JULIET O think’st thou we shall ever meet again?
ROMEO I doubt it not, and all these woes shall serve
For sweet discourses in our times to come!
JULIET O God, I have an ill-divining soul!
Methinks I see thee now, thou art so low,
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.
Either my eyesight fails, or thou look’st pale.
ROMEO And trust me, love, in my eye so do you:
Dry sorrow drinks our blood. Adieu, adieu!
Exit (3.5.51-59)
Well, this is the very definition of wrenching. And the more so because there isn’t, at least on the page, anyone else present – no servant waiting for Romeo (let alone Benvolio), no Nurse pulling Juliet away. They have to do this themselves; they have to do this to each other, together. Juliet is the one who’s more on edge, just saying everything, all at once: not just when will I see you again, but will I ever see you again? Will we ever be again, the two of us, the whole of us? Romeo reassures: of course we will, and we’ll be able to look back and laugh. (Imagining a future in which all past troubles are resolved and can be talked of sweetly, merrily, rather than endured: compare Henry V’s Agincourt speech, or Lear to Cordelia as they are taken away to prison, or the remembrance of things past in the Sonnets. A future of leisurely conversation; time to talk.) But now Juliet is really frightened, looking down at Romeo’s pale face, and having a premonition of his death (and the looking down, so low, is a sad contrast with the impulse to look up which has marked so many of the lovers’ interactions). Again he reassures: you look pale too, don’t worry, of course we both look pale – that’s what sorrow does. The lovers mirror each other even as they part, both looking pale; Romeo’s in my eye so do you perhaps invoking the convention of lovers seeing themselves in each others’ eyes (‘My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears’, as Donne – who else – puts it in The Good Morrow). Sorrow is meant to be dry, proverbially, and sighs were thought to shorten life by taking blood, drop by drop, from the heart. Proverbs are all very well and early modern physiology is utterly fascinating… but footnotes do not console. After the soaring lyricism of the scene’s opening the lovers’ parting is hurried, fragmented, fraught, numb. Romeo’s final lines make a couplet (you/ Adieu, the latter repeated, a commendation of them both to God) but the gloriously interwoven figures and rhymes of their earlier dialogue have gone. The day is broke; there is no more time for singing. All they can do is look at each other one last time, with tender, fierce intensity.
And he’s gone.
