LADY CAPULET         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.

LADY CAPULET         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. (1.3.8-15)

More swift establishing of family dynamics here, and often played for comedy: Lady Capulet doesn’t know how to talk directly to her own daughter, and needs the Nurse there as back-up and mediator. Or, the Nurse is so performatively reluctant and slow to leave that Lady Capulet cuts her losses and tells her that she can stay. Pretty sounds along the same lines as lamb and ladybird, but here it means appropriate, suitable, although it’s going to take much longer than Lady Capulet envisages to reveal what Juliet’s of a pretty age for. There might be an additional joke, that Lady Capulet isn’t entirely sure how old her daughter is, while the Nurse can tell her age unto an hour. And – for a modern audience – there’s a tricky degree of precision here: Juliet is thirteen, almost fourteen. The Nurse’s character is being deftly sketched: she’s garrulous (this is just the beginning), apparently unstoppably cheerful, including about her own losses (teeth are only the start) and given to word-play of a bodily kind, here punning on teen meaning grief or pain. Juliet is being talked about rather than heard – again – and will be for a good while yet.