Romeo and Juliet: Act 3, Scene 2 – Analysis
Scene Profile – At a Glance
- Location: Capulet's orchard, on the evening of Romeo and Juliet's wedding day.
- What Happens: Juliet, not yet knowing of the fight, longs for night and her wedding night with Romeo. The Nurse arrives distraught with news of a death. Juliet first fears Romeo is dead, then learns he has killed Tybalt and been banished. Torn between her cousin and her husband, she chooses Romeo, and her grief settles on his banishment.
- Key Characters: Juliet, the Nurse.
- Dramatic Function: The scene turns the marriage joy of the wedding day straight into the consequences of the street fight – love and violence colliding inside Juliet herself.
- Famous Quote:
"Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,"
(Act 3, Scene 2) - Why It Matters: Juliet's "Gallop apace" speech is one of the play's great set-pieces, and the scene forces her to choose her husband over her own family – the choice the rest of the tragedy will test.
Scene Summary
Alone in the orchard as evening falls, Juliet waits impatiently for night to come. She does not yet know that Romeo has killed Tybalt in the street. In a long, passionate speech she begs the sun to set quickly and night to arrive, because night will bring Romeo to her arms for their wedding night.
The Nurse enters in great distress, carrying the rope ladder that Romeo had asked her to fetch. She wrings her hands and cries that "he's dead". Juliet, terrified, assumes she means Romeo, and the two women talk at cross-purposes for some time before the truth comes out: it is Tybalt who is dead, and Romeo who has killed him and been banished for it.
Juliet's first reaction is fury at Romeo – a torrent of contradictions calling him a "beautiful tyrant" and an "honourable villain". But she quickly catches herself: she will not condemn the man who is now her husband. She turns on the Nurse for wishing shame on Romeo, and reasons that if Romeo had not killed Tybalt, Tybalt would have killed Romeo.
Her grief then shifts. Tybalt's death, she decides, is bearable; the unbearable word is "banished". One word has done the work of ten thousand deaths. Learning that Romeo is hiding at the Friar's cell, she sends the Nurse to find him with a ring, longing for the wedding night that now seems lost.
An Epithalamium for Night
The scene opens with Juliet entirely happy – the only point in the act when she is. She is a new bride waiting for nightfall and the arrival of her husband, and her speech is an epithalamium, a wedding-night song, addressed to night itself. She wills the sun's horses to gallop out of the sky so darkness can come the sooner.
Original
Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phoebus' lodging: such a wagoner...
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Quick, horses at the chariot of the sun-god,
Go to the west's horizon; such a horseman...
The dramatic irony is almost unbearable. The audience has just watched Tybalt die and Romeo banished in the previous scene; Juliet, alone in the orchard, knows none of it. Every line of joyful longing is shadowed by what we know is coming. There is impatience here too – the impatience of haste that runs through the whole play – as Juliet compares herself to a child the night before a festival who has new clothes but "may not wear them". She is rushing towards a happiness that has already been taken away.
Come, Night; Come, Romeo
As the speech builds, Juliet's longing for night and her longing for Romeo fuse into a single desire. Night will hide their love-making; night will deliver her husband. The two become one cry.
Original
Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night;
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night...
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Come, night; come Romeo, bring light to darkness;
For you'll appear to me in night-time's darkness...
Romeo is "day in night" – the same light-against-darkness imagery the play attaches to the lovers from the first feast, now turned to longing. Juliet imagines him whiter than snow on a raven's back, a brightness that will outshine the dark. The speech is frankly sexual for a girl not yet fourteen, and that is the point: she is a married woman now, claiming her wedding night openly. It is the high point of the play's love before the scene drops her, and us, into its violence.
The Nurse's News and Juliet's Confusion
The Nurse arrives wringing her hands and wailing that "he's dead", and the scene becomes a study in misunderstanding. The Nurse, overwhelmed, never names who has died; Juliet, hearing only "dead", leaps to the worst – that Romeo has been killed.
Original
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars...
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And bring my Romeo; and when he's died,
Take him and cut him into little star shapes...
That image of the dead Romeo cut into stars belongs to the opening speech, before the Nurse arrives – a piece of starry beauty in what is still a love song. But it casts a long shadow over the misunderstanding that follows. As the Nurse keeps crying about a corpse and a wound, Juliet works herself into despair, certain Romeo is gone, until the Nurse's lament for "Tybalt, Tybalt, the best friend I had" finally lets Juliet grasp that the dead man is her cousin and that Romeo is the killer.
Tyrant and Villain: Juliet Divided
When the truth lands, Juliet's first response is a torrent of contradictions. The man she loves has killed her kinsman, and she cannot hold the two facts together. The result is a famous run of oxymorons, each pairing beauty with monstrousness.
Original
Beautiful tyrant! Fiend angelical!
Dove-feathered raven! Wolvish-ravening lamb!
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Beautiful tyrant! You angelic fiend!
Dove-feathered raven! A lamb that kills like wolves!
Each phrase yokes a thing of beauty to a thing of horror – saint and devil, dove and raven, lamb and wolf. The language is the same kind of paradox Romeo used when he was play-acting love over Rosaline, but here it does real psychological work: Juliet's mind is genuinely split, unable to reconcile the husband she adores with the killer she has just heard described. The "flowering face" hiding a "serpent heart" is the play's recurring fear that beauty and goodness may not match – and for one terrible moment Juliet believes it of Romeo.
"He Is My Husband"
The turn comes the instant the Nurse agrees with her. When the Nurse says there is no honesty in men and cries "Shame come to Romeo!", Juliet rounds on her at once. She will not let anyone – even herself – condemn her husband.
Original
Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?
Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name...
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Shall I malign the man who is my husband?
