William Shakespeare

“ Apothecary. Such mortal drugs I have; but Mantua's law
Is death to any he that utters them.
Romeo. Art thou so bare and full of wretchedness,
And fear'st to die? famine is in thy cheeks, 70
Need and oppression starveth in thine eyes,
Contempt and beggary hangs upon thy back,
The world is not thy friend, nor the world's law;
The world affords no law to make thee rich;
Then be not poor, but break it and take this.
Apothecary. My poverty, but not my will, consents.
Romeo. I pay thy poverty, and not thy will.
Apothecary. ”

“ Then Lady Capulet comes sweeping by with her train of velvet, her black hood, her fan, and rosary—the very beau-ideal of a proud Italian matron of the fifteenth century, whose offer to poison Romeo, in revenge for the death of Tybalt, stamps her with one very characteristic trait of the age and the country. Yet she loves her daughter, and there is a touch of remorseful tenderness in her lamentations over her, which adds to our impression of the timid softness of Juliet and the harsh subjection in which she has been kept. ”

“ It is her old foster-mother who is the confidante of her love. It is the woman who cherished her infancy who aids and abets her in her clandestine marriage. Do we not perceive how immediately our impression of Juliet's character would have been lowered, if Shakespeare had placed her in connection with any commonplace dramatic waiting-woman?—even with Portia's adroit Nerissa, or Desdemona's Emilia? By giving her the Nurse for her confidante, the sweetness and dignity of Juliet's character are preserved inviolate to the fancy, even in the midst of all the romance and wilfulness of passion. ”

“ Then I defy you, stars!' Yes; he is now master of events; the stars cannot alter his course. 'Nothing,' as Maginn has observed, 'can be more quiet than his final determination, "Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee to night." ... It is plain Juliet. His mind is made up; the whole course of the short remainder of his life so unalterably fixed that it is perfectly useless to think more about it.' These words, because they are the simplest, are amongst the most memorable that Romeo utters. Now passion, imagination, and will are fused together, and Romeo who was weak has at length become strong." ”

“ Friar Laurence.Hold thy desperate hand!
Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art; 110
Thy tears are womanish, thy wild acts denote
The unreasonable fury of a beast.
Unseemly woman in a seeming man!
Or ill-beseeming beast in seeming both!
Thou hast amaz'd me; by my holy order,
I thought thy disposition better temper'd.
Hast thou slain Tybalt? wilt thou slay thyself?
And slay thy lady too that lives in thee,
By doing damned hate upon thyself?
Why rail'st thou on thy birth, the heaven, and earth? ”

“ To strike him dead I hold it not a sin.
Capulet. Why, how now, kinsman! wherefore storm you so?
Tybalt. Uncle, this is a Montague, our foe,
A villain that is hither come in spite,
To scorn at our solemnity this night.
Capulet. Young Romeo is it?
Tybalt. 'Tis he, that villain Romeo.
Capulet. Content thee, gentle coz, let him alone.
He bears him like a portly gentleman;
And, to say truth, Verona brags of him 70
To be a virtuous and well-govern'd youth. ”

“ Only one who knew of what a true woman is capable, in frankness, in courage, and self-surrender when her heart is possessed by a noble love, could have touched with such delicacy, such infinite charm of mingled reserve and artless frankness, the avowal of so fervent, yet so modest a love, the secret of which had been so strangely stolen from her. As the whole scene is the noblest pæan to Love ever [Pg 283] written, so is what Juliet says supreme in subtlety of feeling and expression, where all is beautiful. ”

“ For the rest, there is not a personage or a situation, hardly a speech, essential to Brooke's poem, which has not its counterpart—its exalted and glorified counterpart—in the tragedy.... In brief, Romeo and Juliet owes to Shakespeare only its dramatic form and its poetic decoration. But what an exception is the latter! It is to say that the earth owes to the sun only its verdure and its flowers, the air only its perfume and its balm, the heavens only their azure and their glow. ”

“ When he asks, "O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?" it is only the half-involuntary utterance of the man's impatience—so natural to the man—that the full fruition of his love must be delayed. Juliet knows that it involves no base suggestion, and a touch of tender sympathy and pity is mingled with the maiden wisdom of the innocent response, "What satisfaction canst thou have to-night?" ”

