The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet

Scene 1: Prologue: The sonnet that tells the ending

Prologue (lines 1–14)

Summary

A Chorus steps forward and, in fourteen lines, tells the audience the whole story: two equally noble households in Verona are at feud; from them come two 'star-cross'd' lovers whose deaths will end their parents' quarrel; and the play will show this in 'two hours'. The Chorus closes by asking for a patient hearing.

Analysis

The Prologue is a Shakespearean sonnet, three quatrains and a couplet rhyming ababcdcdefefgg. Opening a tragedy with the form of the love sonnet tells us at once that this will be a play about love written in the language of love poetry, and that the lovers' story is already shaped, finished and told before they appear. By giving away the ending the Chorus shifts our attention from what will happen to how and why it happens (Levin 1960).

The key words pull in two directions. 'Star-cross'd' and 'death-mark'd' suggest a destiny written in the heavens; 'civil blood makes civil hands unclean' and 'their parents' rage' place the cause in human hatred. The play never settles which explanation matters more, and that tension is the root of the long debate about fate and responsibility (Dickey 1957). The Prologue is printed in both Q1 and Q2 but omitted from the First Folio (Evans 2003).

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Scene 2: Act I, Scene 1: The street brawl and Romeo's lovesickness

Act I, Scene 1 (the whole scene)

Summary

Two Capulet servants, Sampson and Gregory, swap bawdy jokes and provoke two Montague servants by biting their thumbs at them. A fight breaks out. Benvolio, a Montague, tries to part them; Tybalt, a Capulet, attacks him; citizens join in, and the old heads of the houses call for their swords while their wives hold them back. Prince Escalus stops the riot and declares that anyone who disturbs the streets again will pay with his life.

Romeo's parents and Benvolio then talk about Romeo, who has been wandering at dawn and shutting himself up in darkened rooms. When Romeo arrives, he tells Benvolio that he loves a woman who has sworn to remain chaste. Benvolio advises him to look at other beauties; Romeo says that nothing can teach him to forget.

Analysis

The scene moves from low to high: servants' puns, a brawl, the Prince's verse sentence, and finally Romeo's Petrarchan lament. The feud is shown first as a pointless habit, kept alive by the servants and by Tybalt's eagerness, while the fathers are old men whose wives mock their swords. Sampson's jokes join fighting and sex, a link the play will keep returning to; Coppélia Kahn reads the feud as a ritual through which young men prove their manhood (Kahn 1981).

Romeo's love for Rosaline, who never appears, is a love of words. His speech is a string of oxymorons ('O brawling love! O loving hate!') drawn from the conventions of Petrarchan poetry, in which the lover suffers for a cold and distant lady. The style is deliberately overdone, and yet the paradoxes of love and hate describe the play's real situation more exactly than Romeo knows (Levin 1960) (Mahood 1957).

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Scene 3: Act I, Scene 2: Paris's suit and the invitation list

Act I, Scene 2 (the whole scene)

Summary

Count Paris asks Capulet for Juliet's hand. Capulet says she is not yet fourteen and should wait two more summers, but tells Paris to woo her and to come to his feast that night. He hands a servant a list of guests to invite. The servant cannot read and asks the first passer-by, who happens to be Romeo. The list includes 'My fair niece Rosaline', and Benvolio persuades Romeo to go to the feast so that he can compare Rosaline with other beauties.

Analysis

Capulet at this point seems a mild and careful father: his consent depends on Juliet's 'scope of choice'. The contrast with his rage in Act III, when he will force a marriage within days, is one of the play's measures of how quickly events change people. Paris's reply, that younger girls are already mothers, is answered by Capulet's warning that those made mothers early are soon 'marr'd'.

Chance enters the plot through an illiterate servant: Romeo learns of the feast only because he happens to be in the street. Shakespeare takes the episode from Brooke but sharpens its accidental quality, the first of many small coincidences on which the story turns (Bullough 1957).

