FRIAR              Go get thee to thy love as was decreed,

                        Ascend her chamber, hence and comfort her;

                        But look thou stay not till the Watch be set,

                        For then thou canst not pass to Mantua,

                        Where thou shalt live till we can find a time

                        To blaze your marriage, reconcile your friends,

                        Beg pardon of the Prince, and call thee back

                        With twenty hundred thousand times more joy

                        Than thou went’st forth in lamentation. (3.3.146-154)

And now there has to be a proper plan. The first part of it is still the original plan: go get thee to thy love as was decreed, ascend her chamber – a reminder there of the balcony, and the ladder of cords that was such a central feature of the previous scene between Juliet and the Nurse. That ladder is now reanimated, not a dead tangle but once again the highway to my bed that Juliet invoked. And Romeo will comfort Juliet, the Friar using the same word as the Nurse has, earlier – he will console her, but he will also delight her, bring her pleasure. Some time-limits are introduced: Romeo has to leave Verona before the Watch, the city guards, are posted and the gates are shut at dusk the following day – he must be able to slip out of the city when the gates are opened early in the morning, and will have to leave Juliet in plenty of time to be able to do this. (I think that stay is stay, remain in Verona, delay, rather than stay with Juliet.) This is the first mention of Mantua as a destination for Romeo; it’s close to Verona but far enough away for Romeo to be safe (and complying with the terms of his banishment). When the time is right, the marriage can be revealed, blazed (resonating ironically with the explosions, the gunpowder to which the Friar has alluded before) – and your friends, your families, can be reconciled, both to the news of the marriage and to each other – the feud will end! this is the Friar’s great hope – and then in that context of general rejoicing you can ask for the Prince’s pardon and you can come home. The language here, the juxtaposition of joy and lamentation, has a Biblical feel – but the Friar is full of hope, and also utterly swayed by his own rhetoric: the rejoicing then is going to be orders of magnitude greater than the lamentation now. It’s all going to be fine!