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