Scene summary
In Friar Laurence's cell, Paris talks about the Thursday wedding, and the friar says the deadline is short and recalls that Paris himself admits he does not know the young woman's mood. Paris explains that she weeps too much for Tybalt, that for this reason he has barely spoken of love, and that her father hastened the wedding to stop her tears. When Juliet arrives, Paris treats her as a wife, and she answers with phrases of double meaning: that she will be a wife when she is one, that what is to be will be, and that her face is no longer her own. Paris leaves the two alone, with a farewell kiss.
Juliet asks the friar to close the door and weep with her, without hope. The friar says he already knows the situation. Juliet replies that he should speak only if he can tell her how to avoid the marriage; otherwise the dagger she carries will decide, because God joined her heart to Romeo's and the friar joined their hands. She asks him to be brief: she wishes to die if what he says is not a remedy. The friar sees "a kind of hope": whoever has the courage to die has the courage to face something like death. Juliet replies that she would throw herself from towers, walk among serpents, hide among bones or in a fresh grave, to be Romeo's wife without stain.
The friar then lays out the plan: she must go home, consent to the marriage with Paris, stay alone the following night, and drink a potion that will stop her pulse and warmth and leave her cold and rigid for forty-two hours. When Paris comes to wake her in the morning, she will be dead, and they will carry her on a bier to the Capulet tomb. Meanwhile, the friar will inform Romeo by letter, and Romeo will be there when she wakes and will take her to Mantua. Juliet accepts, and the friar says he will send a friar to Mantua with the letters.
Analysis
Paris does not listen to Juliet: he explains to the friar that Capulet hastened the wedding to stop Juliet's weeping. She answers with phrases of double meaning and opens up only when the friar is left alone with her. The dagger comes before any advice, but the friar offers the plan only when she says she would face a tomb, serpents, and bones to be Romeo's "unstained wife." The friar tests her resolve as the condition for the remedy.
Be not so long to speak. I long to die, / If what thou speak’st speak not of remedy.
(IV.1)
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