, in a single line.

• Now must I to the monument alone.¹ / Within this three hours² will fair Juliet wake.

  The Friar's last soliloquy is a timetable with Romeo in it, but the wrong Romeo: one still in Mantua, waiting for a second letter ('I will write again to Mantua'), while the real one is already riding to the tomb. The theme's clock is now in the hands of a man who knows only half of what is happening.

  In the exam

  Argue the timing as a tragedy of margins, in the order the play gives it: Romeo arrives and dies, the Friar arrives, Juliet wakes.

Paris strews flowers on Juliet's ‘bridal bed’; Romeo forces the tomb's ‘rotten jaws’, kills Paris, who challenges him there (Paris dies asking to be laid beside her), and finds the vault full of light. He reads the crimson in her lips and cheeks as death's strange failure, then as Death's desire for her, and stays to guard her. He drinks and dies with a kiss. The Friar finds him dead and blames ‘an unkind hour’; then ‘The lady stirs’. Juliet asks where her lord is, refuses to leave with the Friar, reads the cup at once, ‘his timeless end’, finds his lips still warm, hears the Watch, and stabs herself with Romeo's dagger. Every image of death as lover, bed and bridegroom is now literal, and the margin is minutes. No extract has come from 5.3, but AQA's 2022 mark scheme and 2023 report send answers here (Romeo's taking poison; the 'happy dagger'): from any extract on the lovers' feelings, carry one of these minutes and say what the timing changes.

• A grave? O, no.¹ A lantern, slaughtered youth, / For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes / This vault a feasting presence² full of light.³

  Romeo refuses the word 'grave' in the place that is one: he enters death's house and makes it a feast hall. The same refusal to see death as death will stop him seeing that she is alive.

  In the exam

  Pair the refused 'grave' with 'too rich for use' (1.5) to show Romeo's language lifting Juliet out of death to the end.

• O my love, my wife,¹ / Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,² / Hath had no power yet³ upon thy beauty.

  Romeo pictures Death drawing 'the honey' of her breath yet leaving her beauty untouched. The ending's two readings meet in the line: love that death cannot spoil, or a sign of life misread minutes before it could have saved him.

  In the exam

  Use it to open the debate on the ending: read 'no power' as love outlasting death or as dramatic irony, since she is alive, and decide which the rest of the scene supports.

• Ah, dear Juliet, / Why art thou yet so fair?¹ Shall I believe / That unsubstantial death is amorous,² / And that the lean abhorrèd monster keeps / Thee here in dark to be his paramour?³

  The bridegroom thread reaches its last form: Death as a jealous lover. The true answer to Romeo's question (she is fair because she is waking) would save him, but the figure of speech wins over the fact.

  In the exam

  Weigh how far Romeo dies of grief and how far of his own figure of speech.

• Here's to my love.¹ O true apothecary,² / Thy drugs are quick.³ Thus with a kiss I die.⁴

  Romeo dies believing he has kept the vow he made in Mantua, to lie with her tonight, about thirty lines before she stirs: the bed-and-grave thread closes in an act.

  In the exam

  Use it for the theme's cruellest timing: he dies certain that she is dead, minutes before she wakes, so the audience watches him miss the one fact that would save him.

• Romeo! O, pale! Who else? What, Paris too?¹ / And steeped in blood? Ah, what an unkind hour² / Is guilty of this lamentable chance!³

  The man who set the timetable now makes the hour the guilty party: death and time fuse in his excuse, and the audience, who watched each hour being set, can test it.

  In the exam

  Set it beside his own rule on the wedding day, 'Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow' (2.6): the man who warned about speed arrives too late, and blames the hour.

• Thy lips are warm!¹

  The time thread ends without a clock: after hours, days and a borrowed sleep, the margin is measured by the warmth of a body. It is the smallest unit of time in the play, and the cruellest.

  In the exam

  End a timing argument here: set it against 'The clock struck nine' (2.5) to show the play's measure of time shrinking from hours to minutes.

• O, happy¹ dagger,² / This is thy sheath.³ There rust,⁴ and let me die.⁵

  Juliet ends the bridegroom thread herself. Death took the husband's place in her words in 3.2 and in her father's in 4.5; now she takes it back for Romeo, with his own blade.

  Key word: ‘rust’

  'Rust' is a slow word in a fast ending: the blade is to stay in her and decay, a process of years in a story of four days. Romeo's 'everlasting rest' minutes earlier imagines the same permanence, and the fathers will answer both with gold statues meant to last as long as Verona's name.

  In the exam

  On a feelings or courage question, use it to end the bridegroom thread in her own hand, then judge whether the play presents it as the marriage completed or as waste.

After the lovers, the old. The Watch finds Juliet ‘warm, and newly dead’, though buried, it says, two days; Lady Capulet hears the sight as ‘a bell’ calling her own old age to the tomb; Montague reports that his wife has died of grief, offstage, and rebukes his son for reaching the grave first. The Friar retells everything, and Romeo's letter says he came ‘to die and lie with Juliet’. The fathers join hands and promise golden statues. It is Thursday's dawn, and the sun will not show itself. The play ends as it began, on a sonnet's closing rhyme, with the deaths turned into a 'story'. AQA's June 2025 report warns that using only the opening act limits an answer, and the November 2020 mark scheme's 'only resolved through death' needs this scene, and so does any judgement on waste or completion.

• Alas, my liege, my wife is dead tonight.¹ / Grief of my son's exile² hath stopped her breath. / What further woe³ conspires against mine age?

  The play's quietest death is reported in a line and happens offstage: a mother killed by grief at her son's exile. It takes the cost into the older generation, and by sorrow rather than by a sword or a drug.

  In the exam

  Widen a death argument beyond the lovers: count the cost in both generations, and note which deaths Shakespeare shows and which he only reports.

• A glooming peace¹ this morning with it brings.

  The Prince's oxymoron is the theme's verdict in two words: a peace that death has bought, in a light that will not fully come. It neither celebrates nor condemns; it mourns.

  Key word: ‘morning’

  'Morning' completes the play's run of dawns: the lovers' parting in 3.5, when daylight meant Romeo's death; the morning of 4.5, when the bride is found 'dead'; and this one. From 3.5 on, dawn brings a parting or the discovery of a death rather than a beginning.

  In the exam

  Use 'glooming' to weigh the ending: a peace, but a dim one, paid for with the young, and decide whether the play asks you to feel it as renewal or waste.

• For never was a story of more woe¹ / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.²

  Death closes the frame it opened: a sonnet told the deaths before the action, and a closing couplet tells them again and calls them a 'story'. The couplet rhymes 'woe' with 'Romeo': the lovers' names are the play's last words, but the rhyme binds the last of them to grief, so the ending holds the love and the loss together rather than choosing.

  In the exam

  Link the end to the Prologue in a single move, then make your own judgement on waste or completion by asking whose view of the deaths the last word gives.