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ROMEO AND JULIET
[ACT III.
Fri. | Romeo, come forth; come forth, thou fearful[E 2] man: Affliction is enamour'd of thy parts,[E 3] And thou art wedded to calamity. |
Enter Romeo.[C 3]
Rom. | Father, what news? what is the prince's doom? What sorrow craves acquaintance at my hand,5 That I yet know not? |
Fri. | That I yet know not? Too familiar Is my dear son with such sour company: I bring thee tidings of the prince's doom. |
Rom. | What less than dooms-day is the prince's doom? |
Fri. | A gentler judgment vanish'd[E 4] from his lips,10 Not body's death, but body's banishment. |
Rom. | Ha, banishment! be merciful, say "death"; For exile hath more terror in his look, Much more than death:[C 4] do not say "banishment." |
- ↑ Enter …] Friar Laurence has come from without; Romeo is hidden within; hence the directions of Q 1 seem right.
- ↑ 1. fearful] full of fear, as often in Shakespeare.
- ↑ 2. parts] gifts, endowments, as in III. v. 182.
- ↑ 10. vanish'd] No such use of vanish is found elsewhere in Shakespeare, for breath vanishing from the lips like smoke (in Lucrece, line 1041) is not a parallel. Massinger, however, in The Renegado, V. iii., has: "Upon those lips from which those sweet words vanish'd," which Keightley supposes was written on the authority of the present passage. Heath conjectured issued. I suspect that banishment in the next line misled the printer; but possibly (and it is strange that this has not been suggested) Shakespeare wrote:
"A gentler judgment—'banish'd'—from his lips."