Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all.

Here's much to do with hate, but more with love:
Why then, O, brawling love! O, loving hate !
O, any thing, of nothing first create!
Misshapen chaos of well seeming forms!
O, heavy lightness! serious vanity!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!-
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
Dost thou not laugh?

Ben.
No, coz, I rather weep.
Rom. Good heart, at what?
Ben.
At thy good heart's oppression.
Rom. Why, such is love's transgression.-
Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast;
Which thou wilt propagate, to have it prest
With more of thine: this love, that thou hast shown,
Doth add more grief to too much of mine own.
Love is a smoke rais'd with the fume of sighs;
Being urg'd," a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;

These lines add great support to Theobald's emendation. There are few passages in the poet where so great an improvement of language is obtained by so slight a deviation from the text of the old copy.

5 i. e. should blindly and recklessly think he end surmount all obstacles to his will.

6 Every ancient sonnetteer characterised Love by contrarities. Watson begins one of his canzonet :'Love is a sowre delight, and sugred griefe, A living death, and ever-dying life,' &c. Turberville makes Reason harangue against it in the same manner;

'A fierie frost, a flame that frozen is with ise! A heavie burden light to beare! A vertue fraught with vice &c.

7 The old copy reads, Being purgid a fire,' &c.—The emendation I have admitted into the text was suggested by Dr. Johnson. To urge the fire is to bindle or excite it. So in Chapman's version of the twentyfirst Iliad :

So

[Going.

Being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears:
What is it else? a madness most discreet,
A choking gall, and a preserving sweet.
Farewell, my coz.
Ben.
Soft, I will go along;
An if you leave me so, you do me wrong.
Rom. Tut, I have lost myself; I am not here;
This is not Romeo, he's some other where.
Ben. Tell me in sadness,' whom she is you love.
Rom. What, shall I groan, and tell thee?
Ben.
Groan? why, no;

But sally tell me who.

Rom. Bid a sick man in sadness make his will:
Ah, word ill urg'd to one that is so ill!
In sadness, cousin, I do love a woman.

Ben. I aim'd so near, when I suppos'd you lov'd.
Rom. A right good marksman!-And she's fair
I love.

Ben. A right fair mark, fair coz, is soonest hit.
Rom. Well, in that hit, you miss: she'll not be

hit

With Cupid's arrow, she hath Dian's wit;
And, in strong proof of chastity well arm'd,2
From love's weak childish bow she lives unharm'd.
She will not stay the siege of loving terms,
Nor bide the encounter of assailing eyes,
Nor ope her lap to saint-seducing gold:
O, she is rich in beauty; only poor,
That, when she dies, with beauty dies her store:3
Ben. Then she hath sworn, that she will still
live chaste?

Rom. She hath, and in that sparing makes huge

waste;

For beauty, starv'd with her severity,
Cuts beauty off from all posterity.
She is too fair, too wise; wisely too fair,
To merit bliss by making me despair:
She hath forsworn to love; and, in that vow,
Do I live dead, that live to tell it now.

Ben. Be rul'd by me, forget to think of her.
Rom. O, teach me how I should forget to think.
Ben. By giving liberty unto thine eyes;
Examine other beauties.

Rom.
"Tis the way
To call hers, exquisite, in question more :4
These happy masks, that kiss fair ladies' brows,
Being black, put us in mind they hide the fair;
He, that is strucken blind, cannot forget
The precious treasure of his eyesight lost;

1 i. e. tell me gravely, in seriousness.

Show me a mistress that is passing fair,
What doth her beauty serve, but as a note
Where I may read, who pass'd that passing fair?
Farewell; thou canst not teach me to forget.
Ben. I'll pay that doctrine, or else die in debt.
[Exeunt.

SCENE II. A Street. Enter CAPULET, PARIS,
and Servant.

Cap. And Montague is bound as well as I,
In penalty alike; and 'tis not hard, I think,
For men so old as we to keep the peace.

Par. Of honourable reckoning are you both;
And pity 'tis, you liv'd at odds so long.
But now, my lord, what say you to my suit?