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Scene 4: Act I, Scene 3: The Nurse's memories and the marriage question

Act I, Scene 3 (the whole scene)

Summary

Lady Capulet calls for Juliet and tries to speak with her privately, then asks the Nurse to stay. The Nurse launches into a long, rambling memory of Juliet's weaning: it happened eleven years ago, on the day of an earthquake, and the toddler fell on her face and her late husband made a bawdy joke about it. Lady Capulet then asks Juliet what she thinks of marriage and recommends Paris in an elaborate comparison of him to a fine book. Juliet answers cautiously that she will look at him, but no further than her mother allows.

Analysis

This is the scene that establishes the Nurse. Her speech is in verse but has the rhythms of real talk: repetitions, digressions, interruptions of herself, and a joke told three times. Stanley Wells has shown how carefully this apparent 'inconsequentiality' is made, and how it gives her a whole life of memories, a dead daughter, Susan, and a dead husband, around the girl she nursed (Wells 1980).

The scene also sets out three generations of women. Lady Capulet was a mother at about Juliet's age and treats marriage as a social arrangement; the Nurse sees it in bodily terms ('Women grow by men'); Juliet's dutiful answer is the last time she speaks as an obedient daughter. The Nurse's line about the earthquake has been used to date the play to 1591, after an English earthquake of 1580, but most editors treat it as too slight to bear that weight (Evans 2003).

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Scene 5: Act I, Scene 4: Mercutio and Queen Mab

Act I, Scene 4 (the whole scene)

Summary

Romeo, Benvolio, Mercutio and other masked young men are on their way to the Capulet feast. Romeo refuses to dance and says he will only carry a torch. He mentions a dream he has had; Mercutio replies that dreamers lie, and launches into a long, dazzling speech about Queen Mab, the tiny fairy who drives her chariot over sleepers and makes each one dream of his own desires: lovers of love, lawyers of fees, soldiers of cutting throats. The speech grows darker and more sexual until Romeo stops him. As they go in, Romeo says he fears some consequence 'yet hanging in the stars' that will begin with this night.

Analysis

The Queen Mab speech is a set piece of fantastic miniaturism: a chariot made of a hazelnut, a whip of cricket's bone. Mab seems to be largely Shakespeare's own invention as the 'fairies' midwife', who delivers men of their dreams. The speech shows Mercutio's restless wit, but its turn from delicate whimsy to soldiers, nightmares and sexual menace suggests something feverish beneath it. Mercutio himself calls dreams 'the children of an idle brain', and his scepticism about love and dreams sets him against Romeo (Porter 1988).

Romeo's closing premonition is the first of several in which the lovers seem to foresee their end. Whether such moments show fate at work or only the lovers' own fearfulness is part of the larger question of how far the tragedy is destined (Dickey 1957).

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Scene 6: Act I, Scene 5: The feast and the shared sonnet

Act I, Scene 5 (the whole scene)

Summary

At the feast Capulet welcomes the masked guests and reminisces with an old cousin. Romeo sees Juliet and is struck by her beauty. Tybalt recognises Romeo's voice and wants to kill him, but Capulet, who has heard Romeo well spoken of, forbids any disturbance and humiliates Tybalt, who withdraws promising revenge. Romeo approaches Juliet; their first exchange forms a sonnet, and they kiss twice. The Nurse interrupts, and each learns from her who the other is.

Analysis

Romeo's first sight of Juliet abandons the language he used for Rosaline. Instead of paradoxes of suffering he finds images of light against darkness, which Caroline Spurgeon identified as the play's governing imagery (Spurgeon 1935). Beside it runs Tybalt's threat, so that love and hatred are born in the same moment and the same room.

The lovers' first fourteen lines make a perfect Shakespearean sonnet, built on the metaphor of a pilgrim (Romeo, whose name suggests a pilgrim to Rome) and a saint's shrine; it ends in a kiss, and a fresh quatrain begins at once. The form shows two people composing a poem together, with Juliet matching and then teasing Romeo's conceits ('You kiss by the book'). Critics have read the shared sonnet as a moment where Petrarchan convention, usually a man addressing a silent woman, becomes a dialogue (Levin 1960) (Whittier 1989).

