BENVOLIO      Tut, you saw her fair, none else being by,

                        Herself poised with herself in either eye;

                        But in that crystal scales let there be weighed

                        Your lady’s love against some other maid

                        That I will show you shining at this feast,

                        And she shall scant show well that now seems best.

ROMEO           I’ll go along no such sight to be shown,

                        But to rejoice in splendour of mine own.

                                                                                    [Exeunt] (1.2.94-101)

Benvolio draws the exchange, and the scene, to a close with his customary mixture of wit and good sense. He picks up the fair, but points out that it’s meaningless without proper comparison: Romeo was only able to compare Rosaline with herself, as if she was being weighed, poised on both sides of a set of scales. He also resolves the messiness and excess of Romeo’s burning, drowning eyes by transforming them into those crystal scales: as Romeo has two eyes, he can look at (at last) two women at once. Benvolio imagines this hypothetical other maid as shining, anticipating the terms in which Juliet will eventually be praised by Romeo when he sees her for the first time, as a source of light, not simply reflecting it.

The final exchange between the friends, from Romeo’s When the devout religion to his final couplet at the scene’s end, lasts for 14 lines. It’s not quite a sonnet. It rhymes ABABCCDDEEFFGG; it divides between the two speakers as 6+6+2, rather than an obvious 8+6. But it’s working with sonnet form in striking ways. Romeo speaks a quatrain (introduced by the classic sonnet When) then a couplet; his couplet is matched by Benvolio, who turns the ‘sonnet’ with his But in that crystal scales. The division into 3 allows Romeo to have the last, ironic word; the sharing of the central ‘quatrain’ demonstrates the way in which, despite their needling of each other, these friends are still very much united. And, as a ‘sonnet’, the final 14 lines of this scene conclude the play’s first movement, by mirroring the Prologue. The action is about to shift location and new characters, notably Juliet, are about to be introduced.