Cap. By saying o'er what I have said before :
My child is yet a stranger in the world,
She hath not seen the change of fourteen years;
Let two more summers wither in their pride,
Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.

Par. Younger than slie are happy mothers made.
Cap. And too soon marr'd are those so early
made.

The earth hath swallow'd all my hopes but she,
She is the hopeful lady of my earth:
But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart,
My will to her consent is but a part;
An she agree, within her scope of choice
Lies my consent and fair according voice.
This night I hold an old accustom'd feast,
Whereto I have invited many a guest,
Such as I love; and you, among the store,
One more, most welcome, makes my number more.
At my poor house, look to behold this night
Earth-treading stars, that make dark heaven light:
Such comfort, as do lusty young men' feel
When well apparell'd April on the heel
Of limping winter treads, even such delight
Among fresh female buds shall you this night
Inherit at my house; hear all, all see,

And like her most, whose merit most shall be:
Which, on more view of many, mine being one,"1
May stand in number, though in reckoning none.
Come, go with me ;-Go, sirrah, trudge about
Through fair Verona; find those persons out,
Whose names are written there, [gives a Paper,]
and to them say,

My house and welcome on their pleasure stay.
[Exeunt CAPULET and PARIS.
Serv. Find them out, whose names are written

'Can I go forward when my heart is here? Turn back, duil earth, and find thy centre out. So in Shakspeare's 146th Sonnet:

'Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth.

8 i. e. in comparison to.

2 As this play was written in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, these speeches of Romeo may be regarded as an oblique compliment to her majesty, who was not liable to be displeased at hearing her chastity praised after she was suspected to have lost it, or her beauty commended in the sixty-seventh year of her age, though she never possessed any when young. Her declaration that she would continue unmarried increases the pro-reader may convince himself by turning to Spelman's bability of the present supposition.'-Steevens.

3 The meaning appears to be, as Mason gives it, She is poor only, because she leaves no part of her store behind her, as with her all beauty will die :-

For beauty starv'd with her severity
Cuts beauty off from all posterity,'

yeomen. Ritson has clearly shown that young men 9 For lusty young men' Johnson would read 'lusty was used for yeomen in our elder language.

And the

Glossary in the words juniores and yeoman.
10 To inherit, in the language of Shakspeare, is to

possess.

11 By a perverse adherence to the first quarto copy of 1597, which reads, Such amongst view of many,' &c. this passage has been made unintelligible. The subse

4 i. e. to call her exquisite beauty more into my mind,quent quartos and the folio read, Which one [on] and make it more the subject of conversation. Question is used frequently with this sense by Shakspeare.

5 This is probably an allusion to the masks worn by the female spectators of the play: unless we suppose that these means no more than the.

6 The quarto of 1597 reads:

And too soon marr'd are those so early married.' Puttenham, in his Arte of Poesy, 1559, uses this expression, which seems to be proverbial, as an instance of a figure which he calls the Rebound :--

more,' &c.; evidently meaning, Hear all, see all, and
like her most who has the most merit; her, which,
after regarding attentively the many, my daughter being
one, may stand unique in merit, though she may be
reckoned nothing, or held in no estimation. The allu-
sion, as Malone has shown, is to the old proverbial
expression, 'One is no number,' thus adverted to in
Decker's Honest Whore :—
to fall to one
is to fall to none,
For one no number is.'

The maid that soon married is, soon marred is.'
The jingle between marr'd and made is likewise fre- And in Shakspeare's 136th Sonnet:-
quent among the old writers. So Sidney:-

Oh! he is murr'd, that is for others made ! Spenser introduces it very often in his different poems. 7 Fille de terre is the old French phrase for an heiress. Earth is likewise put for lands, i. e. landed estate, in other old plays. But Mason suggests that earth may here mean corporal part, as in a future passage of this play :

Among a number one is reckon'd none,
Then in the number let me pass untold.'

