Scene III

Ay, those attires are best: but, gentle nurse,I pray thee, leave me to myself to-night;For I have need of many orisonsTo move the heavens to smile upon my state,Which, well thou know’st, is cross and full of sin.

No, madam; we have cull’d such necessariesAs are behoveful for our state to-morrow:So please you, let me now be left alone,And let the nurse this night sit up with you;For, I am sure, you have your hands full all,In this so sudden business.

Good night:Get thee to bed, and rest; for thou hast need. Exeunt Lady Capulet and Nurse.

Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again.I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins,That almost freezes up the heat of life:I’ll call them back again to comfort me:Nurse! What should she do here?My dismal scene I needs must act alone.Come, vial.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 her dagger.What if it be a poison, which the friarSubtly 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,For he hath still been tried a holy man.How if, when I am laid into the tomb,I wake before the time that RomeoCome 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,The horrible conceit of death and night,Together with the terror of the place—As in a vault, an ancient receptacle,Where, for these many hundred years, the bonesOf all my buried ancestors are pack’d:Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say,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,That living mortals, hearing them, run mad:—O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught,Environed with all these hideous fears?And madly play with my forefather’s joints?And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud?And, in this rage, with some great kinsman’s bone,As with a club, dash out my desperate brains?O, look! methinks I see my cousin’s ghostSeeking out Romeo, that did spit his bodyUpon a rapier’s point: stay, Tybalt, stay!Romeo, I come! this do I drink to thee. She falls upon her bed, within the curtains.