The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (Dowden)/Act 2/Scene 1

by William Shakespeare

SCENE I.—Verona. A lane^{[C 1][E 1]} by the wall of Capulet's orchard.

Enter Romeo.

Rom.	Can I go forward when my heart is here? Turn back, dull earth,[E 2] and find thy centre out.

[He climbs^{[C 2]} the wall, and leaps down within it.

Enter Benvolio and Mercutio.

Ben.	Romeo! my cousin Romeo! Romeo![C 3]

Mer.	He is wise; And, on my life, hath stol'n him home to bed.

Ben.	He ran this way, and leap'd this orchard wall: 5 Call, good Mercutio.

Mer.

Nay,[C 4] I'll conjure[E 3] too.— Romeo![C 5] humours! madman! passion! lover![C 6][E 4] Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh: Speak but one rhyme and I am satisfied; Cry[C 7] but "Ay me!"[E 5] pronounce[C 8][E 6] but "love" and "dove"[C 9];10 Speak to my gossip Venus one fair word, One nickname for her purblind son and heir[C 10], Young Adam Cupid,[C 11][E 7] he that shot so trim[C 12][E 8] When King Cophetua loved the beggar-maid.— He heareth not, he stirreth[E 9] not, he moveth not; 15 The ape is dead, and[C 13] I must conjure him.— I conjure thee by Rosaline's bright eyes, By her high forehead, and her scarlet lip, By her fine foot, straight leg, and quivering thigh, And the demesnes that there adjacent lie, 20 That in thy likeness thou appear to us!

Ben.	An[C 14] if he hear thee, thou wilt anger him.

Mer.

This cannot anger him: 'twould anger him To raise a spirit in his mistress' circle Of some strange nature, letting it there[C 15] stand 25 Till she had laid it, and conjured it down; That were some spite: my invocation Is fair and honest, and[C 16] in his mistress' name I conjure only but to raise up him.

Ben.	Come, he hath hid himself among these[C 17] trees, 30 To be consorted with the humorous[E 10] night: Blind is his love and best befits the dark.

Mer.

If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark. Now will he sit under a medlar-tree, And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit 35 As maids call medlars[E 11] when they laugh alone. O, Romeo, that she were, O, that she were An open et cetera,[C 18][E 12] thou a poperin[E 13] pear! Romeo, good night: I'll to my truckle-bed;[E 14] This field-bed[E 15] is too cold for me to sleep: 40 Come, shall we go?

Ben.	Come, shall we go? Go, then; for 'tis in vain To seek him here that means not to be found.[Exeunt.

Critical notes

1. A lane …] Camb. editors.
2. 2. He climbs …] Steevens.
3. 3. Romeo! Romeo!] Q, F; Romeo Q 1.
4. 6. Nay … too] given to Mercutio Q 1, Qq 4, 5; continued to Benvolio Q, Q 3, Ff.
5. 7. Romeo] Qq 4, 5; Mer. Romeo Q, Q 3, Ff
6. passion! lover!] passion lover Q (commas in F).
7. 10. Cry] Q, Cry me F
8. pronounce] Q 1, Qq 4, 5; provaunt Q; provant F
9. dove] Q 1; day Q, F; die Qq 4, 5.
10. 12. heir] Q1, Qq 4, 5; her Q, F.
11. 13. Adam Cupid] Steevens (Upton conj.); Abraham: Cupid Q1, Qq 2, 3; Abraham Cupid Qq 4, 5 Ff;
12. trim] Q1; true Q, F.
13. 16. and] Q, omitted F.
14. 22. An] Theobald; And Q, F.
15. 25. there] Q, omitted F.
16. 28. and in] F, in Q.
17. 30. these] Q, F; those Q1.
18. 38. open et cetera, thou] Q1, Malone; open, or thou Q, F.