It will be unnecessary to inform the reader that which
is here used for who, a substitution frequent in Shak-
speare, as in all the writers of his time. One of the
later quartos has corrected the error of the others, and
reads as in the present text :---

Which on more view,' &c

here? It is written-that the shoemaker should | But in those crystal scales, let there be weigh'd meddle with his yard,-and the tailor with his last, Your lady's love against some other maid the fisher with his pencil, and the painter with his That I will show you, shining at this feast, nets; but I am sent to find those persons, whose And she shall scant show well, that now shows best. names are here writ, and can never find what names Rom. I'll go along, no such sight to be shown, the writing person hath here writ. I must to the But to rejoice in splendour of mine own. [Exeunt learned :-In good time. SCENE III. A Room in Capulet's House. Enter LADY CAPULET and Nurse.

Enter BENVOLIO and ROMEO.

Ben. Tut, man! one fire burns out another's burning,

One pain is lessen'd 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.

Rom. Your plantain leaf is excellent for that.2
Ben. For what, I pray thee?

Rom.

For your broken skin.
Ben. Why, Romeo, art thou mad? ·
Rom. Not mad,but bound more than a madman is:
Shut up in prison, kept without my food,
Whipp'd and tormented, and-Good-e'en, good
fellow.

Serv. God gi' good e'en.-I pray, sir, can you

read?

Rom. Ay, mine own fortune in my misery. Serv. Perhaps you have learn'd it without book: But, I pray, can you read any thing you see? Rom. Ay, if I know the letters, and the language. Serv. Ye say honestly; Rest you merry! Rom. Stay, fellow; I can read. [Reads. Signior Martino, and his wife and daughters; County Anselme, and his beauteous sisters; The lady widow of Vitruvio; Signior Placentio, and his lovely nieces; Mercutio, and his brother Valentine; Mine uncle Capulet, his wife, and daughters; My fair niece Rosaline; Livia; Signior Valentio, and his cousin Tybalt; Lucio, and the lively Helena. A fair assembly; [Gives back the Note.] Whither should they come ?

Serv. Up.

Rom. Whither?

Serv. To supper; to our house.
Rom. Whose house?

Serv. My master's.

Rom. Indeed, I should have asked you that before.
Serv. 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.

Ben. At this same ancient feast of Capulet's
Sups the fair Rosaline, whom thou so lov'st;
With all the admired 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.

Rom. When the devout religion of mine eye
Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires!
And these,-who, often drown'd, 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.
Ben. Tut! you saw her fair, none else being by,
Herself pois'd with herself in either eye:

1 The quarto of 1597 adds, And yet I know not who are written here: I must to the learned to learn of them that's as much as to say, the tailor,' &c.

2 The plantain leaf is a blood-stancher, and was formerly applied to green wounds. So in Albumazar:Help, Armellina, help! I'm fallen i' the cellar : Bring a fresh plantain-leaf, I've broke my shin.' 3 This cant expression seems to have been once common; it often occurs in old plays. We have one still in use of similar import :-To crack a bottle.

4 Heath says, 'Your lady's love, is the love you bear to your lady, which, in our language, is commonly used for the lady herself. Perhaps we should read, 'Your lady love.

5 In all the old copies the greater part of this scene was printed as prose. Capell was the first who exhibited it as verse; the subsequent editors have followed him, but perhaps erroneously.

I

Madam, I am here,

La. Cap. This is the matter:-Nurse, give leave

awhile,

We must talk in secret.-Nurse, come back again,
Thou know'st my daughter's of a pretty age.
have remember'd me, thou shalt hear our counsel

Nurse. 'Faith, I can tell her age unto an hour.
La. Cap. 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 is not fourteen: How long is it now
To Lammas-tide ?

La. Cap.
A fortnight, and odd days.
Nurse. Even or odd, of all days in the year,
Come Lammas-eve at night, shall she be fourtees.
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 wean'd,-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 dove-house 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 with the dug,
Shake, quoth the dove-house: 'twas no need, I trow,
To bid me trudge.

And since that time it is eleven years:

For then she could stand alone; nay, by the 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 holy-dam,
The pretty wretch left crying, and said-Дy:
To see now, how a jest shall come about!
I warrant, an I should live a thousand
years,
I never should forget it; Wilt thou not, Jule !
quoth he:
And, pretty fool, it stinted,

and said--Ay.

