Falling backward (1.3.34-49)

NURSE            ‘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 high-lone; nay, by th’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 holidam,

                        The pretty wretch left crying, and said ‘Ay’.

                        To see now how a jest shall come about!

                        I warrant, and 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’. (1.3.34-49)

 

There’s the earthquake again, both personified and reduced to a human scale; the dove-house is both shaking with the earthquake and telling the Nurse to get a move on; she grumbles back, alright alright, I was going anyway, but, as earlier in the passage, the earthquake is entirely eclipsed by the memory of little Juliet. Here the child is imagined in motion, she could have run and waddled all about; a bit wobbly and staggering on her feet, still, a proper toddler, with the bumps and bruises to prove it. Another loss, matter-of-factly noted by the Nurse – she’s a widow – remembering her husband fondly, as having been a bit of a laugh. Despite parental absence, tumbling down and breaking her brow, and even earthquakes, Juliet’s infancy is warm, secure, happy; its recollection here is nostalgic, emphasised by the Nurse’s old-fashioned, residually Catholic oaths, marry (Mary), by th’rood (by the Cross) and holidam (Holy Dame, the Virgin Mary). Juliet, like the Nurse herself, is Englished, as Jule. The Nurse’s husband’s joke is of course Very Inappropriate – that when the little girl grows up she’ll fall backward, be sexually available and take pleasure in it – but here it’s as much about the child’s innocence and her desire to please as about the bawdy humour: she leaves crying and agrees with the nice man, who’s picked her up when she’s fallen over, after all. The husband’s humour very much matches the Nurse’s own preoccupations with bodies, and especially with sex; they both imagine the child Juliet grown up, perhaps picking up on the idea of early ripening and precocious fertility from earlier in the scene. Within the scene, the point is also the repetition – what’s Juliet doing, what’s Lady Capulet doing in the meantime? the Nurse goes unstoppably on, unconcerned by whether the others are listening or not. Juliet is pretty wretch, pretty fool: these are terms of endearment, rather than suggesting that she is either foolish or wretched, but they are diminutives; the continuity with the earlier suggestion that Juliet is of a pretty age again emphasises her youth. She may not be the sunny-natured toddler, but she is still very young, and if she was embarrassed by the reminder of her being breastfed by the Nurse, that embarrassment can only be compounded.

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