MONTAGUE   Many a morning hath he there been seen,

                        With tears augmenting the fresh morning’s dew,

                        Adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs,

                        But all so soon as the all-cheering sun

                        Should in the farthest east begin to draw

                        The shady curtains from Aurora’s bed,

                        Away from light steals home my heavy son,

                        And private in his chamber pens himself,

                        Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out,

                        And makes himself an artificial night:

                        Black and portentous must this humour prove,

                        Unless good counsel may the cause remove. (1.1.122-133)

Here, Montague is unexpectedly lyrical in his portrait of his mopey teenage son. His speech creates a space for Romeo that is beautiful, in its evocation of the dawn (albeit through conventional epithets: Aurora’s bed), and highly emotional – but even the tears and deep sighs are elided with the dew and clouds of the morning. Montague anticipates the language and conceits that Romeo will himself go on to use when he finally appears and, importantly, also anticipates that those conceits and vocabulary can be both clichéd and beautiful. The pattern of light and dark that’s established here, and in particular the contrast between the sun and the darkness it dispels (already anticipated by Benvolio’s golden window of the east, echoed in the balcony scene) is going to be important throughout the play, and Montague won’t be the only one who quibbles on light / heavy as well as light / dark. Artificial night is, of course, the only kind possible in an outdoor theatre. Romeo’s seeking of solitude is conventional for the melancholy lover, but here it’s notable that solitude is also privacy, a space which he can delineate and control, and in which he can, punningly, pen himself as both solitary and as a writer. (Of course Romeo is a writer.) So although it’s temptingly easy to smile at the indulgent paternal portrait of the sulky teenager with his ‘keep out’ sign fixed against the world, that sense of the space which is at once private and creative, generative, is an important note.