Page 3202 - Shakespeare - Vol. 1

NURSE

Will you speak well of him that kill’d your cousin?

JULIET

Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?
Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name
When I thy three-hours wife have mangled it?
But wherefore, villain, didst thou kill my cousin? [100]
That villain cousin would have kill’d my husband.
Back, foolish tears, back to your native spring,
Your tributary drops belong to woe
Which you mistaking offer up to joy.
My husband lives, that Tybalt would have slain, [105]
And Tybalt’s dead, that would have slain my husband.
All this is comfort. Wherefore weep I then?
Some word there was, worser than Tybalt’s death,
That murder’d me. I would forget it fain,
But O, it presses to my memory [110]
Like damned guilty deeds to sinners’ minds.
Tybalt is dead and Romeo - banished.
That ‘banished’, that one word ‘banished’,
Hath slain ten thousand Tybalts: Tybalt’s death
Was woe enough, if it had ended there. [115]
Or if sour woe delights in fellowship,
And needly will be rank’d with other griefs,
Why follow’d not, when she said ‘Tybalt’s dead’,
Thy father or thy mother, nay or both,
Which modern lamentation might have mov’d? [120]
But with a rearward following Tybalt’s death,
‘Romeo is banished’: to speak that word
Is father, mother, Tybalt, Romeo, Juliet,
All slain, all dead. Romeo is banished,
There is no end, no limit, measure, bound, [125]
In that word’s death. No words can that woe sound.
Where is my father and my mother, Nurse?

NURSE

Weeping and wailing over Tybalt’s corse.
Will you go to them? I will bring you thither.

JULIET