LADY CAPULET         Well, girl, thou weep’st not so much for his death

                                    As that the villain lives which slaughtered him.

JULIET                                    What villain, madam?

LADY CAPULET                                             That same villain Romeo.

JULIET                                    [Aside] Villain and he be many miles asunder.— (3.5.78-81)

Lady Capulet is getting impatient – well, girl– but there’s the beginning of a swerve here into a level of danger and fear that we probably haven’t anticipated: Lady Capulet is thinking about revenge, and it’s that desire that she projects on to her daughter here, imagining that Juliet, like her, is weeping less out of grief than anger and frustration and the longing for vengeance (thus making her own murderous intentions seem more reasonable, because imagining that they could be shared). Juliet is immediately even more on her guard: what villain, madam? and now it’s the turn of that word, villain, to resonate. It’s impossible for us, let alone for Juliet, to reconcile villain with the Romeo we’ve just witnessed. Villain was the word that Tybalt used to taunt Romeo when he challenged him, a word with moral weight but, even more, class implications: when Lady Capulet (and Tybalt) use the word, they mean low-born, low-life, scoundrel, reprobate, not a gentleman. As Juliet says, villain and he be many miles asunder – not just because Romeo is indeed a gentleman, but because he is gentle, in all possible senses. I think that the word villain, repeated 4 times in 3 lines, specifically brings this opposite, gentle, into play, by implication. We’ve seen Romeo’s tenderness, his reassuring kindness, only a few moments previously, as well as his courtesy (not least in his first exchange with Tybalt, before Mercutio’s death). Romeo is a Nice Boy; he shows promising signs of becoming a Nice Man, even. Juliet instinctively addressed him as gentle Romeo in the balcony scene. And here’s Lady Capulet, not only calling him that same villain Romeo, but daring to speak his name at all, with casual vitriol. Juliet had luxuriated in Romeo’s name, but here there is a sharp reminder of her initial fear that Tis but thy name that is my enemy; that enmity is taken for granted by Lady Capulet (and she too is now obsessed). Juliet may have given herself, all of herself, to Romeo – but he cannot escape his name, and he is now a marked man.