Enter Benvolio and Romeo

In good time.

BENVOLIO (to Romeo)

Tut, man, one fire burns out another’s burning,

One pain is lessened by another’s anguish.

Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning.

One desperate grief cures with another’s languish.

Take thou some new infection to thy eye,

And the rank poison of the old will die.

ROMEO

Your plantain leaf is excellent for that.

BENVOLIO For what, I pray thee?

ROMEO For your broken shin.

BENVOLIO Why, Romeo, art thou mad?

ROMEO

Not mad, but bound more than a madman is;

Shut up in prison, kept without my food,

Whipped and tormented and—(to ⌈Peter⌉ Good e’en,

good fellow.

⌈PETER⌉

God gi‘good e’en. I pray, sir, can you read?

ROMEO

Ay, mine own fortune in my misery.

⌈PETER⌉ erhaps you have learned it without book. But I pray, can you read anything you see?

ROMEO

Ay, if I know the letters and the language.

⌈PETER⌉ Ye say honestly. Rest you merry.

ROMEO Stay, fellow, I can read.

He reads the letter

‘Signor Martino and his wife and daughters,

County Anselme and his beauteous sisters,

The lady widow of Vitruvio,

Signor Placentio and his lovely nieces,

Mercutio and his brother Valentine,

Mine uncle Capulet, his wife and daughters,

My fair niece Rosaline and Livia,

Signor Valentio and his cousin Tybalt,

Lucio and the lively Helena.’

A fair assembly. Whither should they come?

⌈PETER⌉ Up.

ROMEO Whither?

⌈PETER⌉ To supper to our house.

ROMEO Whose house?

⌈PETER⌉ My master’s.

ROMEO

Indeed, I should have asked thee that before.

⌈PETER⌉ Now I’ll tell you without asking. My master is

the great rich Capulet, and if you be not of the house

of Montagues, I pray come and crush a cup of wine.

Rest you merry. Exit

BENVOLIO

At this same ancient feast of Capulet’s

Sups the fair Rosaline, whom thou so loves,

With all the admirèd beauties of Verona.

Go thither, and with unattainted eye

Compare her face with some that I shall show,

And I will make thee think thy swan a crow.

ROMEO

When the devout religion of mine eye

Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires;

And these who, often drowned, could never die,

Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars.

One fairer than my love !—the all-seeing sun

Ne’er saw her match since first the world begun.

BENVOLIO

Tut, you saw her fair, none else being by,

Herself poised with herself in either eye;

But in that crystal scales let there be weighed

Your lady’s love against some other maid

That I will show you shining at this feast,

And she shall scant show well that now seems best.

ROMEO

I’ll go along, no such sight to be shown,

But to rejoice in splendour of mine own. Exeunt

1.3 Enter Capulet’s Wife and the Nurse

CAPULET’S WIFE

Nurse, where’s my daughter? Call her forth to me.

NURSE

Now, by my maidenhead at twelve year old,

I bade her come. What, lamb, what, ladybird—

God forbid—where is this girl? What, Juliet!

Enter Juliet

JULIET How now, who calls?

NURSE Your mother.

JULIET

Madam, I am here. What is your will?

CAPULET’S WIFE

This is the matter.—Nurse, give leave a while.

We must talk in secret.—Nurse, come back again.

I have remembered me, thou s’ hear our counsel.

Thou knowest my daughter’s of a pretty age.

NURSE

Faith, I can tell her age unto an hour.

CAPULET’S WIFE She’s not fourteen.

NURSE I’ll lay fourteen of my teeth—and yet, to my teen be it spoken, I have but four—she’s not fourteen. How long is it now to Lammastide?

CAPULET’S WIFE A fortnight and odd days.

NURSE

Even or odd, of all days in the year

Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen.

Susan and she—God rest all Christian souls!—

Were of an age. Well, Susan is with God;

She was too good for me. But, as I said,

On Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen,

That shall she, marry, I remember it well.

‘Tis since the earthquake now eleven years,

And she was weaned—I never shall forget it–

Of all the days of the year upon that day,

For I had then laid wormwood to my dug,

Sitting in the sun under the dovehouse wall.

My lord and you were then at Mantua.

Nay, I do bear a brain! But, as I said,

When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple

Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool,

To see it tetchy and fall out wi’th’ dug!

‘Shake’, quoth the dove-housed‘Twas no need, I trow,

To bid me trudge;

And since that time it is eleven years,

For then she could stand high-lone. Nay, by th’ rood,

She could have run and waddled all about,

For even the day before, she broke her brow,

And then my husband—God be with his soul,

A was a merry man!—took up the child.

‘Yea,’ quoth he, ‘dost thou fall upon thy face?

Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit,

Wilt thou not, Jule?’ And, by my halidom,

The pretty wretch left crying and said ‘Ay’.

To see now how a jest shall come about!

I warrant an I should live a thousand years