Romeo and Juliet: Act 1, Scene 3 – Analysis
Scene Profile – At a Glance
- Location: A room in the Capulet house.
- What Happens: Lady Capulet, helped by the talkative Nurse, tells Juliet that Count Paris wishes to marry her and asks her to study him at that night's feast. Juliet agrees only to look.
- Key Characters: Lady Capulet, the Nurse, Juliet, and (discussed) Paris.
- Dramatic Function: Introduces Juliet at home, sets the Paris marriage in motion, and contrasts the worldly women around her with her own innocence – all before she meets Romeo.
- Famous Quote:
"I'll look to like, if looking liking move..."
(Act 1, Scene 3) - Why It Matters: It shows Juliet as an obedient daughter on the edge of an arranged marriage, setting up the collision between her family's plans for Paris and the love she is about to feel for Romeo.
Scene Summary
In a room in the Capulet house, Lady Capulet calls for her daughter, Juliet, wanting to speak with her. She is accompanied by the Nurse, the servant who raised Juliet from a baby.
When Lady Capulet tries to begin, the Nurse launches into a long, rambling, affectionate memory about Juliet's early childhood, fixing her age at not quite fourteen. Eventually quietened, Lady Capulet comes to the point: Count Paris has asked to marry Juliet, and she wants Juliet to look at him favourably at the feast being held that night.
Lady Capulet praises Paris in an elaborate speech, and the Nurse adds her own bawdy encouragement. Asked whether she could love him, Juliet answers carefully: she will try to like him, but no more than her parents allow.
A servant arrives to announce that the feast has begun and the guests are waiting. The women hurry off to join them.
The Nurse's Memory and Juliet's Age
The scene opens with three women: Lady Capulet, her daughter Juliet, and the Nurse who raised her. When Lady Capulet tries to raise the serious business of marriage, the Nurse hijacks the conversation with a long, rambling reminiscence that establishes, almost by accident, exactly how old Juliet is.
Original
Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The eve of August 1st, at night she’s fourteen.
Juliet is not yet fourteen. The Nurse fixes the date precisely – Lammas Eve, the night before the first of August – and then wanders off into a comic, affectionate memory: weaning the baby Juliet, an earthquake eleven years past, and a bawdy joke her late husband once made about the toddler falling on her back. The speech is one of Shakespeare's great character sketches, garrulous and earthy and warm; the Nurse remembers Juliet's body and infancy in vivid physical detail while her mother stands by, impatient and knowing none of it. It also slips in a quietly sad detail – the Nurse once had a daughter of her own, Susan, now dead – which helps explain why she has poured all her love into Juliet.
Lady Capulet and the Book of Love
With the Nurse finally quietened, Lady Capulet states her purpose: Count Paris has asked to marry Juliet, and she wants Juliet to study him at the feast that evening. She makes her case in an elaborate, formal conceit, comparing Paris to a beautiful book that lacks only one thing.
Original
This precious book of love, this unbound lover,
To beautify him, only lacks a cover...
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
This man is like a book without a cover;
To make him beautiful, he needs a lover...
The metaphor is revealing. Paris is a "precious book of love", handsome and well made, who lacks only a "cover" – a wife – to complete him; Juliet, the conceit implies, would be that cover. It is a strikingly cool way to describe a marriage, appraising Paris like an object and casting Juliet as his finishing touch. The whole speech is performance, all polish and no feeling, and it could hardly be further from the urgent, personal language Juliet will find with Romeo within hours. For Lady Capulet, marriage is a matter of good matches and fine surfaces.
Juliet's Careful Answer
Pressed directly – can she love Paris? – Juliet gives an answer that is a small masterpiece of obedience and reserve. She will try to like him, she says, but no further than her mother's permission requires.
Original
I'll look to like, if looking liking move:
But no more deep will I endart mine eye
Than your consent gives strength to make it fly.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ll strive to like him if he looks appealing:
But I won’t let my eyes be over-tempted
Than your permission grants that I’m exempted.
