Lammas-tide, and Susan (1.3.15-23)

NURSE                        How long is it now

                                    To Lammas-tide?

LADY CAPULET                                             A fortnight and odd days.

NURSE                        Even or odd, of all days in the year,

                                    Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen.

                                    Susan and she – God rest all Christian souls! –

                                    Were of an age. Well, Susan is with God,

                                    She was too good for me. But as I said,

                                    On Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen,

                                    That shall she, marry, I remember it well. (1.3.15-23)

 

Juliet’s been identified already as Very Young, not fourteen, and here that is given more precision: she’ll be fourteen in two and a bit weeks. And this also establishes the season of the play, to within a few days: it’s mid July, summer, as Lammas – an early harvest festival, going back at least to Anglo-Saxon times, when loaves made from the first ripe grain were blessed – is 1 August (and Lammas Eve is therefore 31 July). And Juliet is linked here to early ripening, precocious fertility (appropriate for the subsequent turn of the conversation) but also, perhaps, to an untimely harvest. (One need not over-determine it. Mostly, I think, this is about establishing both Juliet’s age and that it’s summer. It’s hot.) The Nurse does indeed know Juliet’s age almost to the hour – that she was born at night.

Susan is the very English name of this very English native of Verona’s dead infant daughter. That, as she goes on to describe, the Nurse has been Juliet’s wet-nurse, breast-feeding her presumably from birth, both underscores the closeness and duration of the bond between them, and inscribes loss, not just of teeth, but of a child, into the Nurse’s life and character. Susan has lived long enough to be named and baptised; her mother is confident that she is with God. She has a fleeting, intense presence in the play – elided, perhaps, with the subsequent description of the infant Juliet – that’s not unrelated to the absent presence of Rosaline, an imagined corporeality, a little lost armful. Grief doesn’t define the Nurse – far from it – this little account of Susan is parenthetical, and indeed entirely subordinated to the establishment of Juliet’s age. But it’s a note worth noting, and being reminded of much later in the play, when the Nurse loses her other child.

Little do we know that the Nurse is only just starting to get going here, and the line by line reader might – for the first time – be given pause. What’s the point of this (and the rest of it)? More as the rest of the speech unfolds, but some initial thoughts, too. This has, surely, been written for a known actor with a gift for comedy; it’s a set piece for a garrulous woman, a gossip, a recognisable London (or perhaps country) type. It begins to establish the Nurse as a woman deeply invested in the physical, in the body – sex, pregnancy, maternity, breast-feeding, aging. It’s a different kind of body language – although not entirely unrelated – to that of the servingmen in the first scene. Where does Juliet fit, in relation to her formal mother and her all-enveloping, over-the-top, even gross nurse? Is the Nurse going to be played by a boy actor, or by a man? The speech is long, and complicated, with lots of doubling back and repetition. It’s in verse, mostly, but quite irregular; it’s not in rhyme, which makes it harder to remember, relatively speaking. If the Nurse were played by a man, then it would be possible for the play to be performed with only two boys, because Juliet could double Lady Montague in 1.1. (There must have been more than that, though, because of the demands of the ball scene, unless Capulet’s promised hot girls turn out to be so much hot air, at least from an audience’s point of view. Surely not.) But the comedy of the Nurse, her broadness and parody, might suggest a more experienced adult male actor.

 

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