[Enter Mother, LADY CAPULET.]
LADY CAPULET What noise is here?
NURSE O lamentable day!
LADY CAPULET What is the matter?
NURSE Look, look! O heavy day!
LADY CAPULET O me, o me, my child, my only life!
Revive, look up, or I will die with thee.
Help, help! Call help. (4.5.17-21)
The scene continues to be brilliantly controlled as the news of Juliet’s apparent death begins to spread. Has Lady Capulet heard the Nurse calling for help, or was she coming anyway? Certainly she doesn’t appear to have heard the specifics, that my lady’s dead. So now there’s another delayed reveal: at first the Nurse doesn’t speak directly to Juliet’s mother in answer to her questions but rather continues to lament (this was exactly what she was like in conveying the news of Tybalt’s death to Juliet: she is utterly caught up in her own emotional response, and understandably so). We might imagine Lady Capulet pausing just inside the entrance – is the Nurse leaning over the bed, kneeling beside it – and then running, panicked, to the bed to look, all dignity (and insecurity about the coolness of her relationship with her daughter?) forgotten, as the Nurse commands: Look, look! Lady Capulet continues to be something of a cipher: she’s been so remote with Juliet (and, latterly, so cruel, in the scene where Capulet kicked off about the marriage with Paris) – but here she is, destroyed and distraught. My only life reminds us, again, that Juliet is an only child. But the assertion or I will die with thee rings true: Tybalt dead, and now her daughter too, whom she does, in her own remote, messed-up way, fiercely love. What has Lady Capulet got to live for? And she too calls for help, and begins to lament – from this point the Os of ritual lamentation begin to resound ever more insistently in the scene. The alternating shared lines, the questions, the sense of hurried, desperate, impotent movement – all of these contrast with the utter stillness of Juliet, limp and apparently lifeless on the bed.
