NURSE                        O lamentable day!

LADY CAPULET                                             O woeful time!

CAPULET                    Death that hath tane her hence to make me wail

                                    Ties up my tongue and will not let me speak.

Enter FRIAR [LAWRENCE] and the COUNTY [PARIS with the MUSICIANS].

FRIAR  LAWRENCE    Come, is the bride ready to go to church?

CAPULET                    Ready to go, but never to return.—(4.5.30-34)

Editors get really sniffy about this scene and directors cut it to the bone, because it seems comic to a modern audience, inauthentic, over the top, and nothing really happens. I’ve noted already (repetitively) the way in which the Nurse and Lady Capulet’s repetitions – O lamentable day! O woeful time! – come to dominate (and this is only the beginning; it gets much more repetitive). But in discussing it in bits, I want to speak up for the scene as a whole, and make a case for it, by thinking about music and pattern. (My ideas here are indebted to the work of Russ McDonald, in books such as his Shakespeare and the Arts of Language  – a much-missed scholar; I heard him give a paper partly about this scene many years ago.) I suggested that Capulet’s conceit of the frosted flower was lyrical, and extending that musical vocabulary, I think, works persuasively for much of the scene – not least because it is framed with music, and musicians are (probably) present (their inclusion in the stage direction here is editorial, albeit entirely justified). O is going to become the characteristic sound of the scene, the sound of ritual lamentation (especially when it’s repeatedly paired with woe). Capulet here says that he cannot speak – temporarily, it turns out – but his reply to the Friar introduces another movement of the scene, in which Capulet, Lady Capulet, the Nurse, and Paris will take turns to speak intricately patterned stanzas. In terms of their content, they are – yes – repetitive, even banal – but their cumulative effect is a kind of polyphony of lamentation, its weight less semantic than sonic, even choric. Its repetitions become refrains. Think of the middle part of this scene as song.

But now it’s the Friar’s turn to give the performance of a lifetime… There’s a long gap for him after his first line: does he examine Juliet, check for a pulse? (His medical credentials must be well known.) He could take the opportunity to remove the vial, and perhaps notice and move the dagger. He probably prays. And what does Paris do? Lots of interesting choices can be made by these actors while the other characters get on with the (musical) work of ritual lamentation – which is going to take some time…