“ I would thou hadst my bones, and I thy news.
Nay, come, I pray thee, speak; good, good nurse, speak.
Nurse. Jesu, what haste? can you not stay awhile? 30
Do you not see that I am out of breath?
Juliet. How art thou out of breath, when thou hast breath
To say to me that thou art out of breath?
The excuse that thou dost make in this delay
Is longer than the tale thou dost excuse.
Is thy news good, or bad? answer to that;
Say either, and I'll stay the circumstance.
Let me be satisfied, is 't good or bad?
Nurse. Well, you have made a simple choice; you
know not how to choose a man. Romeo! ”

“ Romeo. And trust me, love, in my eye so do you;
Dry sorrow drinks our blood. Adieu, adieu! [Exit.
Juliet. O Fortune, Fortune! all men call thee fickle; 60
If thou art fickle, what dost thou with him
That is renown'd for faith? Be fickle, Fortune;
For then, I hope, thou wilt not keep him long,
But send him back.
Lady Capulet. [Within] Ho, daughter! are you up?
Juliet. Who is 't that calls? is it my lady mother?
Is she not down so late, or up so early?
What unaccustom'd cause procures her hither?
Enter Lady Capulet
Lady Capulet. ”

“ Our impression of Juliet's loveliness and sensibility is enhanced when we find it overcoming in the bosom of Romeo a previous love for another. His visionary passion for the cold, inaccessible Rosaline forms but the prologue, the threshold, to the true, the real sentiment which succeeds to it. ”

“ This incident, which is found in the original story, has been retained by Shakspeare with equal feeling and judgment; and, far from being a fault in taste and sentiment, far from prejudicing us against Romeo by casting on him, at the outset of the piece, the stigma of inconstancy, it becomes, if properly considered, a beauty in the drama, and adds a fresh stroke of truth to the portrait of the lover. Why, after all, should we be offended at what does not offend Juliet herself? ”

“ Romeo is a very young man—if indeed we may call him a man when we first meet him. We may suppose him to be twenty, but hardly older. He has seen very little of society, as we infer from Benvolio's advising him to go to the masquerade at Capulet's, in order to compare "the admired beauties of Verona" with Rosaline. He had thought her "fair, none else being by." He is hardly less "a stranger in the world" than Juliet himself. Love develops him as it does her, but more slowly. ”

“ It appears to me an admirable touch of nature, considering the master-passion which, at this moment, rules in Juliet's soul, that she is as much shocked by the nurse's dispraise of her lover as by her wicked, time-serving advice. ”

“ We make the acquaintance of Romeo at the critical period of that not dangerous sickness to which youth is liable. It is that 'love lying in the eyes' of early and just blossoming manhood, that humorsome, whimsical 'love in idleness,' that first bewildered, stammering interview of the heart with the scarcely awakened nature. ”

“ In Juliet's case, I believe that the youthfulness was an essential element in Shakespeare's conception of the character. With the parents and the Nurse he has given her, she could only have been, at the opening of the play, the mere girl he makes her. She must be too young to have discovered the real character of her father and mother, and to have been chilled and hardened by learning how unlike they were to the ideals of her childhood. She must not have come to comprehend fully the low coarse nature of the Nurse, her foster-mother. ”

“ With the kiss that ends the pretty quibbling the girl learns what love means, and the larger life of womanhood begins.
The "balcony scene" (ii. 2) —the most exquisite love scene ever written—is in perfect keeping with the poet's conception of Juliet as little more than a child—still childlike in the expression of the new love that is making her a woman. Hence the absolute frankness in her avowal of that love—an ideal love in which passion and purity are perfectly interfused. There is not a suggestion of sensuality on Romeo's part any more than on hers. ”

“ She is thinking aloud; it is the young heart 'triumphing to itself in words.' In the midst of all the vehemence with which she calls upon the night to bring Romeo to her arms, there is something so almost infantine in her perfect simplicity, so playful and fantastic in the imagery and language, that the charm of sentiment and innocence is thrown over the whole ”

“ Strangely enough, objections have been made to this 'superfluous complication,' as if, down to this day, every Romeo had not to sigh for some Junonian Rosaline, nay, for half a dozen Rosalines, more or less, before his eyes open upon his Juliet."
Young men of ardent and sentimental nature, as Kreyssig intimates, imagine themselves in love—sometimes again and again—before a genuine passion takes possession of them. As Rosalind expresses it, Cupid may have "clapped them on the shoulder," but, they are really "heart-whole." ”

“ The cloud of night is broken up, by Day, which breaks out, breaks in, as from heaven to earth, with a breach in the cloud wall of it. The thing that the day breaks up is partly a garment rent, the blanket of the dark torn to be peeped through.... ”

