FRIAR When presently through all thy veins shall run
A cold and drowsy humour; for no pulse
Shall keep his native progress, but surcease;
No warmth, no breath shall testify thou livest;
The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade
To wanny ashes, thy eyes’ windows fall,
Like Death when he shuts up the day of life… (4.1.95-101)
This, perhaps unexpectedly, might be another moment to which the play’s body language has been leading. The Friar recalls the traditional blazon to which Romeo was previously so committed when he invokes the roses in thy lips and cheeks, but he describes them as fading – compare the maiden blush which Juliet herself evoked, in the balcony scene – until they are pale as ashes, not only white, wan, faded, but dead. The warmth of blood – again, the blood that Juliet imagined as bating in her cheeks, coming and going, a beating pulse– will become cold. All her veins, her whole body. There’s an intense, literally chilling, sensuality in the Friar’s description of the absence of warmth, the absence of breath; we can’t help imagining, remembering, touch, and warmth, and life. He is describing what we will have to imagine, and project, later on; he’s also perhaps transforming Juliet not simply into a corpse, but into a kind of statue, marble, a tomb effigy. (There’s a whole web of possible connections here – with the statue that Montague will imagine and promise in the play’s final moments, for instance, but also with Ovid’s Pygmalion, whose sculpture-creation comes to life, archetype of the artist, and hence, looking forward in Shakespeare’s career, to other women who seem to die and revive, at least temporarily, who are often imagined as statues: Much Ado’s Hero, Othello’s Desdemona, Cymbeline’s Imogen, Winter’s Tale’s Hermione.) The windows of the eyesare the eyelids, windows meaning shutters (very confusing) – but the image of Death shutting up the day of life, of closing windows, also echoes the dawn scene and Romeo’s departure: Then window, let day in, and let life out. Juliet’s imagining of the charnel house, the bones, the shroud, was creepy, but the physicality, the sensuality of this might make it worse. In this moment, the Friar is story-teller, playwright, suddenly the most powerful person in the play.