The scene closes with discovery. Romeo's 'My life is my foe's debt' and Juliet's rhymed lament at learning his name state the play's central paradox in a single couplet.

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Scene 7: Act II, Chorus: Old desire and young affection

Act II, Chorus (lines 1–14)

Summary

The Chorus returns with a second sonnet. Romeo's old love for Rosaline is dead and his new love is returned; but Juliet belongs to the enemy house, and the lovers have few means of meeting. Passion, the Chorus says, will give them power and opportunity.

Analysis

The second Chorus tells us little that we have not seen, and many productions cut it; it does not appear in Q1. Its value lies in its tone, which treats Romeo's change of heart with a slight irony, and in its final line, which balances 'extremities' against 'extreme sweet' and so restates the play's pattern of opposites (Evans 2003). After this, the Chorus never appears again, and the play's later sonnets are spoken by the characters themselves.

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Scene 8: Act II, Scene 1: Mercutio's mock conjuration

Act II, Scene 1 (the whole scene)

Summary

Romeo, leaving the feast, climbs the wall of the Capulet orchard. Benvolio and Mercutio look for him. Mercutio, still thinking he loves Rosaline, pretends to raise him like a spirit by calling on Rosaline's eyes, lips and thighs, with a stream of obscene jokes. They give up and go home.

Analysis

This short scene places Mercutio's crude, bodily view of love immediately before the balcony scene, so that the audience hears the two ideas of love side by side. Mercutio does not know that Rosaline is forgotten, and his bawdy is aimed at the wrong woman; Romeo, hidden beyond the wall, is already in a different world. The wall itself becomes the scene's symbol, separating the street of male banter from the private garden (Porter 1988) (Kahn 1981).

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Scene 9: Act II, Scene 2: The balcony scene

Act II, Scene 2 (the whole scene)

Summary

In the orchard Romeo sees Juliet appear at a window above and compares her to the sun. Not knowing he is there, she wishes that he were not a Montague and that names did not matter. Romeo answers her, and she is startled and embarrassed that he has overheard. She warns him that her kinsmen will kill him if they find him, asks if he truly loves her, and stops him from swearing by the inconstant moon. She worries that their contract is too sudden. Called inside by the Nurse, she returns twice, and they agree that she will send a messenger at nine the next morning to learn when and where they will marry.

Analysis

Shakespeare's text says only that Juliet 'appears above at a window'; the 'balcony' comes from later staging. The scene is built on height and distance: Romeo below in the dark, Juliet above in light. His speech is full of celestial images (sun, stars, angel), while hers is direct, practical and searching. She is the one who thinks about danger, names and marriage, and who refuses the ready-made vows of love poetry. Her 'What's in a name?' raises the play's question of whether identity is given by family or chosen by the self (Belsey 2014).

Juliet's fear that the contract is 'too rash, too unadvis'd, too sudden' names the play's central worry about haste, and her image of lightning, gone before one can name it, anticipates the brevity of their love. Yet her lines on love as boundless as the sea are the most confident statement of love's value in the play. Q2 at the end of this scene gives Romeo four lines on the 'grey-eyed morn' that it repeats, with variants, at the start of the next scene for the Friar, an apparent sign of Shakespeare's revisions in his draft; the quote text gives them to the Friar (Gibbons 1980) (Weis 2012).

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Scene 10: Act II, Scene 3: Friar Lawrence's herbs

Act II, Scene 3 (the whole scene)

Summary

At dawn Friar Lawrence gathers herbs and reflects in rhyming couplets that every plant contains both good and harm, as men contain grace and rude will. Romeo arrives, not having slept, and the Friar assumes he has been with Rosaline. Romeo explains that he now loves Juliet and asks to be married that day. The Friar scolds him for changing so fast, but agrees, hoping the marriage will turn the households' rancour to love.