It is the reply of a dutiful daughter, and on the surface it gives her mother everything she asks. But listen closely and it concedes almost nothing. Juliet promises only to "look to like" – to attempt liking – and ties even that carefully to her parents' consent, as if measuring out exactly as much feeling as is required and no more. This is the obedient Juliet her family expects, and it makes the transformation of the next scene all the more startling. The girl who here rations her glances "no more deep" than permission allows will, at the feast, fall headlong in love at first sight.
Language and Technique
- Verse and the Nurse: Even the Nurse speaks in verse here, but her repetitive, circling style – returning again and again to the same joke – makes the verse sound like real, runaway speech.
- Extended metaphor (conceit): Lady Capulet's "book of love" speech compares Paris to a book that needs a cover, a sustained, decorative image that treats marriage as the matching of fine objects.
- Bawdy humour: The Nurse's memories and jokes keep returning to the body and to sex, grounding the play's lofty romance in something earthy and physical.
- Dramatic irony: The audience knows Juliet will meet Romeo within hours, so her cool promise to "look to like" Paris is quietly charged.
- Foil and contrast: The warm, talkative Nurse and the cold, formal Lady Capulet are set side by side as two opposite models of motherhood.
Key Quotes from Act 1, Scene 3
Quote 1The valiant Paris seeks you for his love.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The brave Count Paris wants to marry you.
No less! Nay, bigger; women grow by men.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
At least! No, bigger, for he’ll make you pregnant.
Well, think of marriage now; younger than you,
Here in Verona, ladies of esteem...
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
It’s time to think of marriage; there are younger
Verona ladies than you, well respected...
Go, girl, seek happy nights to happy days.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Go, girl; seek happy times to bring you cheer.
Key Takeaways
- Juliet at home: We meet Juliet for the first time – an obedient daughter, not yet fourteen, surrounded by the women who manage her life.
- The Paris match: Lady Capulet sets the marriage to Paris in motion, asking Juliet to consider him at the feast that night.
- Two kinds of mother: The bawdy, loving Nurse and the cool, formal Lady Capulet are sharply contrasted throughout the scene.
- Obedient, for now: Juliet promises only to "look to like" Paris – measured and dutiful, and about to be overturned by Romeo.
Study Questions and Analysis
What is the dramatic purpose of the Nurse's long, rambling speech?
On the page it can look like a digression, but the Nurse's speech is doing several jobs at once. Most practically, it fixes Juliet's age: she is not quite fourteen, a fact the whole tragedy depends on. It does so not through a flat statement but through a tangle of memory – the weaning, an earthquake eleven years before, her husband's joke – so that the information arrives wrapped in character.
And character is the speech's real work. In a few dozen lines the Nurse becomes one of Shakespeare's most vivid comic creations: warm, garrulous, physical, unable to stay on topic, and devoted to Juliet in a way her mother plainly is not. The buried detail that the Nurse's own daughter, Susan, died young explains the depth of that devotion – Juliet is, in effect, the child she has left. The comedy also sets the tone the first half of the play keeps returning to before the tragedy closes in.
How does Shakespeare present Lady Capulet as a mother?
Lady Capulet is distant, formal, and faintly uncomfortable with her own daughter. She has to call the Nurse back into the room to help her broach the subject of marriage, and she speaks of Juliet's prospects in polished, impersonal verse rather than warmth. Tellingly, she reminds Juliet that she became a mother at about the same age Juliet is now.
I was your mother much upon these years...
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I was your mother just about the same age...
The line hints at a life in which she, too, was married young to an older man, and it helps explain her brisk, businesslike approach: this is simply how things are done. Beside the Nurse's earthy affection, Lady Capulet's coolness stands out sharply, and the contrast prepares us for the later scenes in which she fails to protect Juliet from her husband's fury over the very marriage she sets in motion here.
What does the "book of love" speech reveal about how the Capulets see marriage?
