Enter NURSE [hastily].

NURSE            Madam!

JULIET                        Nurse?

NURSE            Your lady mother is coming to your chamber.

                        The day is broke, be wary, look about.       [Exit.]

JULIET                        Then window, let day in, and let life out. (3.5.37-41)

Staging. The Nurse must enter below, if the lovers are aloft, at the window; she might enter at a run (the hastily is from Q1) and disappear almost immediately, we might imagine to delay Lady Capulet as much as possible. This is the visit promised at the end of the previous scene, for Lady Capulet to tell Juliet that she is to marry Paris in a few days’ time. And if the lovers are at the window or on the balcony and the Nurse enters and exits below, and perhaps if she even directs her lines downstage, rather than upstage, and looking up, then the balcony space indeed remains private, and Romeo remains unseen (although of course the Nurse knows he’s there). In that configuration, the main stage space has to remain indeterminate for a few moments, because if it’s too strongly established as Juliet’s room before Romeo climbs down, then it gets a bit confusing. (I am imagining an early modern playing space here, roughly akin to the Globe’s stage, although the Theatre’s auditorium was a different shape.) It’s got to be abrupt – no anticipatory noises off – because even though Romeo and Juliet (and we) know they have to part, they will still delay as long as they can – it will take a third party’s intervention to make the general danger of the situation urgent and specific. (We might have forgotten that Lady Capulet was the most vehement advocate of Romeo’s execution in the immediate aftermath of Tybalt’s death. That’s going to come back in the next movement of the scene.) But the glorious slow-motion, suspended animation of the first part of the scene now seems properly over: The day is broke, says the Nurse. She means, of course, that the sun has risen, the day has begun, but the sense of rupture, severing, something that has only just been created forcibly broken apart is palpable. And the window at which the lovers have been standing, holding off the daybreak through reinvention and lyricism and passionate ardour and hope and sheer force of will – that’s now the only escape route. Let day in – it can’t be kept out any more by poetry and love alone – and let life out. Romeo must go.