Enter Nurse [within] and knock.
FRIAR Arise, one knocks. Good Romeo, hide thyself.
ROMEO Not I, unless the breath of heart-sick groans
Mist-like infold me from the search of eyes.
Knock.
FRIAR Hark how they knock! – Who’s there? – Romeo, arise,
Thou wilt be taken. – Stay a while! – Stand up;
Loud knock.
Run to my study. – By and by! – God’s will,
What simpleness is this? – I come, I come!
Knock.
Who knocks so hard? whence come you? what’s your will?
NURSE [Within] Let me come in, and you shall know my errand:
I come from Lady Juliet.
FRIAR Welcome then. [Unlocks the door.] (3.3.71-80)
A lovely mishmash of stage directions here from various quartos and the folio. We might think of the Porter scene in Macbethas the supreme example of the unknown visitor knocking at the gate or door being used to ramp up tension, but this is an earlier version. The Porter scene is crazier, but also less fragmented, because the Porter isn’t talking to anyone else on stage: here the Friar has to try to get Romeo up off the ground and into hiding – so we might assume that (if there are three rear entrances to the stage) the study is imagined as being in the inner stage, where Romeo probably entered from at the top of the scene, while the Nurse is knocking at one of the side entrances, the same one through which the Friar entered earlier – but the textual messiness of this passage (there are lots of little variants as to who says what when) suggests a certain adaptability for different performance spaces.
Less well-known than Macbeth’s Porter is a similar knocking scene in Richard II, so close in date to Romeo and Juliet. There, the young Aumerle has repented of his involvement in a plan to kill the new king Henry IV and races to the king to beg for mercy, locking the door of the presence chamber. Aumerle is pursued first by his father, the duke of York, who wants to alert the king to the intended treason and abandon his son to justice, and then by his mother the Duchess, who has come to plead for mercy; there is much knocking and much off-stage shouting. The scene rapidly descends into farce, with all three of the Yorks on their knees and the Duchess in particular going on at great and comic length. (I hadn’t wondered before now whether the Duchess and the Nurse might have been played by the same actor, and would be grateful for any thoughts!)
This scene too can become comic, with Romeo refusing to move, the Friar becoming more and more agitated (what simpleness is this? what kind of fool are you being?) and the sense of danger defused as soon as the Nurse identifies herself. But, just for a few seconds, there’s the possibility that Romeo will have to prove his willingness to die rather than be banished – although it’s surely impossible to play the lines unless the breath of heart-sick groans mist-like infold me from the search of eyes, that is, unless I sigh so much that I disappear into an all-concealing cloud,and not get a laugh. (It also echoes his earlier protestation, way back in 1.1, that love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.)