Lady Capulet praises Paris through an extended metaphor: he is a fine "book" that needs only a "cover" to complete him, and Juliet is to be that cover. The conceit is clever and decorative, full of talk of margins, bindings and golden clasps, but it is striking for what it leaves out – any sense of Juliet's feelings, or of love as anything more than a good arrangement.
The speech treats marriage as the matching of attractive surfaces and the joining of two estates. Paris is appraised like a valuable object; Juliet's task is to admire the object and accept it. It is courtship conducted entirely from the outside, and Shakespeare sets it up deliberately so that the inside-out, mutual, headlong love Juliet finds with Romeo will feel like its complete opposite. The Nurse's blunt interruption – that marriage will soon make Juliet pregnant – punctures the elegance and reminds us what these polished negotiations are finally about.
What is Juliet's attitude to marriage in this scene?
Juliet is dutiful and guarded. When her mother first raises marriage, she answers that it is something she has not even thought about.
It is an honour that I dream not of.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
It is an honour I don’t think about.
Asked directly whether she can love Paris, she promises only to "look to like" him, and no more deeply than her parents permit. It is a careful, obedient answer that gives her mother the form of agreement while withholding any real feeling. The point is how completely this measured, dependent Juliet will be transformed within hours. At the feast she will not wait for permission to fall in love, and within a day she will marry in secret against her parents' wishes. The contrast between the obedient daughter here and the decisive young woman of the later acts is one of the play's most important developments, and it begins from this deliberately restrained starting point.
How does the scene present women's roles and gender in Verona?
The scene is unusual in being given over almost entirely to women – mother, daughter and nurse – yet the subject they discuss shows how little power any of them holds over the central decision. Juliet's marriage is being arranged for her; her own preference is reduced to whether she can learn to "like" the man already chosen. Marriage is presented as a transaction between households, with the daughter as the asset transferred.
Coppélia Kahn, in Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (1981), argued that Verona is governed by a patriarchal code in which daughters belong to their fathers' households and are exchanged to cement alliances. Read in that light, the women of this scene are all working, knowingly or not, to deliver Juliet into that system: Lady Capulet brokers the match, and even the loving Nurse measures Juliet's worth in terms of the husband and children to come. The play will test that order to destruction, but here it is simply the water everyone swims in, which belongs to the wider theme of gender and society.
How old is Juliet, and why does her age matter?
The scene establishes that Juliet is not yet fourteen – she will turn fourteen on Lammas Eve, at the end of July. Shakespeare is unusually specific about it, and the choice is deliberate. In his main source, Arthur Brooke's poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), Juliet is sixteen; Shakespeare lowered her age, and even in his own period, when noble marriages could be arranged early, most women in fact married in their twenties.
As editors such as Jill Levenson note in the Oxford Shakespeare edition (2000), making Juliet so young sharpens several of the play's effects at once. It heightens the sense of a child being hurried into an adult world of marriage contracts; it makes her courage and decisiveness in the later acts all the more remarkable; and it intensifies the tragedy of her death. Her extreme youth keeps the theme of youth and age constantly before us, and it makes the adults' haste to marry her off feel all the more dangerous.
Why does Shakespeare give the Nurse such bawdy humour in a love tragedy?
The Nurse's jokes keep dragging the conversation back to the body: her husband's joke about the toddler one day "falling backward" for a man, her cheerful observation that "women grow by men". In a play that will rise to some of the most idealised love-poetry in English, this earthiness is not an accident but a deliberate counterweight.
The bawdy humour grounds the romance. The Nurse, like Mercutio in the scenes among the young men, represents a frankly physical view of love – sex, marriage, childbirth – against which the lovers' transcendent feeling is measured. The contrast cuts both ways: it can make the lovers' idealism look naive, or it can make it look all the more pure for rising above the Nurse's practical world. It also continues the pattern set by the servants in the opening scene, where talk of love slides constantly towards talk of conquest and the body, tying the scene into the play's wider treatment of love as something both exalted and physical.
