Romeo and Juliet Analysis: Pages 40-52 PDF

## *Romeo and Juliet* ### Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 1-26 7. "He jests at scars that never felt a wound. But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? 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 a...

## *Romeo and Juliet* ### Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 1-26 7. "He jests at scars that never felt a wound. But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? 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: Be not her maid, since she is envious; Her vestal livery is but sick and green And none but fools do wear it; cast it off. It is my lady, O, it is my love! O, that she knew she were! She speaks yet she says nothing: what of that? Her eye discourses; I will answer it. I am too bold, 'tis not to me she speaks: Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, Having some business, do entreat her eyes To twinkle in their spheres till they return. What if her eyes were there, they in her head? The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars, As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven Would through the airy region stream so bright That birds would sing and think it were not night. See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand! O, that I were a glove upon that hand, That I might touch that cheek!" Romeo's famous speech establishes the passion between these two love-struck teenagers and contains some of the play's most persistent symbolism. Romeo and Juliet often imagine each other as celestial bodies, especially the stars and the sun. When Romeo imagines Juliet as the sun, he sees her as not only a gorgeous light, but also the source of life itself. By contrast, both often forswear the moon; it's too inconstant, too changeable, and too virginal for comfort. ### Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 46-47 8. "What's in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other word would smell as sweet." In her (she believes) private musings on Romeo, Juliet reflects that a name is not the essential part of a thing: A word is only a gesture toward reality. What's true of Romeo is not that he is a Montague, but that he is himself. This is a different spin on the slipperiness of language: Here, Juliet places her faith in a reality that is past words. ### Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 123-131 9. "Well, do not swear: although I joy in thee, I have no joy of this contract to-night: It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden; Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be Ere one can say 'It lightens.' Sweet, good night! This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath, May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet. Good night, good night! as sweet repose and rest Come to thy heart as that within my breast!" Though by the end of this scene she's telling Romeo that she'll marry him tomorrow, here she sees their overwhelming passion as not merely rapturous but also dangerous. When she cautions Romeo not to swear by the moon and then not to swear on anything, she's being both pragmatic and superstitious: A love so strong and immediate is both hard to believe in and almost impossible not to be swept up by. ### Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 1-26 10. "O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities: For nought so vile that on the earth doth live But to the earth some special good doth give, Nor aught so good but strain'd from that fair use Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse: Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied; And vice sometimes by action dignified. Within the infant rind of this small flower Poison hath residence and medicine power: For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part; Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart." Two such opposed kings encamp them still In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will; And where the worser is predominant, Full soon the canker death eats up that plant." Friar Lawrence's speech on the contradictory properties of herbs and the virtue of moderation introduces some of the contradictions of his character. Despite his sensible approach-in particular, his understanding that good and bad come as much from context and application as from any inherent property of a thing-all of his efforts to moderate and ameliorate according to these principles will end in tragedy. Friar Lawrence understands the power of nature, but he's mistaken in thinking he can harness that power through reason alone. ### Act 2, Scene 3, Pages 15-22 11. "JULIET I' faith, I am sorry that thou art not well. Sweet, sweet, sweet nurse, tell me, what says my love? NURSE Your love says, like an honest gentleman, and a courteous, and a kind, and a handsome, and, I warrant, a virtuous,-Where is your mother? JULIET Where is my mother! why, she is within; Where should she be? how oddly thou repliest! 