Explanatory notes

1. A lane …] Perhaps some stage furniture representing a wall was introduced, which, as Daniel suggests, may have been withdrawn, when Mercutio and Benvolio depart.
2. 2. earth] body. So Sonnets, cxlvi., "Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth." Ff 2–4 read my centre.
3. 6. conjure] Accented on first syllable as here in Midsummer-Night's Dream, III. ii. 158.
4. 7.] Singer (ed. 2) reads Humour's-madman! Passion-lover; Daniel humorous madman! passionate lover!
5. 10. Ay me] as in Spenser, Virgil's Gnat, 353, "Ay me, that thankes so much should faile of meed." Corrupted in F 2 to ayme. Theobald and others Ah me!
6. 10. pronounce] F 2 alters the provant of F to couply, whence Rowe's couple, adopted by many editors.
7. 13. Adam Cupid] Upton's conjecture Adam (easily misread Abram) is generally accepted, the allusion being to the great archer, Adam Bell, famous in ballad poetry. Compare Much Ado, I. i. 260: "shoot at me; and he that hits me let him be clapped on the shoulder, and called Adam." The Abraham of Q1, Qq, Ff may be right. If the source of Cophetua ballad were found, which may lurk in some old book on Africa, a bowman named Abraham might be discovered. An Ethiopian king (448–470) was so named. If "young Abraham" is named after the patriarch, the nickname must mean "father of many nations" (Genesis xvii. 5), not wholly inappropriate to Cupid. Knight supposed that cheat was meant, the allusion being to the Abraham-men of Elizabethan days—vagabonds, bare-armed and bare-legged, pretending madness. In S. Rowlands' Martin Mark-all (about 1609), he gives Abram as a slang word meaning mad. In Street Robberies consider'd (about 1700) Abram is given as a cant word for naked, which would suit Cupid well, but, though clearly a relic of the Abraham-men, I have found no earlier example in this sense. Again, as Theobald observed, abraham and abram are old spellings of auburn (e.g. Coriolanus, II. iii. 21, F text); many examples might be cited. Italian poets name Cupid "Il biondo Dio," and W. Thomas, Principal Rules of the Italian Grammer, 1567, explains biondo, as "the aberne (auburn) colour, that is betwene white and yelow." White reads "auburn" here. Finally, the nickname may be an allusion to some forgotten Elizabethan contemporary, whose name (such, for example, as S[ir] Abra[ham] Bowerman, who wrote verses in the British Museum copy of Nash's Jack Wilton) or whose fame in archery invited a jest.
8. 13. trim] The trim of Q1 preserves a word of the ballad "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid," given in Percy's Reliques: "The blinded boy that shoots so trim." In Love's Labour's Lost, I. ii. 117, the ballad is spoken of as written "some three ages since."
9. 15. stirreth] Q 3 (alone) reads striveth.
10. 31. Humorous] humid. Chapman and Drayton are cited by Steevens as so describing night.
11. 36. medlars] See Halliwell's Dict. of Archaic … Words, p. 589, for the suppressed name.
12. 38. et cetera] Used, as here (a substitute for a suppressed unbecoming word), in Cotgrave, under Bergamasque. Ovid frequently uses cetera in a euphemistic way. See Pilgrimage to Parnassus (ed. Macray), opening lines of Act IV. (p. 13).
13. 38. poperin] Named from Poperingue, a town two leagues distant from Ypres; chosen here for the sake of a quibble. See Cyril Tourneur, The Atheist's Tragedie (ed. Collins, vol. i. pp. 97–99), for conceits on medlars and the poperin pear-tree.
14. 39. truckle-bed] a small bed made to run under a larger.
15. 40. field-bed] a camp-bed, or a bed upon the ground, here used with a play on field. In Brooke's Romeus and Juliet (1562) the Nurse plays on the sense camp-bed: line 897, "Loe here a fielde (she shewd a fieldbed ready dight), etc." This is an example earlier than any recorded in New Eng. Dict. Certain coarse words are called "field-bed words" by Massinger, Old Law, IV. ii. (meaning speech of the camp?).