Analysis

The Friar's speech is the play's moral key: the same flower holds 'poison' and 'medicine', and virtue misapplied turns to vice. His sleeping draught will prove the point, as a remedy that becomes a cause of death. His sententious couplets mark him as the voice of measured wisdom, yet he too acts at once and for a political motive, the reconciliation of the families (Dickey 1957).

His last line, 'they stumble that run fast', sums up the warning against haste, but the plot will show that slowness is equally fatal: the Friar's letter arrives too late, and he reaches the tomb a minute after Romeo has died. Many modern editions spell his name 'Laurence'; the Gutenberg text uses 'Lawrence'.

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Scene 11: Act II, Scene 4: Wit in the streets and the Nurse's errand

Act II, Scene 4 (the whole scene)

Summary

Benvolio and Mercutio learn that Tybalt has sent Romeo a challenge. Mercutio mocks Tybalt as a fashionable duellist who fights by the rules of fencing manuals. Romeo arrives in high spirits, and he and Mercutio fence with puns. The Nurse comes looking for Romeo, and Mercutio teases her crudely before leaving. The Nurse warns Romeo not to deceive Juliet; Romeo tells her that Juliet should come to Friar Lawrence's cell that afternoon to be married, and that his man will bring a rope ladder for the night.

Analysis

Romeo's quick, bawdy exchange with Mercutio shows him restored to his friends' world: love has made him sociable instead of melancholy. Mercutio's scorn for Tybalt's fencing style (the 'passado', the 'punto reverso') sets up their fatal duel, and his mocking of Petrarchan poetry ('the numbers that Petrarch flowed in') attacks the language of love that Romeo has already left behind (Porter 1988).

The Nurse's prose speeches, full of self-importance, good sense and muddled grammar, show her loyalty to Juliet as well as her vanity. The rope ladder and the Nurse's errand mark the turn from talk to action; within a few hours, the marriage will be made (Wells 1980).

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Scene 12: Act II, Scene 5: Juliet waits for news

Act II, Scene 5 (the whole scene)

Summary

Juliet has been waiting three hours for the Nurse, who left at nine. When the Nurse returns, she complains about her aching bones and her breathlessness, praises Romeo's looks, and asks whether Juliet has dined, while Juliet begs for the news. At last the Nurse tells her to go to Friar Lawrence's cell, where a husband is waiting.

Analysis

This is a comic scene about time: Juliet's impatience against the Nurse's leisurely teasing. Juliet's soliloquy contrasts love's speed (thoughts, doves, Cupid's wings) with the slowness of the old. The Nurse's delays are partly play, partly physical tiredness, and partly a way of enjoying the importance her secret gives her. The comedy darkens in retrospect, because later Juliet will again wait for the Nurse's news, and it will be of death (Snyder 1979) (Wells 1980).

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Scene 13: Act II, Scene 6: The secret wedding

Act II, Scene 6 (the whole scene)

Summary

In his cell the Friar prays that heaven will bless the marriage. Romeo says that no sorrow can outweigh one minute with Juliet and that death may do what it likes once she is his. The Friar warns him that violent delights have violent ends and urges him to love moderately. Juliet arrives; the lovers exchange speeches about their joy, and the Friar leads them away to be married.

Analysis

The wedding itself takes place offstage. The scene consists mostly of warnings and boasts: Romeo's defiance of 'love-devouring death' tempts fate in the audience's hearing, and the Friar's image of fire and powder (gunpowder) that 'as they kiss consume' anticipates the speed of the coming catastrophe. Juliet's reply to Romeo's request for eloquence, that true wealth cannot be counted, sets her characteristic plainness against his rhetoric (Levin 1960).

In Brooke there is a long gap between wedding and disaster; Shakespeare places the killing of Tybalt within an hour. The structure gives the comic first half its ending, a marriage, and immediately turns it towards tragedy (Snyder 1979).

