JULIET                                    Nurse, will you go with me into my closet,

                                    To help me sort such needful ornaments

                                    As you think fit to furnish me tomorrow?

LADY CAPULET         No, not till Thursday, there is time enough.

CAPULET                    Go, Nurse, go with her, we’ll to church tomorrow.

                                                            Exeunt [Juliet and Nurse] (4.2.32-36)

Now that she’s set the plan in motion, Juliet needs to get out of there, so the excuse of working out what to wear for this putative wedding is a handy one if the strain of deceiving her parents, swallowing her pride (and revulsion at Paris) and nervously anticipating what she’s about to do is getting too much. Lady Capulet is interesting here, and it’s understandable that modern dress productions in particular suggest that she’s out of it on drink or tranquillisers (often because she’s been having an affair with Tybalt and is totally pole-axed by grief) – because she takes a weirdly long time to register that Juliet has agreed, implicitly, to marry Paris, let alone that the wedding’s been brought forward to tomorrow morning. (This is the first thing that she says in the scene.) She could, of course, be involved in complex lady-of-the-house negotiations with yet more comic servingmen and the Nurse, totally on board with this whole wedding-in-short-order scenario, Martha Stewart avant la lettre. But it’s perhaps notable that it’s the Nurse whom Juliet asks to go with her, still a more reassuring presence than her mother, even though Juliet realises that she can no longer confide in her absolutely. And it also reinforces, yet again, the compression of the time-frame originally envisaged and planned for by the Friar. We’ll to church tomorrow.

A bit of early modern (textile) context: closet here does not mean walk-in wardrobe, but rather (in this context) bed-chamber or perhaps (given that Juliet is from a socially-elite family and presumably living in a large house) a small room adjacent to her bedchamber, probably lockable, where she would keep her valuables. Ornaments would certainly include jewellery, but also more elaborate head-tires (head-dresses – although as an Elizabethan bride she would wear her hair loose, as a sign of virginity) and other accessories, such as embroidered gloves, and perhaps an elaborate ruff or fine lace partlet. The modern concept of a wedding dress as such was alien at this time; people getting married would certainly wear their best clothes and might well have new clothes for the occasion, but with the expectation of wearing them again.