My dismal scene I needs must act alone.
Come, vial. 20
What if this mixture do not work at all?
Shall I be married then to-morrow morning?
No, no; this shall forbid it: lie thou there.
[Laying down a dagger.]
What if it be a poison, which the friar 24
Subtly hath minister'd to have me dead,
Lest in this marriage he should be dishonour'd
Because he married me before to Romeo?
I fear it is: and yet, methinks, it should not, 28
For he hath still been tried a holy man.
I will not entertain so bad a thought.
How if, when I am laid into the tomb,
I wake before the time that Romeo 32
Come to redeem me? there's a fearful point!
Shall I not then be stifled in the vault,
To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in,
And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes?
Or, if I live, is it not very like, 37
The horrible conceit of death and night,
Together with the terror of the place,—
As in a vault, an ancient receptacle, 40
Where, for these many hundred years, the bones
Of all my buried ancestors are pack'd;
Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,
Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say, 44
At some hours in the night spirits resort;—
Alack, alack! is it not like that I,
So early waking, what with loathsome smells,
And shrieks like mandrakes' torn out of the earth, 48
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad:
25 minister'd: supplied
29 tried: proved
30 Cf. n.
33 redeem: save
40 As: namely
43 green in earth: freshly buried
48 mandrakes'; cf. n.