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Scene 14: Act III, Scene 1: Mercutio and Tybalt die

Act III, Scene 1 (the whole scene)

Summary

On a hot afternoon Benvolio urges Mercutio to go indoors to avoid a fight. Tybalt arrives looking for Romeo; Mercutio provokes him. Romeo comes in, newly married, and refuses Tybalt's challenge, speaking of a love for him that he cannot explain. Mercutio, disgusted at this 'vile submission', draws on Tybalt. Romeo steps between them, and Tybalt stabs Mercutio under Romeo's arm. Mercutio curses both houses and dies offstage. Romeo, blaming Juliet's beauty for making him 'effeminate', kills Tybalt in revenge, cries that he is 'fortune's fool', and flees. The Prince, hearing Benvolio's account and the demands of Lady Capulet and Montague, banishes Romeo.

Analysis

This is the turning point of the play: in a few minutes the comedy of the first two acts becomes tragedy. Susan Snyder describes the first half as following the pattern of comedy, where obstacles can be overcome, and the death of Mercutio as the moment that pattern breaks and choice narrows into necessity (Snyder 1979). John Dryden recorded a tradition that Shakespeare said he had to kill Mercutio in the third act or be killed by him, a tribute to the character's power to draw attention (Porter 1988).

Romeo's action is a choice between two codes. His peace-making speech belongs to his new private identity as Juliet's husband; his revenge belongs to the public code of honour, in which a man must answer an insult and avenge a friend. Kahn reads his words about being made 'effeminate' as the feud's code reclaiming him (Kahn 1981). Mercutio's 'A plague o' both your houses', repeated three times, turns blame from the stars to the feud. The scene's heat ('these hot days') makes the blood that stirs literal (Dickey 1957).

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Scene 15: Act III, Scene 2: 'Gallop apace' and the word 'banished'

Act III, Scene 2 (the whole scene)

Summary

Juliet, alone, longs for night to come and bring Romeo to her bed. The Nurse enters wringing her hands and lamenting someone's death, and Juliet at first thinks Romeo is dead. When she learns that Romeo has killed Tybalt and been banished, she breaks into contradictory insults against him, then turns on the Nurse when the Nurse curses Romeo. She decides that the word 'banished' is worse than ten thousand Tybalts' deaths. The Nurse promises to bring Romeo to her that night.

Analysis

Juliet's soliloquy is an epithalamium, a wedding song spoken by the bride, and unusually frank about her desire. She calls on the horses of the sun to gallop and on night to come; the mention of Phaeton, who lost control of the sun's chariot and was destroyed, darkens the speech. The image of Romeo cut 'in little stars' imagines him transfigured after death, a hint of the ending (Spurgeon 1935).

The Nurse's confused report repeats the comic delays of 2.5 in a tragic key. Juliet's string of oxymorons ('Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical') recalls Romeo's in 1.1, but now they express a real conflict between love for her husband and loyalty to her family. Her choice of Romeo over Tybalt is the first step in her separation from the Nurse and from her house (Mahood 1957) (Levenson 2000).

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Scene 16: Act III, Scene 3: Romeo in the Friar's cell

Act III, Scene 3 (the whole scene)

Summary

Hiding in the Friar's cell, Romeo hears that he has been banished, not sentenced to death, and says banishment is worse than death because it separates him from Juliet. He rejects the Friar's 'philosophy' and throws himself on the floor. The Nurse arrives and describes Juliet's weeping; Romeo tries to stab himself. The Friar stops him and, in a long speech, rebukes him for unmanly despair, reminds him of his good fortune, and sets out a plan: Romeo will spend the night with Juliet, go to Mantua, and wait until the marriage can be announced and a pardon obtained.

Analysis

The scene mirrors 3.2: in both, a lover receives the news of banishment and responds with extravagant despair, but Romeo's grief is more self-pitying than Juliet's. His insistence on the word 'banished' echoes her speech, so that the two scenes form a pair. The Friar's counsel is wise and his plan reasonable, but it depends on time, patience and luck, the three things the play keeps withholding (Dickey 1957).

