juliet Flashcards
Juliet complains that she saw Romeo and fell in love with him “too early,” before she knew he was her enemy. Almost everything happens to Juliet too early. She is told to prepare herself for marriage before she is ready, she marries Romeo before she can get her parents’ permission, her marriage to Paris is moved forward twice, and Romeo arrives at her tomb before she has time to wake up.
My only love sprung from my only hate
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Juliet is practical. She argues that Romeo’s name is not a part of his body, so it’s not an essential part of him. The audience might think of Romeo’s genitals when she lists “any other part / Belonging to a man,” especially since Juliet’s language is often physical and erotic. But here she is also philosophical, exploring language’s relationship to how we experience reality.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand nor foot,
Nor arm nor face nor any other part
Belonging to a man. Oh, be some other name!
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
Like Romeo, Juliet sees love as a kind of freedom, “boundless” and “infinite.” The suggestion that Juliet will “give” her “bounty” to Romeo is the most explicitly erotic moment in their conversation so far. Throughout the play, Juliet takes the lead in the sexual side of their relationship.
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.
In these lines, Juliet looks forward to her wedding night in explicitly sexual terms. “Die” was Elizabethan slang for orgasm, which turns her image of Romeo as a sky full of stars into a metaphor for sexual climax. The violence of the image also reminds us that in Romeo and Juliet, sex and violence are never far apart.
Come, gentle night, come, loving black-browed night,
Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars.
Just before Romeo and Juliet met, Romeo had an intuition that his life was about to take a tragic turn. In this scene, which is the lovers’ last scene alive together, it is Juliet’s turn to foresee their tragic fate. These two moments bookend the lovers’ relationship and show that from beginning to end, Romeo and Juliet share a single fate and experience it together.
O God, I have an ill-divining soul!
Methinks I see thee now, thou art so low,
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.
These are Juliet’s last words. She imagines the poison that has killed Romeo as a “restorative,” a medicine that can put an end to her suffering. One of the play’s major themes is the inseparability of good and evil, love and hate, poison and cure. Juliet’s death is tragic, but she also celebrates it as a way of escaping a life without her beloved.
I will kiss thy lips.
Haply some poison yet doth hang on them
To make me die with a restorative.
