NURSE            O woe! O woeful, woeful, woeful day!

                        Most lamentable day, most woeful day

                        That ever, ever I did yet behold!

                        O day, O day, O day, O hateful day!

                        Never was seen so black a day as this.

                        O woeful day, O woeful day! (4.5.49-54)

This is probably the trickiest passage to play straight. There are all sorts of class issues here: Lady Capulet (and, in the next passage, Paris) can do synonyms, but the Nurse is potentially made ridiculous by her comparatively impoverished vocabulary – 6 woefuls in as many lines. But woe is a potent word, onomatopoeic of lamentation, and a key word in the mourning scenes of this play in general (it’s almost the last word in the play, but let’s not go there yet). What this most sounds like, I think, is ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in Midsummer Night’s Dream, a knowingly uncool idiom, a moment of self-parody by a playwright who is testing the limits and showing off a bit. So here – as with Lady Capulet – there’s another version of what emotional extremity might look like, again with that ritual, archaic quality. (Compare, too, the mourning women in Richard III.) If we’ve come to love the Nurse, then we have to allow her this moment of potential bathos, in which she is – for once – lost for words, all but a terrible few. We might remember, when she says that this is the worst day of her life, that she has already lost a child, little baby Susan, evoked as she remembered Juliet’s own babyhood. And, in this moment, this moment is worse even than that.