Juliet alone with the potion

Scene summary

In her room, Juliet and the Nurse choose the ornaments, and Juliet asks the Nurse to leave her alone at night, because she must pray hard for heaven to smile on her situation, which, as the Nurse knows well, is adverse and full of sin. Lady Capulet enters and asks whether she should help, and Juliet answers that they have already chosen what is needed for the next day and asks that the Nurse spend the night with her mother, who will be busy with the preparations. Her mother wishes her good night and tells her to rest.

Alone, Juliet feels a chill of fear that nearly freezes the warmth of life in her, and she almost calls back her mother and the Nurse, but gives up: the dark scene is hers, and only she should play it. She takes the vial and imagines what could go wrong. If the mixture does not work, she will have to marry the next morning, and so she sets the dagger aside. If it is poison, which the friar would have prepared to escape the dishonor of having married her to Romeo before and now marrying her to Paris, she concludes no, because he has always been held a holy man. If she wakes in the tomb before Romeo arrives, she will be suffocated by the stale air, or, if she survives, she will go mad with the horror of the night, with her ancestors' bones and Tybalt still fresh in his shroud, and may tear Tybalt from the cloth and break her head with a kinsman's bone. Then she sees Tybalt's ghost searching for Romeo, whom he ran through with a sword; she cries out for him to stop, and drinks, saying, "Romeo, Romeo, Romeo, here is the drink! I drink to you." She falls onto the bed.