“ Stand up, stand up; stand, an you be a man.
For Juliet's sake, for her sake, rise and stand. 90
Why should you fall into so deep an O?
Romeo. Nurse!
Nurse. Ah sir! ah sir! Well, death's the end of all.
Romeo. Spak'st thou of Juliet? how is it with her?
Doth she not think me an old murtherer,
Now I have stain'd the childhood of our joy
With blood remov'd but little from her own?
Where is she? and how doth she? and what says
My conceal'd lady to our cancell'd love?
Nurse. O, she says nothing, sir, but weeps and weeps; 100
And now falls on her bed; and then starts up,
And Tybalt calls ”

“ Mercutio. Could you not take some occasion without
giving?
Tybalt. Mercutio, thou consort'st with Romeo,—
Mercutio. Consort! what, dost thou make us
minstrels? an thou make minstrels of us, look to
50hear nothing but discords; here's my fiddlestick,
here's that shall make you dance. Zounds, consort!
Benvolio. We talk here in the public haunt of men.
Either withdraw unto some private place,
Or reason coldly of your grievances,
Or else depart; here all eyes gaze on us.
Mercutio. Men's eyes were made to look, and let them gaze;
I will not budge for no man's pleasure, I.
Enter Romeo
Tybalt. ”

“ The necessity of loving creates an object for itself in man and woman; and yet there is a difference in this respect between the sexes, though only to be known by a perception of it. It would have displeased us if Juliet had been represented as already in love, [Pg 286] or as fancying herself so; but no one, I believe, ever experiences any shock at Romeo's forgetting his Rosaline, who had been a mere name for the yearning of his youthful imagination, and rushing into his passion for Juliet. ”

“ Nothing can be more naturally exhibited than the indifference of hirelings, without attachment, to a family scene of grief. Peter and the musicians bandy jokes; and though the musicians think Peter a 'pestilent knave,' perhaps for his inopportune sallies, they are ready enough to look after their own gratification, even amidst the sorrow which they see around them. A wedding or a burial is the same to them. 'Come, we'll in here; tarry for the mourners, and stay dinner.' So S. read the course of the world—and it is not much changed. ”

“ Juliet. Here's such a coil!—come, what says Romeo?
Nurse. Have you got leave to go to shrift to-day?
Juliet. I have.
[Pg 83]
Nurse. Then hie you hence to Friar Laurence' cell; 70
There stays a husband to make you a wife.
Now comes the wanton blood up in your cheeks,
They'll be in scarlet straight at any news.
Hie you to church; I must another way,
To fetch a ladder, by the which your love
Must climb a bird's nest soon when it is dark.
I am the drudge, and toil in your delight.
Go; I'll to dinner; hie you to the cell.
Juliet. Hie to high fortune!—Honest nurse, farewell. ”

“ Contrast the strength of Juliet's new-born heroism in her budding womanhood, when she drinks the potion that is to consign her to the horrors of the charnel-house, with the weakness of Romeo who is ready to kill himself when he learns that he is to be banished from Verona,—an insignificant fate compared with that which threatens her—banishment from home, a beggar in the streets,—the only alternative a criminal marriage that would forever separate her from her lawful husband, or death to escape that guilt and [Pg 288] wretchedness. ”

“ He has the form of a man, but talks and acts like a weak girl, while the girl of fourteen whom he loves—a child three days before, we might say—now shows a self-control and fortitude worthy of a man.
Romeo does not attain to true manhood until he receives the tidings of Juliet's supposed death. "Now, for the first time," as Dowden says, "he is completely delivered from the life of dream, completely adult, and able to act with an initiative in his own will, and with manly determination. ”

“ If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.—
Romeo, good night.—I'll to my truckle-bed;
This field-bed is too cold for me to sleep.
Come, shall we go?
Benvolio.Go, then; for 'tis in vain
To seek him here that means not to be found. [Exeunt. Scene II. Capulet's Orchard
Enter Romeo
Romeo. He jests at scars that never felt a wound.— [Juliet appears above at a window.
But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? [Pg 61]
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.—
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou her maid art far more fair than she. ”

“ Coleridge, in his Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare, says: "The stage in Shakespeare's time was a naked room with a blanket for a curtain, but he made it a field for monarchs. That law of unity which has its foundations, not in the factitious necessity of custom, but in nature itself, the unity of feeling, is everywhere and at all times observed by Shakespeare in his plays. Read Romeo and Juliet: all is youth and spring—youth with its follies, its virtues, its precipitancies ”