Romeo and Juliet
ACT IV SCENE III | Juliet’s chamber. | |
[Enter JULIET and Nurse] | ||
JULIET | Ay, those attires are best: but, gentle nurse, | |
I pray thee, leave me to myself to-night, | ||
For I have need of many orisons | ||
To move the heavens to smile upon my state, | ||
Which, well thou know’st, is cross, and full of sin. | ||
[Enter LADY CAPULET] | ||
LADY CAPULET | What, are you busy, ho? need you my help? | |
JULIET | No, madam; we have cull’d such necessaries | |
As are behoveful for our state to-morrow: | ||
So please you, let me now be left alone, | ||
And let the nurse this night sit up with you; | 10 | |
For, I am sure, you have your hands full all, | ||
In this so sudden business. | ||
LADY CAPULET | Good night: | |
Get thee to bed, and rest; for thou hast need. | ||
[Exeunt LADY CAPULET and Nurse] | ||
JULIET | 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. | 20 | |
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. | ||
[Laying down her dagger] | ||
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, | 30 | |
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 | 40 | |
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? | 50 | |
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, I come! this do I drink to thee. | ||
[She falls upon her bed, within the curtains] |
Next: Romeo and Juliet, Act 4, Scene 4