The Friar's 'Art thou a man?' speech judges Romeo's tears as womanish and his fury as bestial, using the period's ideas of manhood as reasoned self-control. His alternative to the feud's version of manhood is philosophical restraint, but Romeo's attempted suicide shows how close love and self-destruction already are (Kahn 1981).

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Scene 17: Act III, Scene 4: Capulet sets the wedding day

Act III, Scene 4 (the whole scene)

Summary

Late on Monday night Paris visits the grieving Capulets. Capulet suddenly decides that Juliet will be ruled by him and promises her to Paris; he first suggests Wednesday, then settles on Thursday, with only a few friends because of Tybalt's recent death. He tells his wife to inform Juliet before she goes to bed.

Analysis

This brief scene is one of the play's turning points, and its irony is sharp: while the father arranges the marriage below, the daughter is upstairs on her wedding night with Romeo. Capulet's change from the patient father of 1.2 is unexplained, but it fits the play's pattern of sudden reversals; his 'Do you like this haste?' and his remark that it is so late it will soon be early make time itself feel compressed. The scene also shows how a father could dispose of a daughter's hand in the period, without consulting her (Callaghan 1994).

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Scene 18: Act III, Scene 5: The lark, the quarrel and the Nurse's betrayal

Act III, Scene 5 (the whole scene)

Summary

At dawn Juliet tries to persuade Romeo that the bird they hear is the nightingale, not the lark, so that he can stay; he agrees to stay and die, and she then urges him to go. He climbs down, and she sees him below 'as one dead in the bottom of a tomb'. Lady Capulet comes in, thinks Juliet is weeping for Tybalt, promises to have Romeo poisoned in Mantua, and announces the marriage to Paris on Thursday. Juliet refuses. Capulet arrives and, in a violent rage, threatens to drag her to church or turn her into the streets; her mother will not help her. The Nurse advises her to marry Paris, since Romeo is as good as dead. Juliet pretends to agree, and when alone curses the Nurse and resolves to go to the Friar, or die.

Analysis

The dawn parting is an aubade, a lovers' dawn song, and its debate about the birds briefly lets the lovers invent their own time. The shift from Juliet's 'It is not yet near day' to her 'Hie hence' and Romeo's 'More dark and dark our woes' turns light into the enemy. Juliet's vision of Romeo in the tomb is the strongest of the play's forebodings (Spurgeon 1935).

In the rest of the scene Juliet is stripped of every adult support. Her ambiguous replies to her mother allow her to grieve for Romeo while seeming to hate him. Capulet's fury, with its insults and threat of disinheritance, exposes the power that patriarchal marriage gave to fathers; feminist critics see here the clearest statement of the forces the lovers' private union defies (Callaghan 1994) (Kahn 1981). The Nurse's advice to marry Paris is practical, and in its way loving, but it breaks her bond with Juliet; 'Ancient damnation!' marks Juliet's isolation and her new self-reliance (Wells 1980).

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Scene 19: Act IV, Scene 1: The Friar's potion

Act IV, Scene 1 (the whole scene)

Summary

Paris is at the Friar's cell arranging the wedding when Juliet arrives; she parries his courtesies with guarded wordplay. Once he leaves, she draws a knife and says she will kill herself unless the Friar finds a remedy. He offers a desperate plan: she must agree to marry Paris, then on Wednesday night drink a potion that will make her seem dead for 'two and forty hours'. She will be laid in the Capulet vault, and the Friar will send letters to bring Romeo, who will take her to Mantua. Juliet seizes the vial.

Analysis

Juliet's exchanges with Paris are a duel of meanings: every line she speaks is true in a sense he cannot hear. Her 'What must be shall be', a proverb of resignation, is answered by the Friar's ironic 'That's a certain text'. Her list of horrors she would endure rather than marry Paris (charnel-house, new-made grave, a dead man's shroud) prepares for the tomb (Levenson 2000).

