This weekend, please read Act III, scene ii, and then analyze Juliet’s transformation in the section of the text I have copied below. Explain how Juliet changes over the course of this section of the text, provide specific textual evidence of that transformation, and — here’s the tricky part!– make sure you show how that text really demonstrates the change.
As always, please follow the rules of standard written English and respond to at least one other comment in this thread.
JULIET
O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!
Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feather’d raven! wolvish-ravening lamb!
Despised substance of divinest show!
Just opposite to what thou justly seem’st,
A damned saint, an honourable villain!
O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell,
When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend
In moral paradise of such sweet flesh?
Was ever book containing such vile matter
So fairly bound? O that deceit should dwell
In such a gorgeous palace!
Nurse
There’s no trust,
No faith, no honesty in men; all perjured,
All forsworn, all naught, all dissemblers.
Ah, where’s my man? give me some aqua vitae:
These griefs, these woes, these sorrows make me old.
Shame come to Romeo!
JULIET
Blister’d be thy tongue
For such a wish! he was not born to shame:
Upon his brow shame is ashamed to sit;
For ’tis a throne where honour may be crown’d
Sole monarch of the universal earth.
O, what a beast was I to chide at him!
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?
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;
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,
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:
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 lamentations might have moved?
But with a rear-ward 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,
In that word’s death; no words can that woe sound.
R&J blog #12
