LADY CAPULET         We will have vengeance for it, fear thou not:

                                    Then weep no more. I’ll send to one in Mantua,

                                    Where that same banished runagate doth live,

                                    Shall give him such an unaccustomed dram

                                    That he shall soon keep Tybalt company;

                                    And then I hope thou wilt be satisfied.

JULIET                                    Indeed I never shall be satisfied

                                    With Romeo, till I behold him – dead –

                                    Is my poor heart, so for a kinsman vexed. (3.5.87-95)

It does seem as if Lady Capulet has already been plotting this, and there’s an assertion of family solidarity: we will have vengeance for it. If we remember back to an earlier scene, perhaps this is one of the reasons why the Nurse commented that, at the time of the earthquake, when Juliet was weaned, the Capulet parents were then at Mantua, suggesting that there are indeed family connections there, even another Capulet house. Lady Capulet has contacts, as well as a plan. (Of course, as editors point out, there’s no way that Romeo can be anywhere near Mantua yet. More sinister is the fact that Lady Capulet knows that he’s going to Mantua at all: the only people who are meant to know his destination are Friar Lawrence, the Nurse, Juliet, and Romeo himself. Has the Nurse let it slip already? Given how Juliet eventually ends the scene, does she note this possibility here?) Again Lady Capulet is dismissive of Romeo, this time as a banished runagate, a renegade, runaway; as with villain, she’s not dignifying him as an equal foe, but more as an irritation, an insult. And that she suggests poison conforms both to the Italian setting (those Italians, poisoning each other all over the place) and the association between poison and women (sneaky, devious): she’s not going to hire an assassin to cut his throat, but rather to slip him poison in a drink, an unaccustomed dram. And yes, there is massive irony and foreshadowing here… The suggestion that, should this be successful, Romeo will soon keep Tybalt company echoes Romeo himself in the duel scene, when he promised Tybalt himself that Mercutio’s soul is but a little way above our heads, staying for thine to keep him company: either thou or I, or both, must go with him. But it’s satisfied that Juliet seizes on, another unavoidable echo, this time of the balcony scene: what satisfaction canst thou have tonight? Lady Capulet means satisfaction as recompense or even in the formal sense of a duel, satisfying honour, but Juliet now understands, and owns, the word’s sexual sense. She will never be satisfied again until she is with Romeo – and then she makes it ambiguous, for safety’s sake: her heart will be dead until she beholds him, but as far as her mother’s concerned, she won’t be satisfied until she sees him dead. (Editors do wild things with the punctuation here.) There’s an increasing recklessness to Juliet’s double speaking.