Juliet
Play
Summary
Thirteen years old, a Capulet, who meets Romeo at her father's feast and enters immediately into the most absolute love in Shakespeare. Where Romeo comes to love through extravagant poetry, Juliet is from the start more direct, more practical, and in many ways more clear-sighted — she worries the love is "too rash, too sudden, too like the lightning" even as she gives herself to it entirely. Her courage in taking Friar Lawrence's potion alone, her waking to find Romeo dead, and her instantaneous suicide make her the tragedy's moral center.
Notable Quotations
"O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? / Deny thy father and refuse thy name." *(II.ii)*
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet." *(II.ii)*
"My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep; the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite." *(II.ii)*
"Yea, noise? Then I'll be brief. O happy dagger, / This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die." *(V.iii)*
Cross-references
- Romeo and Juliet — the play
- Tragedies
- character_romeo — her beloved
- character_nurse — her confidante who ultimately fails her
- character_friar_lawrence — who devises the sleeping-potion plan
- character_capulet — her domineering father
- character_lady_capulet — her cold, status-conscious mother