'Your love says, like an honest gentleman, Where is your mother?" This comical exchange between the Nurse and Juliet-Juliet is impatient for the most important news of her life, the Nurse is distractible and self-absorbed-is not only an example of the relationship between the two but also an image of the divide between old and young in the play. Even the Nurse can't quite understand how urgent news of Romeo is to Juliet. This adult incomprehension returns tragically when the Nurse counsels Juliet to go ahead and marry Paris. ### Act 2, Scene 5, Lines 55 - 56 12. "ROMEO Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much. MERCUTIO No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve: ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague o' both your houses! 'Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death! a braggart, a rogue, a villain, that fights by the book of arithmetic! Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm. ROMEO I thought all for the best. MERCUTIO Help me into some house, Benvolio, Or I shall faint. A plague o' both your houses! They have made worms' meat of me: I have it, And soundly too: your houses!" Mercutio dies as he lived: punning. His death sets in motion the mechanism of the final tragedy and points to one of the play's major themes. When Mercutio asks Romeo why he came between him and Tybalt, causing Tybalt to fatally wound him, Romeo replies that he was just trying to do what he thought was best. However, human ideas about what is best have only so much power next to the massive force of chance, accident, and passion. ### Act 3, Scene 1, Lines 99 - 113 13. "Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds, Towards Phoebus' lodging: such a wagoner As Phaethon would whip you to the west, And bring in cloudy night immediately. Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night, That runaway's eyes may wink and Romeo Leap to these arms, untalk'd of and unseen. Lovers can see to do their amorous rites By their own beauties; or, if love be blind, It best agrees with night. Come, civil night, Thou sober-suited matron, all in black, And learn me how to lose a winning match, Play'd for a pair of stainless maidenhoods: Hood my unmann'd blood, bating in my cheeks, With thy black mantle; till strange love, grown bold, Think true love acted simple modesty. Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night; For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night Whiter than new snow on a raven's back. Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night, Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he 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. O, I have bought the mansion of a love, But not possess'd it, and, though I am sold, Not yet enjoy'd: 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." Juliet's speech of longing is laden with dramatic irony. She, unlike the audience, does not yet know that the Prince has banished Romeo, rendering her impatience to see him more poignant. As elsewhere, Juliet imagines her love in the context of day and night, sun and moon. She wishes for the darkness of night to come and shelter her and Romeo, foreshadowing that their love will never see the light of day. ### Act 3, Scene 2, Lines 1 - 33 14. "O serpent heart hid with a flow'ring face! Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave? Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical! Dove-feathered raven, wolvish-ravening lamb! Despised substance of divinest show! Just opposite to what thou justly seem'st, A damnèd saint, an honorable villain. O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh? Was ever book containing such vile matter So fairly bound? O, that deceit should dwell In such a gorgeous palace!" As Juliet mourns Romeo slaying Tybalt, her words recapitulate earlier imagery and metaphors. Benvolio once told Romeo he'd find him a girl who made Rosaline look like a crow next to a dove-an image that Romeo repeats when he first sees Juliet. Juliet now sees Romeo's beautiful exterior as hiding a dark inside. The book metaphor her mother used to describe Paris also reappears here. In this moment, Juliet is seeing that reality sometimes doesn't just flip back and forth between extremes-instead, the extremes coexist in the same place. ### Act 3, Scene 2, Lines 79-91 15. "JULIET Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day: It was the nightingale, and not the lark, That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear; Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree: Believe me, love, it was the nightingale. ROMEO It was the lark, the herald of the morn, No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east: Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. I must be gone and live, or stay and die." On the morning after their wedding night, Romeo and Juliet must prepare themselves for a painful parting. Juliet wishes at first to pretend that the lark they hear heralding the morning is a nightingale. Later, Romeo, at first realistic, will make this same claim, and it will be Juliet who insists he needs to listen to the lark and leave before he's executed. Fantasy, dreams, and the power of longing transform experience until they collide with an immovable reality. ### Act 3, Scene 5, Lines 1 - 11 16. "JULIET O think'st thou we shall ever meet again? ROMEO I doubt it not; and all these woes shall serve For sweet discourses in our time to come. JULIET O God, I have an ill-divining soul! Methinks I see thee, now thou art below, As one dead in the bottom of a tomb: Either my eyesight fails, or thou look'st pale." During their