Enter Mother [LADY CAPULET below].
LADY CAPULET Ho, daughter, are you up?
JULIET Who is’t that calls? It is my lady mother.
Is she not down so late, or up so early?
What unaccustomed cause procures her hither?
[She goeth down from the window and enters below.] (3.5.64-7)
If – despite all my compelling arguments to the contrary – the whole of this scene has been set in the bedroom, then Lady Capulet can call ‘within’, offstage. If Juliet does come down from the upper stage to the main stage (and the stage direction is from Q1, but doesn’t appear in other early editions, and it’s a bit messy) then that short hiatus gives her time to gather her wits and prepare to give the performance of a lifetime; she knows that something – an unaccustomed cause– is up.
By way of a brief emotional respite, this might be a moment to think about what Juliet’s wearing. To fast-forward: there will be around 20 lines between Juliet’s eventual exit at the end of this scene and her re-entry to Friar Lawrence in the next scene. In which context she is, presumably, fully dressed, although she could conceivably be wearing a partially concealing cloak. So what’s she been wearing on the balcony (or at the window)? What signifies to an audience that she’s just got out of bed? Early moderns generally slept naked; a shift or smock could stand for nakedness. A bed-gown was a kind of dressing gown or ‘undress’, not worn in bed but associated with private, domestic space – again, concealing, and quite unstructured. In modern dress (and more natural in a bedroom setting) it would be possible for an actor to do a quick change from near nakedness (underwear, nightwear) to day-wear (this sounds like the stages of a beauty pageant, who even talks about day-wear, let alone street-wear?) Jeans and t-shirt, or suchlike, or a dress, over the head and do up the zip. Early modern dress, not so much, because fastenings are much slower and clothes are bulky and there is a wig to contend with. So what are the possibilities? Easiest: no naturalism, Juliet begins the scene fully dressed. Entirely possible (although perhaps not appealing for a modern audience). Or: if it’s the balcony/window, she’s only visible from the waist up. So a loose shift or smock over the costume for the first part of the scene, or a voluminous bedgown (or indeed a sheet) concealing the costume. Or a shift/smock, followed by a bedgown for the rest of the scene, then a quick change into a skirt (but: bum-roll? farthingale? although skirt plus bum-roll would be a matter of tying a couple of tapes) for the following scene, with top half concealed by a cloak. (It’s a bodice/corset that takes the time, and for a woman of Juliet’s status they would fasten at the back, not the front, assuming the help of a maid in getting dressed.)
Why do I think these questions matter? I do think they’re interesting of themselves, and they remind us of the very particular physical circumstances for which Shakespeare was writing, which were often both restrictive and formative. Asking these questions renews my admiration for actors in general, but also the first boy actors of this role, who perhaps had to play these pivotal, highly passionate scenes without some of the familiar props of gender identity and performance. (Shakespeare does this again, more devastatingly, in Othello, as Desdemona is undressed by Emilia and sings the Willow Song.) And if Juliet has the confrontation with her parents in shift and bedgown / pyjamas and dressing gown, then she is going to look very young, and very vulnerable. (Compare the notorious question of what Cressida’s wearing when she arrives at the Greek camp in Troilus and Cressida: nightgown and Troilus’s great-coat, or Sunday best?) I’m entirely happy to see this in modern dress, and indeed probably prefer it, but I like thinking about the practicalities too.
