Romeo and Juliet: Last Part
I find myself quite a bit older than I was the last time I read this play, and I don't find myself as struck by the young couple as I used to be. This time around, the star of the play for me is Juliet's nurse.
She's not a nurse in the medical sense; she was instead Juliet's wet nurse when the girl was a baby, having been pregnant around the same time as Juliet's mother, and having been hired to breast feed Juliet due to the girl's mother being unwilling or unable to do so. The nurse's own daughter died young at some point, and the nurse was kept on the payroll, ostensibly as Juliet's nanny.
Neither is she a sexy nurse: a young wag from the rival Montague family compares her face to a lady's fan, and one Shakespeare guide has told me this is a play on the word "fanny."
In modern American English, fanny is a cute slang word for a butt; in modern British English, it's slang instead for a vagina. I'm not sure where the Elizabethans fell along the fanny line, but I'll not be probing into it any more deeply.
What I enjoy about the nurse is that she's in it for two things: preserving what has become an easy job for her by this point, and keeping the lulz rolling.
Juliet is 13 years old at the start of the play, and she hasn't needed a wet nurse for more than a decade, and she seems to be a well-behaved and respectful kid--at least until she meets Romeo--so the nurse's duties have been light, but it must also have occurred to the nurse by now that her services won't be needed for much longer, unless of course Juliet has a kid of her own who might need a nanny.
When we first meet the nurse, she's telling Juliet's mother a long story that starts with how she rubbed foul-tasting wormwood on her 'dug' to ween Juliet when the girl was around 2 years old, and concludes distastefully with toddler Juliet falling down and bumping her forehead, then having the nurse's late husband step in to tell the girl not to worry because she'd be falling backwards soon enough with the boys, meaning she'd be getting laid soon enough, which is creepy and wrong even by questionable Elizabethan age of consent standards.
The nurse thinks her story is hilarious, but only--I believe--for the effect that it has on Juliet's mother, who quickly tells the nurse to shut up, so the nurse immediately turns to Juliet and repeats the latter part of her story verbatim, and Juliet tells the nurse to shut up, and all I can think of from then on whenever I picture the expression on the nurse's face is the famous Agent Smith lulz meme.
We don't meet the nurse again until we're past the balcony scene where Romeo and Juliet agree that they will marry in secret, and then we find our nurse on a mission to carry a message from Juliet to Romeo. From what I can tell, Juliet's message is basically "
u up? what r we doin today
?'
The nurse endeavors to take the message to Romeo inside enemy Montague territory, where she endures a fair number of insults from Romeo's friends, the aforementioned fanny comparison being one of them. After this she berates Peter, her servant, for not defending her honor. That's right: this nanny has her own dedicated servant.
She takes Romeo's message back to Juliet...but she makes the poor girl wait for it...and she does it for the lulz. I can't think of any other reason.
JULIET
O God, she comes,--O honey Nurse, what news?
Hast thou met with him? Send thy man away.
NURSE
Peter, stay at the gate.
[
Exit PETER]
JULIET
Now, good sweet Nurse--O Lord, why look’st thou sad?
Though news be sad, yet tell them merrily.
If good, thou shamest the music of sweet news
By playing it to me with so sour a face.
NURSE
I am aweary. Give me leave awhile.
Fie, how my bones ache! What a jaunt have I!
JULIET
I would thou hadst my bones and I thy news.
Nay, come, I pray thee, speak. Good, good Nurse, speak.
NURSE
Jesu, what haste! Can you not stay awhile?
Do you not see that I am out of breath?
JULIET
How art thou out of breath when thou hast breath
To say to me that thou art out of breath?
The excuse that thou dost make in this delay
Is longer than the tale thou dost excuse.
Is thy news good, or bad? Answer to that.
Say either, and I’ll stay the circumstance.
Let me be satisfied. Is ’t good or bad?
NURSE
Well, you have made a simple choice. You know
not how to choose a man. Romeo! No, not he,
though his face be better than any man’s, yet his
leg excels all men’s, and for a hand and a foot
and a body, though they be not to be talked on,
yet they are past compare. He is not the flower of
courtesy, but, I’ll warrant him, as gentle as a
lamb. Go thy ways, wench. Serve
God. What, have you dined at home?
JULIET
No, no. But all this did I know before.
What says he of our marriage? What of that?
NURSE
Lord, how my head aches! What a head have I!
It beats as it would fall in twenty pieces.
My back a' t' other side. Ah, my back, my back!
Beshrew your heart for sending me about,
To catch my death with jaunting up and down!
JULIET
I' faith, I am sorry that thou art not well.
Sweet, sweet, sweet Nurse, tell me, what says my love?