6 i. e. to my sorrow. This old word is introduced for the sake of the jingle between teen, and four, and fourteen.

7 Mr. Tyrwhitt thinks that Shakspeare had in view the earthquake which had been felt in England in his own time, on the 6th of April, 1580; and that we may from hence conjecture that Romeo and Juliet was wri ten in 1591.

8 The nurse means to boast of her retentive facultyTo bear a brain was to possess much mental capacity either of attention, ingenuity, or remembrance. Thus in Marston's Dutch Courtezan :

My silly husband, alas! knows nothing of It, Tis I that must bear a braine for all.'

9 To stint is to stop. Baret translates Lachrymas

La. Cap. Enough of this; I pray thee, hold thy | This precious book of love, this unbound lover,

3 After this speech of the Nurse, Lady Capulet, in the old quarto, says only :

"Well, Juliet, how like you of Paris' love?" She answers, I'll look to like,' &c.; and so concludes the scene, without the intervention of that stuff to be found in the later quartos and the folio.

4 Thus the quarto of 1599. The quarto of 1609 and the folio read, several lineaments. We have, The unity and married calm of states,' in Troilus and Cressida. And in his eighth Sonnet :

'If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,
By unions married, do offend thine ear.'

5 The comments on ancient books were generally printed in the margin. Horatio says, in Hamlet, I knew you must be edified by the margent,' &c. So in The Rape of Lucrece :

But she that never cop'd with stranger eyes Could pick no meaning from their parling looks, Nor read the subtle shining secrecies Writ in the glassy margent of such books.' This speech is full of quibbles. The unbound lover is a quibble on the binding of a book, and the binding in marriage; and the word cover is a quibble on the law phrase for a married woman, femme couverte.

Mer. Nay, gentle Romeo, we must have you

dance.

Rom. Not I, believe me: you have dancing
shoes,

With nimble soles: I have a soul of lead,
So stakes me to the ground, I cannot move.
Mer. You are a lover; borrow Cupid's wings,
And soar with them above a common bound.

Rom. I am too sore enpierced with his shaft,
To soar with his light feathers; and so bound,
I cannot bound' a pitch above dull wo:
Under love's heavy burden do I sink.

Mer. And, to sink in it, should you burden love,
Too great oppression for a tender thing.

Rom. Is love a tender thing? it is too rough,
Too rude, too boist'rous: and it pricks like thorn.
Mer. If love be rough with you, be rough with
love;

Prick love from pricking, and you beat love down.
Give me a case to put my visage in:

[Putting on a Mask.
A visor for a visor!-what care I,
What curious eye doth quote deformities?
Here are the beetle-brows, shall blush for me.
Ben. Come, knock, and enter: and no sooner in,
But every man betake him to his legs.

Rom. A torch for me: let wantons, light of heart,
Tickle the senseless rushes3 with their heels;
For I am proverb'd with a grandsire phrase,-
I'll be a candle-holder, and look on,-
The game was ne'er so fair, and I am done.4
Mer. Tut! dun's the mouse, the constable's own

word:

If thou art dun, we'll draw thee from the mires
Of this (save reverence) love, wherein thou stick'st
Up to the ears.---Come, we burn daylight, ho.
Rom. Nay, that's not so.
Mer.
I mean, sir, in delay
We waste our lights in vain, like lamps by day.
Take our good meaning; for our judgment sits
Five times in that, ere once in our five wits."

true.

Mer. O, then, I see, queen Mab hath been with
She is the fairies' midwife; and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,"
Drawn with a team of little atomies10
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep:
Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners' legs;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
The traces, of the smallest spider's web;
The collars, of the moonshine's watery beams:
Her whip, of cricket's bone; the lash, of film :
Her wagoner, a small grey-coated gnat,'
Not half so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid:
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut,
Made by the joiner squirrel, or old grub,
Time out of mind the fairies' coach-makers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love:
On courtiers'knees,that dream on court'sies straigh:
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees:
O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream:
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweet-meats tainted
are.12

Sometime she gallops o'er a courtier's nose, 13
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit :14
And sometimes comes she with a tithe-pig's tail,
Tickling a parson's nose as 'a lies asleep,
Then dreams he of another benefice:
Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscados, Spanish blades.1

1 Let Milton on this occasion keep Shakspeare in unable to do it, and call for more assistance. The game countenance. Par. Lost, book iv. 1. 180:

in contempt

At one slight bound high over-leap'd all bound.' 2 To quote is to note, to mark. See Hamlet, Act ii.