farewell, Juliet has a vision not unlike Romeo's at the beginning of the play. Looking down from the same balcony where the two first declared their love, Juliet sees Romeo as if he were already dead and entombed. Romeo's brave assertion that they'll laugh about all this later points at the play's one thread of hope: Romeo dreams of Juliet's kiss resurrecting him, implying a heavenly reunion, if not an earthly one. ### Act 3. Scene 5, Lines 51 - 57 17. "LADY CAPULET Marry, my child, early next Thursday morn, The gallant, young and noble gentleman, The County Paris, at Saint Peter's Church, Shall happily make thee there a joyful bride. JULIET Now, by Saint Peter's Church and Peter too, He shall not make me there a joyful bride. I wonder at this haste; that I must wed Ere he, that should be husband, comes to woo. I pray you, tell my lord and father, madam, I will not marry yet; and, when I do, I swear, It shall be Romeo, whom you know I hate, Rather than Paris. These are news indeed!" Juliet's out-and-out refusal to marry Paris demonstrates her strength of will, which shows how much she has matured over a few days. Her language takes on the same shifting quality present in other characters' dialogue as she insists (truthfully but also deceptively) that she'd rather marry Romeo than Paris. Juliet's true affection requires her to make her words double. ### Act III. Scene 5, Lines 118-128 18. "NURSE Faith, here it is. Romeo is banish'd; and all the world to nothing, That he dares ne'er come back to challenge you; Or, if he do, it needs must be by stealth. Then, since the case so stands as now it doth, I think it best you married with the county. O, he's a lovely gentleman! Romeo's a dishclout to him: an eagle, madam, Hath not so green, so quick, so fair an eye As Paris hath. Beshrew my very heart, I think you are happy in this second match, For it excels your first: or if it did not, Your first is dead; or 'twere as good he were, As living here and you no use of him. JULIET Speakest thou from thy heart? Nurse And from my soul too; Or else beshrew them both. JULIET Amen!" Juliet's Nurse has been her closest friend and her surrogate mother all through her life. In encouraging Juliet to give up on Romeo and enter into bigamy with Paris, she demonstrates her limitations. Her suggestion that Juliet might even prefer Paris to Romeo for his good looks reveals how little she understands Juliet's conviction and sincerity. The suggestion is a real betrayal, and Juliet treats it accordingly. ### Act III, Scene 5, Pages 225-241 19. "Give me, give me! O, tell not me of fear!" In moments of extremity, Juliet often speaks briefly instead of delivering a long soliloquy. This urgent plea for Friar Lawrence's drug demonstrates the depth of her desperation-and her courage. Her language here is at once brave and childish. ### Act IV, Scene 2, Line 123 20. "Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again. I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins, That almost freezes up the heat of life: I'll call them back again to comfort me: Nurse! What should she do here? My dismal scene I needs must act alone. Come, vial. What if this mixture do not work at all? Shall I be married then to-morrow morning? No, no: this shall forbid it: lie thou there. What if it be a poison, which the friar Subtly hath minister'd to have me dead, Lest in this marriage he should be dishonour'd, Because he married me before to Romeo? I fear it is: and yet, methinks, it should not, For he hath still been tried a holy man. How if, when I am laid into the tomb, I wake before the time that Romeo Come to redeem me? there's a fearful point! Shall I not , then, be stifled in the vault, To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in, And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes? Or, if I live, is it not very like, The horrible conceit of death and night, Together with the terror of the place,- As in a vault, an ancient receptacle, Where, for these many hundred years, the bones Of all my buried ancestors are packed: Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth, Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say, At some hours in the night spirits resort;- Alack, alack, is it not like that I, So early waking, what with loathsome smells, And shrieks like mandrakes' torn out of the earth, That living mortals, hearing them, run mad:- O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught, Environed with all these hideous fears? And madly play with my forefather's joints? And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud? And, in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone, As with a club, dash out my desperate brains? O, look! methinks I see my cousin's ghost Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body Upon a rapier's point: stay, Tybalt, stay! Romeo, Romeo , Romeo! Here's drink. I drink to thee." The bravery that Juliet exhibited in the previous quotation continues here. Juliet, still young, considers for a moment calling her mother and the Nurse back to comfort her but at last steels herself. She imagines the potential betrayal of Friar Lawrence-none of the adults around her has proven very reliable-and the horrors of the tomb. This grotesque, fleshly imagery demonstrates what Juliet is facing and provides a foretaste of the Capulet tomb. Juliet's morbid fascination with the reality of death here helps to prepare the audience for the play's tragic end. ### Act IV, Scene 3, Lines 15-60 21. "If I may trust the flattering truth of sleep, My dreams presage some joyful news at hand: My bosom's lord sits lightly in his throne; And all this day an unaccustom'd spirit Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts. I dreamt my lady came and found me dead- Strange dream, that gives a dead man leave to think!