LADY CAPULET         Why how now, Juliet?

JULIET                                                                        Madam, I am not well.

LADY CAPULET         Evermore weeping for your cousin’s death?

                                    What, wilt thou wash him from his grave with tears?

                                    And if thou couldst, thou couldst not make him live;

                                    Therefore have done. Some grief shows much of love,

                                    But much of grief shows still some want of wit. (3.5.68-73)

Lady Capulet is underrated. She’s steelier, more practical and less blustering than her husband, and is much more given to moral pronouncement, and to cynicism. We saw her passionate response in the immediate aftermath of Tybalt’s death, and her crying for vengeance, but she’s now got a grip on herself: emotion is weak. It’s too easy to condemn her as lacking any sign of maternal love: how now, Juliet? can be played with tender concern as well as with remote formality (and Juliet’s addressing of her as Madam isn’t necessarily a warning sign; early modern children used formal titles for their parents as a matter of course, at least those of higher social status did). There is a note here for Juliet too, one that will be repeated a number of times in the rest of the scene: Juliet is weeping. (Of course she is.) Lady Capulet supplies a world-weary commentary: tears are all very well, but they don’t do anything, and Lady Capulet has a plan, as will shortly be revealed. We’ve seen her immediate, intense grief for Tybalt, and perhaps, in the short scene with Capulet and Paris, intuited her shock and numbness. Now a kind of fatalism seems to have prevailed, and a bitter concern for appearances. (As editors point out, there’s also an anticipation here of Hamlet, both Claudius rebuking Hamlet for his apparent excess of mourning, and Hamlet vilifying Gertrude for her apparent insufficiency.) One of the things that this scene is going to do – in addition to being crucial for the plot – is to emphasise the degree to which Juliet is no longer a Capulet, just as she’s promised. Already, she is no longer the girl who promised her mother that she would do as she was told in relation to Paris, looking favourably on him but no more favourably than her parents allowed. She is passionate, argumentative, unrestrained – and so quick, so clever in her responses. Her grief here does indeed show much of love – but not for Tybalt – and her wit (as the rest of the exchange with her mother will show) is razor-sharp. As this scene will go on to show, Juliet is now more or less on her own: for a few moments, she can give in and weep – but not reveal the desperate true cause of her grief.