NURSE
Your love says, like an honest gentleman, and a
courteous, and a kind, and a handsome, and, I
warrant, a virtuous— Where is your mother?
JULIET
Where is my mother? Why, she is within.
Where should she be? How oddly thou repliest!
“Your love says, like an honest gentleman,
'Where is your mother?'”
NURSE
O God’s lady dear,
Are you so hot? Marry, come up, I trow.
Is this the poultice for my aching bones?
Henceforward do your messages yourself.
Eventually, after enduring more of this trolling, Juliet pries the story out of her nurse: she is to meet Romeo at Friar Lawrence's cell, where the priest will marry the couple in secret.
Romeo and Juliet are then given a few minutes of happiness together before the tragedy begins. That starts with Romeo killing Juliet's cousin Tybalt in a fight, resulting in Romeo being banished from the city for life.
A Shakespearean comedy would then see Juliet dressing like a boy and sneaking out of the city to join Romeo, but this is a Shakespearean tragedy, so Juliet instead spends her days in her bedroom in her parents' house crying and pining for Romeo.
Of course, Juliet can't tell her parents why she's so upset, so her father advances the theory that she's mourning for her dead cousin Tybalt, but he says that she's taking this mourning too far. Everything we know about Tybalt painted him as a straight-up jerk, and it's sort of implied that even his own family didn't like him much.
Juliet's father comes up with a solution to cheer up his girl: marry her in just a few days and without her consent to a young nobleman named Paris. Obviously this isn't going to cheer her up in the least, even if she hadn't already been secretly married to Romeo. On top of this, in Act I her father had told Paris that Juliet was too young for marriage, so something strange is afoot here.
My theory--and it's only a fan theory as there's no way to confirm it--is that Juliet's father, dismayed at Juliet's crying in her room all day long, was smart enough to grill the girl's only confidante about what was going on with her. That confidante would be the nurse. And the nurse, I believe, spilled the beans about Romeo and her to Juliet's father.
Again, none of this is in the play, but it provides an explanation for why Juliet's father wants to marry her off so quickly, knowing that it's impossible to cheer up Juliet with a marriage to a man she doesn't love, but also knowing that it will provide cover for her (and her family's) honor if Romeo has already gotten her pregnant, as no one like Maury Povich was around back then to verify the paternity of babies.
So then we come to this scene...
JULIET
O God!--O Nurse, how shall this be prevented?
My husband is on earth, my faith in heaven.
How shall that faith return again to earth,
Unless that husband send it me from heaven
By leaving earth? Comfort me. Counsel me.--
Alack, alack, that heaven should practice stratagems
Upon so soft a subject as myself.--
What sayst thou? Hast thou not a word of joy?
Some comfort, Nurse.
NURSE
Faith, here it is.
Romeo is banishèd, and all the world to nothing
That he dares ne'er come back to challenge you.
Or, if he do, it needs must be by stealth.
Then, since the case so stands as now it doth,
I think it best you married with the county.
Oh, he’s a lovely gentleman.
Romeo’s a dishclout to him. An eagle, madam,
Hath not so green, so quick, so fair an eye
As Paris hath. Beshrew my very heart,
I think you are happy in this second match,
For it excels your first. Or if it did not,
Your first is dead, or ’twere as good he were,
As living here and you no use of him.
JULIET
Speakest thou from thy heart?
NURSE
And from my soul too, else beshrew them both.
JULIET
Amen!
NURSE
What?
And just like that, Juliet is done with the nurse. She never confides in her again. This can be a jarring scene for anyone who might be invested in the idea that the nurse loves Juliet and wants to see her happy. The nurse wants to see the nurse happy, and this is her trying to make the best of a bad situation after--as I proposed--she has already told Juliet's father offstage about Romeo.
Let's also not discount the potential in the nurse's view for any forthcoming lulz, if Juliet decides to marry Paris and to also keep her relationship with Romeo going on the sly. She'll need to keep the nurse around as a go-between, and the nurse can hope to hang around long enough until a new baby arrives, one who needs an experienced and trusted nanny.
The play, alas, is a tragedy, and none of this works out for our nurse. Romeo and Juliet both kill themselves, and the nurse almost certainly finds herself out of a job--husband dead, daughter dead, meal ticket dead. There's going to be some tough rowing ahead for her.
And on that unhappy note, I'll wrap up my posts about one of my favorite plays.
Romeo and Juliet has a little bit of everything that makes Shakespeare great: word play, sword play, vivid characters, tragedy, close friendships, betrayal, and a deep dive into the nature of love.
When I was younger, this was my favorite play by Shakespeare. I don't know if it's going to hold the number one spot now that I'm older, but I intend to find out.
Next: A Midsummer Night's Dream
Last edited by suitedjustice; 03-07-2021 at 05:40 AM.