NURSE            ’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 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 wi’th’dug! (1.3.24-33)

Happy Valentine’s Day…. The Nurse is just getting into her stride here. One could go into lots of detail about the dating of the play (a possible reference to an earthquake felt in England in 1580), but what’s more notable, I think, is that the presumably major, local or even national event of the earthquake is entirely subordinated in the Nurse’s memory to the momentous occasion of Juliet’s weaning. It’s primarily a means of locating her own, and Juliet’s experience in time – the earthquake is still a cataclysmic event, of course – but the account of the weaning is much more vividly imagined, and with much more sensuality. The Nurse continues to be frank about her body (dug isn’t vulgar, exactly, but it’s more colloquial than ‘pap’ or ‘breast’ would be), and the remembered scene is warmly physical, sitting in the sun in a sheltered corner of the garden (although perhaps that’s overlaid with the imagining of sun-warmed Italian stone or brick…), doves cooing, nursing a toddler with a long-accustomed intimacy. The Nurse has a dramatist’s eye, as well as a story-teller’s – the surreptitious smearing of the nipple with the bitter wormwood, and the subsequent utter outrage of the child. The parents absent – tempting to construct the backstory of poor neglected Juliet, brought up by her Nurse while her parents gadded to Mantua – but that’s probably anachronistic, and just another of the Nurse’s characteristic parentheses. And the bravura comic set-piece continues, and will for some time. Is Juliet embarrassed yet? probably, an adolescent girl being reminded that she was once intimately acquainted with the breasts of the woman telling this interminable, and apparently pointless story. But it’s vivid, warm, benign. Juliet is loved.