Romeo and Juliet (26 page)

Juliet.
Go, get thee hence, for I will not away.

Exit
[
Friar
].

What’s here? A cup, closed in my truelove’s hand?
Poison, I see, hath been his timeless° end.
O churl!° Drunk all, and left no friendly drop
To help me after? I will kiss thy lips.
Haply some poison yet doth hang on them
To make me die with a restorative. [
Kisses him.
]
Thy lips are warm!

Chief Watchman.
[
Within
] Lead, boy. Which way?

Juliet.
Yea, noise? Then I’ll be brief. O happy°
dagger! [
Snatches Romeo’s dagger.
]
This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die.

[
She stabs herself and falls.
]

Enter
[
Paris’
]
Boy and Watch.

Boy.
This is the place. There, where the torch doth
burn.

Chief Watchman.
The ground is bloody. Search about
the churchyard.
Go, some of you; whoe’er you find attach.

[
Exeunt some of the Watch.
]

Pitiful sight! Here lies the County slain;
And Juliet bleeding, warm, and newly dead,
Who here hath lain this two days burièd.
Go, tell the Prince; run to the Capulets;
Raise up the Montagues; some others search.

[
Exeunt others of the Watch.
]

We see the ground whereon these woes do lie,
But the true ground° of all these piteous woes
We cannot without circumstance° descry.

Enter
[
some of the Watch, with
]
Romeo’s Man
[
Balthasar
].

Second Watchman.
Here’s Romeo’s man. We found
him in the churchyard.

Chief Watchman.
Hold him in safety till the Prince
come hither.

Enter Friar
[
Lawrence
]
and another Watchman.

Third Watchman.
Here is a friar that trembles, sighs,
and weeps.
We took this mattock and this spade from him
As he was coming from this churchyard’s side.

Chief Watchman.
A great suspicion! Stay the friar too.

Enter the Prince
[
and Attendants
].

Prince.
What misadventure is so early up,
That calls our person from our morning rest?

Enter Capulet and his Wife
[
with others
].

Capulet.
What should it be, that is so shrieked abroad?

Lady Capulet.
O, the people in the street cry “Romeo,”
Some “Juliet,” and some “Paris”; and all run
With open outcry toward our monument.

Prince.
What fear is this which startles in your ears?

Chief Watchman.
Sovereign, here lies the County Paris
slain;
And Romeo dead; and Juliet, dead before,
Warm and new killed.

Prince.
Search, seek, and know how this foul murder
comes.

Chief Watchman.
Here is a friar, and slaughtered
Romeo’s man,
With instruments upon them fit to open
These dead men’s tombs.

Capulet.
O heavens! O wife, look how our daughter
bleeds!
This dagger hath mista’en, for, lo, his house°
Is empty on the back of Montague,
And it missheathèd in my daughter’s bosom!

Lady Capulet.
O me, this sight of death is as a bell
That warns my old age to a sepulcher.

Enter Montague
[
and others
]
.

Prince.
Come, Montague; for thou art early up
To see thy son and heir more early down.

Montague.
Alas, my liege, my wife is dead tonight!
Grief of my son’s exile hath stopped her breath.
What further woe conspires against mine age?

Prince.
Look, and thou shalt see.

Montague.
O thou untaught! What manners is in this,
To press before thy father to a grave?

Prince.
Seal up the mouth of outrage° for a while,
Till we can clear these ambiguities
And know their spring, their head, their true
descent;
And then will I general of your woes°
And lead you even to death. Meantime forbear,
And let mischance be slave to patience.
Bring forth the parties of suspicion.

Friar.
I am the greatest, able to do least,
Yet most suspected, as the time and place
Doth make against me, of this direful murder;
And here I stand, both to impeach and purge°
Myself condemnèd and myself excused.

Prince.
Then say at once what thou dost know in this.

Friar.
I will be brief, for my short date of breath°
Is not so long as is a tedious tale.
Romeo, there dead, was husband to that Juliet;
And she, there dead, that’s Romeo’s faithful wife.
I married them; and their stol’n marriage day
Was Tybalt’s doomsday, whose untimely death
Banished the new-made bridegroom from this city;

For whom, and not for Tybalt, Juliet pined.
You, to remove that siege of grief from her,
Betrothed and would have married her perforce
To County Paris. Then comes she to me
And with wild looks bid me devise some mean
To rid her from this second marriage,
Or in my cell there would she kill herself.
Then gave I her (so tutored by my art)
A sleeping potion; which so took effect
As I intended, for it wrought on her
The form of death. Meantime I writ to Romeo
That he should hither come as° this dire night
To help to take her from her borrowed grave,
Being the time the potion’s force should cease.
But he which bore my letter, Friar John,
Was stayed by accident, and yesternight
Returned my letter back. Then all alone
At the prefixèd hour of her waking
Came I to take her from her kindred’s vault;
Meaning to keep her closely° at my cell
Till I conveniently could send to Romeo.
But when I came, some minute ere the time
Of her awakening, here untimely lay
The noble Paris and true Romeo dead.
She wakes; and I entreated her come forth
And bear this work of heaven with patience;
But then a noise did scare me from the tomb,
And she, too desperate, would not go with me,
But, as it seems, did violence on herself.
All this I know, and to the marriage
Her nurse is privy;° and if aught in this
Miscarried by my fault, let my old life
Be sacrificed some hour before his time
Unto the rigor of severest law.

