LADY CAPULET Accursed, unhappy, wretched, hateful day!
Most miserable hour that e’er time saw
In lasting labour of his pilgrimage!
But one, poor one, one poor and loving child,
But one thing to rejoice and solace in,
And cruel Death hath catched it from my sight! (4.5.43-48)
So this is the first stanza, in effect, of the scene’s central lamentations, which I’m suggesting are like choral music in their effect, full of repetition and pattern, their emotional weight generated partly by an accumulation of sounds and words, especially adjectives. There are different shades of meaning that could be ascribed to accursed, unhappy, wretched, hateful, but they’re mostly used here as intensifiers; if we’re thinking in terms of the creation of some kind of emotional truth, then there’s a sense of Lady Capulet groping for a succession of adjectives, each one seized on and immediately found insufficient for the expression of her agony. This is the worst day ever, the worst day of all time. (And time is toil, lasting labour of his pilgrimage.) And then, like Capulet, she focuses on the specifics: that Juliet has been their only child, repeating onefour times in the space of two lines, with just enough variation in the syntax and the other words for it to wrench more, pulling the line back to this terrible one, one, one, one, every time it looks like it might go somewhere else. (Perhaps reading, or even hearing, we supply the half-rhyme: gone.) It does develop, slightly: the description of Juliet as loving, and the shift, prompted by that, to Lady Capulet thinking of her own emotional life, which has now been so irreparably altered: but one thing to rejoice and solace in. Juliet has been, apparently, the only source of joy and comfort in her life.
Public service announcement: Juliet isn’t dead, remember. But another thought – which I think holds true for all of this part of the scene: Shakespeare is experimenting here, and in other plays written around this time, with ideas about language and truth, especially the ways in which intense emotional experience might be expressed. (It is, after all, what he does with the language of the lovers, Romeo starting off all Petrarchan and then, with Juliet, building on and transcending that more conventional language.) And, part of that: the rhetorical strategies used to express extremes of emotion in early modern texts can sometimes look fake to us, because they are often highly wrought, very structured, elevated, formal. The classic example is Marcus’s speech when he sees his mutilated niece Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, where the sheer beauty of the poetry seems implausible in the horror of the moment. Here, the ritual, almost liturgical quality which will build through this movement of the scene might recall for an early modern audience both liturgy itself and, perhaps, the scenes of lamentation in medieval religious drama (especially once the Os start to get going) – and they’d acquire a particular emotional and psychological weight from those echoes.
