Weeping for a friend, a feeling loss (3.5.74-77)

JULIET                                    Yet let me weep for such a feeling loss.

LADY CAPULET         So shall you feel the loss, but not the friend

                                    Which you weep for.

JULIET                                                                        Feeling so the loss,

                                    I cannot choose but ever weep the friend. (3.5.74-77)

Juliet’s on guard, and the word play is dense and double; the repetitions and echoes (loss, feel, weep, friend), as well as the stichomythia, the shared lines, with her mother signal not intimacy and understanding (as has been the case in similar exchanges with Romeo) but that they are speaking at cross-purposes. Loss is perhaps the most prominent word, that palpable sense of absence, and incompletion (another thing that, perhaps, the half-lines perform: on the page at least, there is a gap). For Juliet, it is a feeling loss, something deeply affecting; her mother, more cynical, suggests that Juliet is merely feeling the loss, mourning in a way that is ultimately self-indulgent and not specific to the death of Tybalt. She’s right, of course – Juliet isn’t weeping for the loss of Tybalt – and here, incidentally, there’s a useful illustration of the capaciousness of friend in early modern usage: Lady Capulet uses it to mean family member, relation, while Juliet means lover – as well as family. In the balcony scene, planning their marriage, when she promised Romeo that all my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay, and follow thee my lord throughout the world – Juliet also implored him that if thou meanest not well, I do beseech thee, cease thy strife, and leave me to my grief. That moment resonates here: of course they’d never imagined Romeo’s banishment – and Juliet has not been able to follow him – and now, if she can’t be with Romeo, all she wants is to be left to her grief. But she’s not allowed to weep in peace, to have her cry, to cry herself to sleep: instead she has to dissemble with all her might, twisting words, staying one step ahead, and still grabbing any opportunity to say what she is truly feeling. I cannot choose but ever weep the friend.

There’s a lot more to come (and this is one of the scenes that I suspect is often trimmed a bit in performance) – but this is yet another of the part of the play in which I am amazed by what’s asked of Juliet, and the actor playing her (and indeed the actor playing Lady C). What were they like, these boys?

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