- And breathed such life with kisses in my lips, That I revived, and was an emperor. Ah me! how sweet is love itself possess'd, When but love's shadows are so rich in joy!" Romeo's second dream prefigures a reunion with Juliet and a resurrection through her. This is another instance of dramatic irony creating pathos: The audience knows that this reunion won't happen. However, that Juliet's kiss revives the dead Romeo in this dream suggests a tiny note of hope: Romeo's earlier dream of death and doom is certainly coming true, so perhaps the two will reunite after death. Dreams, here as elsewhere, have a complicated relationship to reality: The truth they contain isn't necessarily legible to the dreamer. ### Act V. Scene 1, Lines 1 - 12 22. "ROMEO Come hither, man. I see that thou art poor: Hold, there is forty ducats: let me have A dram of poison, such soon-speeding gear As will disperse itself through all the veins That the life-weary taker may fall dead And that the trunk may be discharged of breath As violently as hasty powder fired Doth hurry from the fatal cannon's womb. 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, 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." The play spends a significant amount of time on this haunted, starved, and weather-beaten apothecary-a character who speaks only four lines. The scene underscores that the mechanisms of fate are beyond human control: The apothecary is so desperate that he's willing to sell illegal poison to a boy. ### Act V, Scene 1, Lines 62-80 23. "How oft when men are at the point of death Have they been merry! which their keepers call A lightning before death: O, how may I Call this a lightning? O my love! my wife! Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath, Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty: Thou art not conquer'd; beauty's ensign yet Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks, And death's pale flag is not advanced there. Tybalt, liest thou there in thy bloody sheet? O, what more favour can I do to thee, Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twain To sunder his that was thine enemy? Forgive me, cousin! Ah, dear Juliet, Why art thou yet so fair? shall I believe That unsubstantial death is amorous, And that the lean abhorred monster keeps Thee here in dark to be his paramour? For fear of that, I still will stay with thee; And never from this palace of dim night Depart again: here, here will I remain With worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, here Will I set up my everlasting rest, And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last! Arms, take your last embrace! and, lips, O you The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss A dateless bargain to engrossing death! Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide! Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on The dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark! Here's to my love! O true apothecary, Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die." Romeo's last speech is full of dramatic irony that renders his ultimate death more tragic. As Romeo notices that Juliet doesn't look dead at all, there's still the hope that Juliet might wake up before Romeo can kill himself. She doesn't, and Romeo's last words bring many of the play's familiar images and themes (fate in the stars, the linkage between love and mortality) to their culmination. ### Act V. Scene 3, Lines 88-120 24. "Yea, noise? then I'll be brief. O happy dagger! This is thy sheath. There rust, and let me die." Juliet's last words, conversely, are brief and (literally) to the point. She has no time to reflect on mortality or beauty: Her love drives her to quick and final action. There's a degree of role reversal in the lovers' last minutes. Juliet's use of Romeo's knife as the instrument of her self-destruction suggests a kind of courage that, to a Renaissance audience, might have a masculine flavor; meanwhile, Romeo chooses poison, which was seen as a woman's tool of violence. Moreover, for the first time in the play, a sexual double-entendre has a tragic cadence rather than a playful one as Juliet describes herself as the "sheath" for Romeo's "dagger." ### Act V, Scene 3, Lines 174-175 25. "A glooming peace this morning with it brings; The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head: Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things; Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished: For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo." The Prince gets the play's last word and serves as a counterpart to the Chorus. He sums up its tragic events in the language of storytelling. There's the sense that the final reconciliation of the Montagues and Capulets has a legendary quality-as, indeed, it now does. ### Act V, Scene 3, Lines 316-321