The Friar's plan is the play's most elaborate attempt to cheat time. It depends on the potion, on a messenger, and on his own arrival at the tomb; in Brooke the plan was similar, but Shakespeare's compression makes it far more hazardous. The Friar's faith in his art, the knowledge of plants he displayed in 2.3, now holds the lovers' lives (Bullough 1957).

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Scene 20: Act IV, Scene 2: Juliet's false submission

Act IV, Scene 2 (the whole scene)

Summary

Capulet is busy with wedding preparations, sending servants to invite guests and hire cooks. Juliet returns from the Friar's cell, kneels and asks her father's pardon, saying she will be ruled by him. Delighted, Capulet moves the wedding forward from Thursday to Wednesday, the next morning, and resolves to stay up all night to prepare.

Analysis

The scene is comic in its domestic bustle, but Capulet's small decision, to move the wedding a day earlier, wrecks the Friar's timetable: Juliet must drink the potion a night sooner, and so wake sooner, while the letter to Romeo has not yet reached him. No one in the play notices the significance. It is a clear example of how the tragedy grows from ordinary haste rather than from any cosmic design (Dickey 1957) (Snyder 1979).

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Scene 21: Act IV, Scene 3: Juliet takes the potion

Act IV, Scene 3 (the whole scene)

Summary

Juliet sends away the Nurse and her mother for the night. Alone, she considers her fears: that the potion might fail, so that she must marry Paris (she lays a dagger beside her in case); that it might be poison given by the Friar to hide his part in the first marriage; that she might wake in the tomb before Romeo comes and suffocate, or go mad among the bones and Tybalt's rotting body. She seems to see Tybalt's ghost seeking Romeo, then drinks to Romeo and falls on her bed.

Analysis

This soliloquy is Juliet's greatest test of courage, and it is spoken in complete solitude: 'My dismal scene I needs must act alone.' The theatrical metaphor reminds us that she is now the author of her own fate. Her fears move from rational doubt to imaginative horror, and the spoken image of the vault prepares the audience for the last scene. Many critics have seen in this speech the moment when Juliet grows from girl to tragic heroine (Levenson 2000) (Granville-Barker 1930).

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Scene 22: Act IV, Scene 4: Wedding preparations at dawn

Act IV, Scene 4 (the whole scene)

Summary

At three in the morning the Capulet household is busy with cooking. Capulet bustles about, joking with servants, while the Nurse teases him for doing women's work. As day breaks, music announces Paris's arrival, and Capulet sends the Nurse to wake Juliet.

Analysis

A short comic interlude of household detail: keys, spices, dates and quinces, logs for the fire. Its cheerfulness, set against what the audience knows lies in Juliet's chamber, creates suspense and irony. It shows Capulet as a busy, affectionate host, which makes his grief in the next scene more pitiable (Snyder 1979).

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Scene 23: Act IV, Scene 5: Juliet found 'dead'

Act IV, Scene 5 (the whole scene)

Summary

The Nurse finds Juliet apparently dead. Lady Capulet, Capulet and Paris join in a chorus of lamentation. The Friar rebukes them, saying Juliet is now in heaven, and tells them to take her to church. Capulet orders the wedding festivities turned into a funeral. The scene ends with comic banter between the servant Peter and the musicians hired for the wedding.

Analysis

The laments are formal and repetitive ('O woe! O woeful, woeful, woeful day'), and critics have debated whether they are meant to be moving, absurd, or both. Because the audience knows Juliet is alive, the mourning sounds excessive and conventional, and in a sense rehearses the real grief to come. Capulet's image of Death as his son-in-law gives the play's love-death theme its most grotesque form (Levenson 2000) (Snyder 1979).

The scene with the musicians, often cut in performance, is a deliberate shift into comedy. Q2 heads Peter's entry with the name of the clown Will Kemp, showing that the company's leading comic actor played the part (Gibbons 1980).