Sc. 1.

3 Middleton (the author of The Witch) has borrowed this thought in his play of Blurt Master Constable,

1602:

bid him, whose heart no sorrow feels, Tickle the rushes with his wanton heels, I have too much lead at mine."

It has been before observed that the apartments of our ancestors were strewed with rushes, and so it seems was the ancient stage. On the very rushes when the Comedy is to dance.'-Decker's Gull's Hornbook, 1609. Shakspeare does not stand alone in giving the manners and customs of his own times to all countries and ages. Marlowe, in his Hero and Leander, describes Hero as

fearing on the rushes to be flung.'

4 To hold the candle is a common proverbial expression for being an idle spectator. Among Ray's proverbial sentences we have, A good candle-holder proves a good gamester,' This is the grandsire phrase' with which Romeo is proverbed. There is another old prudential maxim subsequently alluded to, which advises to give over when the game is at the fairest.

continues till all the company take part in it, when das is extricated of course; and the merriment arises from the awkward and affected efforts of the rustics to lift the log, and sundry arch contrivances to let the ends of it fall on one another's toes.'

perfluous actions in general, occurs again in The Merry 6 This proverbial phrase, which was applied to se

Wives of Windsor.

7 The quarto of 1597 reads, Three times a day; and right wits instead of fire wits.

8 The fairies' midwife does not mean the midwife to the fairies, but that she was the person among the feines whose department it was to deliver the fancies of sleep ing men of their dreams, those children of an idle brain. When we say the king's judges, we do not mean per. to judge his subjects-Steerens. Warburton, with sens sons who judge the king, but persons appointed by him plausibility, reads, the fancy's midwife."

9 The quarto of 1597 has, of a burgomaster." The citizens of Shakspeare's time appear to have worn this ornament on the thumb. So Glapthorne in his comedy of Wit in a Constable:- And an alderman, as I may say to you, he has no more wit than the rest of the bench; and that lies in his thumb ring? Shakspeare compares his fairy to the figure carved on the agate stone of a thumb ring.

10 Atomies for atoms.

Windsor.

5 Dun is the mouse is a proverbial saying to us of vague signification, alluding to the colour of the mouse; 11 There is a similar fanciful description of Queen but frequently employed with no other intent than that of Mab's chariot in Drayton's Nymphidia, which was quibbling on the word done. Why it is attributed to a written several years after this tragedy. constable we know not. It occurs in the comedy of 12 This probably alludes to the kissing comfits,' menPatient Grissel, 1603. So in The Two Merry Milk-tioned by Falstaff in the last act of the Merry Wives of maids, 1620-Why then, 'tis done, and dun's the mouse, and undone all the courtiers." To draw dun out of the mire was a rural pastime, in which dun meant a dun horse, suposed to be stuck in the mire, and sometimes represented by one of the persons who played, at others by a log of wood. Mr. Gifford has described the game, at which he remembers often to have played, in a note to Ben Jonson's Masque of Christmas, vol. vii. p. 282: A log of wood is brought into the midst of the room; this is dun, (the cart horse,) and a cry is raised that he is stuck in the mire. Two of the company advance, either with or without ropes, to draw him out. After repeated attempts, they find themselves

13 This speech received much alteration after the first edition in the quarto of 1597: and Shakspeare basical vertently introduced the courtier twice. Mr. Tyrs bit finding countries knees' in the first instance printed in the second folio, would read counties' (i. e. noblexes :) knees. Steevens remarks that the whole speech bears a resemblance to a passage of Claudian in Sextum Col sulatum Honorii Augusti Præfatio. 14 A place in court.

15 The quarto of 1597 reads, 'counter mines. Sparish blades were held in high esteem. A sword was called a Toledo, from the excellence of the Toletan steel.