Romeo buys poison in Mantua

Scene summary

In Mantua, Romeo wakes from a dream in which his love found him dead and brought him back to life with kisses, until he became an emperor, and feels a joy he takes as a good omen. His servant Balthasar arrives from Verona. Romeo asks whether he brings letters from the friar, and about Juliet and her father, saying nothing can be wrong if she is well. Balthasar replies that she is well, because her body sleeps in the Capulet tomb and her immortal part lives with the angels; he saw her laid there and ran to tell, asking pardon for bringing bad news. Romeo says, "Then I defy you, stars!" and orders Balthasar to bring ink, paper, and post horses, because he will return to Verona that night. Balthasar, who finds him pale and distraught, asks for patience. Romeo asks again for letters from the friar and hears that there are none.

Alone, Romeo says that tonight he will lie beside Juliet in the tomb, and that the thought of disaster quickly enters the minds of the desperate. He recalls an apothecary he saw nearby, in ragged clothes and with a thin look, and a wretched shop of empty boxes, pots, and old seeds. He thinks that if someone needed poison, whose sale is punished in Mantua by death, a wretch who would sell it would live there. He knocks on the apothecary's door, gives him forty ducats, and asks for a dose of quick poison. The apothecary says he has such drugs, but that Mantua's law gives death to anyone who sells them. Romeo replies that hunger and misery are written on his face, that the world and the world's law do not help him grow rich, and that he should break the law and accept the money. The apothecary yields: he says his poverty consents, not his will, and explains that it is enough to put the powder in a liquid. Romeo gives him the gold, which he calls a worse poison for souls, and says that it was he who sold the poison, not the apothecary. He takes the drug as a cordial, not as poison, to Juliet's tomb.