Enter Father [CAPULET].

CAPULET                    For shame, bring Juliet forth, her lord is come.

NURSE                        She’s dead, deceased, she’s dead, alack the day!

LADY CAPULET         Alack the day, she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead!

CAPULET                    Hah, let me see her. Out alas, she’s cold,

                                    Her blood is settled and her joints are stiff:

                                    Life and those lips have long been separated;

                                    Death lies on her like an untimely frost

                                    Upon the sweetest flower of all the field. (4.5.22-29)

Capulet’s first thought is for his honour; as he enters he’s preparing to be angry at the delay, that Paris has arrived early, as promised, and Juliet’s apparently not ready: For shame, bring Juliet forth, her lord is come. He is, perhaps, paranoid that after all her apparent contrition, she is going to refuse to marry Paris after all – that would be really shameful and totally awkward. The Nurse and Lady Capulet are properly hysterical, repeating themselves – and that repetitive, ritual quality of lamentation will run through the rest of the scene, which, as here, risks become comic and is, I think, often cut. Then Capulet too approaches the bed: let me see her, and finally there is some qualitative description, matching the Friar’s account of the drug’s effects. Out here is, apparently, another expression of lamentation (like alack), so Capulet isn’t saying that Juliet is out cold (slightly disappointingly). She is pale, stiff, there is no detectable breath (life and those lips have long been separated). Does he feel for a pulse, check for breath? probably. And then, rather than the potential bathos of yet more alacks and she’s deads, an unexpectedly (for Capulet) beautiful, lyrical conceit: Death lies on her like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of all the field. There’s an echo here of other flowers in the play – the roses, of course, but also Juliet’s own invocation of this bud of love, which by summer’s ripening breath may prove a beauteous flower when next we meet, during the balcony scene. And Capulet himself had said to Paris, when he was still seeking to delay the marriage, at the beginning of the play, Let two more summers wither in their pride, ere we may think her ripe to be a bride. The description of Juliet as a flower emphasises her youth, but also the bridal context; it’s not impossible that the Nurse or the Capulet parents have brought flowers with them, for Juliet to carry or wear. And the untimely frost does indeed strike a chill. We know – we believe – that Juliet isn’t dead. But we’ve seen the play’s timings get trickier and trickier, and questions of time and timeliness becoming more fraught. We have seen, with the lovers, that there is never enough time for love. And we know, thanks to the Prologue, how this is going to end. (Shakespeare is obsessed with time and timeliness, obviously. Not going to give a list. But – thinking about Midsummer Night’s Dream connections – the figure of the frosted flower is there in Titania’s great ‘forgeries of jealousy speech’, as the climax of a catalogue of environmental and emotional disorders. It’s a commonplace, sure, but it also speaks precisely to the shattering cosmic wrongness of the deaths of the young.)