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Scene 24: Act V, Scene 1: Mantua: the news and the apothecary

Act V, Scene 1 (the whole scene)

Summary

In Mantua Romeo wakes cheerful after a dream that Juliet found him dead and revived him with kisses. His servant Balthasar arrives with news that Juliet is dead and buried. Romeo defies the stars and resolves to go to Verona that night and lie with Juliet in death. He remembers a poor apothecary nearby, persuades him with forty ducats to sell poison despite the law, and sets out.

Analysis

Romeo's dream is cruelly ironic: what he dreamed will nearly come true, but reversed. His cry 'Then I defy you, stars!' is ambiguous: it can be read as a rebellion against fate or as the hasty act that fulfils it. He acts at once, without waiting for word from the Friar, and his speed is decisive (Dickey 1957).

The apothecary scene is an image of poverty and death. Romeo's reflection that gold is a worse poison than the drug, because it does more harm in the world, shows a new bitterness, and the shop full of stuffed creatures and empty boxes is a small picture of the tomb to come.

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Scene 25: Act V, Scene 2: Friar John's undelivered letter

Act V, Scene 2 (the whole scene)

Summary

Friar John tells Friar Lawrence that he could not deliver the letter to Romeo: he was shut in a house by officials who suspected plague. Friar Lawrence realises the danger, sends for a crowbar, and hurries to the tomb to be there when Juliet wakes, planning to keep her in his cell until Romeo can be reached.

Analysis

The plague quarantine is the plot's purest accident, and it comes from Brooke. For an Elizabethan audience it was a familiar reality: the London theatres had been closed by plague in 1592–94. The Friar's cry of 'Unhappy fortune!' places the blame on chance, but the failure also follows from his secret plan, which depended on a single messenger (Bullough 1957) (Evans 2003).

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Scene 26: Act V, Scene 3: The tomb

Act V, Scene 3 (the whole scene)

Summary

At night Paris comes to strew flowers on Juliet's tomb. Romeo arrives with Balthasar, whom he sends away with a letter for his father, and begins to break open the tomb. Paris challenges him as a grave-robber; Romeo begs him to go, but they fight and Paris is killed. Romeo lays Paris in the tomb, gazes at Juliet, wonders at her beauty, addresses Tybalt, kisses her and drinks the poison. The Friar arrives just afterwards. Juliet wakes; the Friar, hearing the watch, urges her to flee to a convent, then leaves in fear. Juliet kisses Romeo's lips for poison and, hearing the watch, stabs herself with his dagger.

The watch gathers the Prince, the Capulets and Montague, whose wife has died of grief. The Friar tells the whole story; Balthasar and Paris's page confirm it, and Romeo's letter proves it. The Prince condemns the families' hatred, Capulet and Montague take hands, and each promises a golden statue of the other's child. The Prince speaks the final lines.

Analysis

The last scene gathers the play's images into one place. The tomb is a 'womb of death' and a bridal chamber, a 'palace of dim night' made bright by Juliet's beauty. Romeo's last speech returns to the stars ('the yoke of inauspicious stars') and to the sea of love from 2.2, now turned into a shipwreck. The audience sees what he cannot: that Juliet's lips are still crimson because she is alive. The timing is the play's cruellest: had he waited moments, or had the Friar come sooner, there would be no tragedy (Spurgeon 1935) (Dickey 1957).

Juliet's death is swift and decisive, in a few lines, after Romeo's long speech. Her refusal of the Friar's offer and her suicide with Romeo's dagger complete the pattern of love and death that the lovers' language has prepared since 1.5. Productions from Otway and Garrick to the nineteenth century often let Juliet wake before Romeo died, but Shakespeare denies them that last meeting (Levenson 1987).

The ending is a public reckoning. The Friar's long summary has been criticised as redundant, but it allows the city to learn what the audience knows. The Prince's verdict, 'All are punish'd', spreads the blame to himself for 'winking' at the feud. The golden statues have been read both as a true reconciliation and as a sign that the fathers still compete in wealth and turn their children into monuments, possessions of the families from which they tried to escape.

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