Prince.
We still° have known thee for a holy man.
Where’s Romeo’s man? What can he say to this?

Balthasar.
I brought my master news of Juliet’s death;
And then in post he came from Mantua
To this same place, to this same monument.
This letter he early bid me give his father,
And threat’ned me with death, going in the vault,
If I departed not and left him there.

Prince.
Give me the letter. I will look on it.
Where is the County’s page that raised the watch?
Sirrah, what made your master° in this place?

Boy.
He came with flowers to strew his lady’s grave;
And bid me stand aloof, and so I did.
Anon comes one with light to ope the tomb;
And by and by° my master drew on him;
And then I ran away to call the watch.

Prince.
This letter doth make good the friar’s words,
Their course of love, the tidings of her death;
And here he writes that he did buy a poison
Of a poor apothecary and therewithal°
Came to this vault to die and lie with Juliet.
Where be these enemies? Capulet, Montague,
See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.
And I, for winking at° your discords, too,
Have lost a brace° of kinsmen. All are punished.

Capulet.
O brother Montague, give me thy hand.
This is my daughter’s jointure,° for no more
Can I demand.

Montague.
But I can give thee more;
For I will raise her statue in pure gold,
That whiles Verona by that name is known,
There shall no figure at such rate° be set
As that of true and faithful Juliet.

Capulet.
As rich shall Romeo’s by his lady’s lie—
Poor sacrifices of our enmity!

Prince.
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 pardoned, and some punishèd;
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

[
Exeunt omnes.
]

 

 

FINIS

The First Quarto (Q1) of
Romeo and Juliet
was printed in 1597 without previous entry in the Stationers’ Register. It bore the following title page: “An/ EXCELLENT/ conceited Tragedie/ OF/ Romeo and Iuliet./ As it hath been often (with great applause)/ plaid publiquely, by the right Ho-/ nourable the L. of
Hunsdon
/ his Seruants./ LONDON,/ Printed by Iohn Danter./ 1597.” Until the present century, editors frequently assumed that this text, curtailed and manifestly corrupt, represented an early draft of the play. Most now agree that Q1, like the other “bad” Shakespeare quartos, is a memorial reconstruction; that is, a version which some of the actors (accusing fingers have been pointed at those who played Romeo and Peter) put together from memory and gave to the printer. The Second Quarto (Q2) was printed in 1599 with the following title page: “THE/ MOST/ EX-/ cellent and lamentable / Tragedie, of Romeo/ and
Iuliet
./
Newly corrected, augmented, and/ amended
: As it hath bene sundry times publiquely acted, by the/ right Honourable the Lord Chamberlaine/ his Seruants./ London/ Printed by Thomas Creede, for Cuthbert Burby, and are to/ be sold at his shop neare the Exchange./ 1599.” Apparently Q2 derives directly from the same acting version that is imperfectly reflected in the memorially reconstructed Q1, but it is based on a written script of the play rather than on actors’ memories. Q2, however, is the product of careless or hasty printing and does not inspire complete confidence. Lines that the author doubtless had canceled are sometimes printed along with the lines intended to replace them, and occasionally notes about staging appear which are probably the prompter’s, or possibly Shakespeare’s. Vexing matters like these, together with the fact that some speeches in Q2 are clearly based on Q1 (possibly the manuscript that provided the copy for most of Q2 was illegible in places), have caused editors to make at least limited use of Q1. The other texts of
Romeo and Juliet
have no claim to authority. The Second Quarto provided the basis for a Third Quarto (1609), which in turn served as copy for an undated Fourth Quarto and for the text in the Folio of 1623. A Fifth Quarto, based on the Fourth, appeared in 1637.

None of these texts—including the Second Quarto, upon which the present edition is based—makes any real division of the play into acts and scenes. (The last third of Q1 does have a rough indication of scene division in the form of strips of ornamental border across the page, and the Folio has at the beginning
Actus Primus
.
Scena Prima,
but nothing further.) The division used here, like that in most modern texts, derives from the Globe edition, as do the
Dramatis Personae
and the various indications of place. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized, a number of stage directions have been added (in square brackets), and speech prefixes have been regularized. This last change will be regretted by those who feel, perhaps rightly, that at least some of the speech prefixes of Q2 show how Shakespeare thought of the character at each moment of the dialogue. Lady Capulet, for example, is variously designated in the speech prefixes of Q2 as
Wife
,
Lady
, and sometimes
Mother
; Capulet is occasionally referred to as
Father
, and Balthasar as
Peter
; the First Musician of our text (4.5) is once called
Fidler
in Q2 and several times
Minstrel
or
Minstrels
. Other deviations (apart from obvious typographical errors) from Q2 are listed in the textual notes. There the adopted reading is given first, in italics, followed by a note in square brackets if the source of the reading is Q1; this is followed by the rejected reading in roman. Absence of a note in square brackets indicates that the adopted reading has been taken from some other source and represents guesswork at best. Apparently the editors of F as well as of Q3 and Q4 had no access to any authentic document.

In dealing with the troublesome stage direction at the end of 1.4, I have followed the solution adopted by H. R. Hoppe in his Crofts Classics edition (1947); and I have adopted the reading of “eyes’ shot” for the customary “eyes shut” at 3.2.49 from the Pelican edition of John E. Hankins (Penguin, 1960), which presents a good argument for retaining the reading of Q2 with the addition of an apostrophe.