Ah, my poor husband, who'll speak well of you...
This is the moral centre of the scene. Faced with a choice between her blood family and her marriage, Juliet chooses Romeo without hesitation, and is ashamed she ever wavered: "O, what a beast was I to chide at him!" She reasons it through coldly – Tybalt would have killed Romeo, so Romeo's survival is a comfort, not a crime. In a play built on family loyalty, Juliet has just transferred her loyalty from the Capulets to a Montague. It is a decisive, adult act of will from a girl the play keeps reminding us is a child.
The Weight of One Word
Having defended Romeo, Juliet realises her real grief lies elsewhere. Tybalt's death she can bear; what murders her is the single word the Nurse let fall: "banished".
Original
That 'banished,' that one word 'banished,'
Hath slain ten thousand Tybalts. Tybalt's death...
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
That 'banished,' that one word 'banished,'
Hurts like ten thousand Tybalts. Tybalt's death...
Juliet turns the word over and over, testing its weight against every other loss she can imagine – father, mother, Tybalt, all of them – and finds it heavier than all. Banishment means Romeo is alive but lost to her, which is in its way crueller than death. The scene that began with her longing for her wedding night ends with her sending the Nurse to find a banished husband, her ring in hand, and reaching instead for an image of death: "death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead". The wedding night has become a kind of grave.
Language and Technique
- Epithalamium: The opening speech is a wedding-night song, a recognised poetic form, here spoken by the bride herself as she waits for her husband.
- Dramatic irony: Juliet's joy is unbearable because the audience already knows Tybalt is dead and Romeo banished – she is celebrating a marriage that has just been wrecked.
- Light and dark imagery: Juliet imagines Romeo as "day in night" and whiter than snow on a raven's back, carrying on the play's pattern of the lovers as light against darkness.
- Oxymoron: "Beautiful tyrant", "fiend angelical", "damned saint" – each phrase pairs beauty with horror, showing Juliet's mind torn in two.
- Repetition: The word "banished", repeated and weighed against every other grief, becomes the emotional climax of the scene.
Key Quotes from Act 3, Scene 2
Quote 1Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,
That runaway's eyes may wink and Romeo...
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Now lovely night, close curtains on the day,
So everybody's eyes may close and Romeo...
O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!
Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Romeo's serpent-heart's hid by his face!
Did dragons ever have a lovely cave?
Was ever book containing such vile matter
So fairly bound? O that deceit should dwell...
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Has any book with such appalling content
Been made so beautifully? Oh, such deception...
Come, cords, come, nurse; I'll to my wedding-bed;
And death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead!
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Come, ropes and nurse, come up to bed with me,
Where death will now take my virginity!
Key Takeaways
- Juliet's great speech: The scene opens with "Gallop apace", a passionate wedding-night song in which Juliet longs for night to bring Romeo to her.
- Dramatic irony: Juliet celebrates her marriage while the audience knows Romeo has just killed Tybalt and been banished.
- A mind torn in two: Learning the truth, Juliet swings from condemning Romeo as a "beautiful tyrant" to defending him as her husband.
- Loyalty chosen: Juliet picks her husband over her own family, and decides Romeo's banishment is a grief worse than Tybalt's death.
Study Questions and Analysis
What is the "Gallop apace" speech and why is it so important?
The "Gallop apace" speech is the soliloquy that opens Act 3, Scene 2. Juliet, alone in the orchard on her wedding day, begs the sun to set quickly so that night will come and bring Romeo to her for their first night together as husband and wife. It is an epithalamium – a poem celebrating a wedding night – spoken, unusually, by the bride herself, and it is one of the most rapturous love speeches in the play.
Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phoebus' lodging: such a wagoner...
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Quick, horses at the chariot of the sun-god,
Go to the west's horizon; such a horseman...
The speech matters partly for its sheer beauty and partly for its devastating placement. Caroline Spurgeon, in her landmark study Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935), traced how the play's dominant pattern of light against darkness runs through speeches exactly like this one, where Romeo is imagined as brightness coming into the dark. But the speech is also the cruellest piece of dramatic irony in the tragedy: the audience has just watched Romeo kill Tybalt and be sentenced to banishment, while Juliet, knowing nothing, sings of the happiness she is about to lose. Every joyful line is shadowed by what we know is coming, and the speech is designed to make us feel the gap between her hope and her fate.
Why does Juliet at first think Romeo is dead?
The confusion comes from the Nurse's grief. She enters the orchard so overwhelmed by what she has seen that she cannot speak clearly, crying "he's dead, he's dead, he's dead!" without ever naming who has died. Juliet, waiting for her husband and primed to think of nothing but Romeo, naturally assumes the worst – that the "he" is Romeo. The two women talk at cross-purposes for a long stretch, the Nurse lamenting a corpse and a wound, Juliet imagining her new husband killed.
The misunderstanding is more than a plot device. It lets Shakespeare show us the depth of Juliet's love before she has the full facts: faced with the bare possibility of Romeo's death, she collapses entirely, declaring she will die with him. It also tightens the screw of suspense, since the audience knows the real news is almost as bad. When the truth finally emerges – that Tybalt is dead and Romeo is his killer – Juliet is hit with a far more complicated grief than the simple loss she had been bracing for, and the scene shifts from despair into a genuine moral crisis.
What is the effect of the oxymorons Juliet uses about Romeo?
When Juliet learns that Romeo has killed Tybalt, she pours out a string of oxymorons – figures of speech that yoke opposites together – each pairing something beautiful with something monstrous.
Beautiful tyrant! Fiend angelical!
Dove-feathered raven! Wolvish-ravening lamb!
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Beautiful tyrant! You angelic fiend!
Dove-feathered raven! A lamb that kills like wolves!
The effect is to dramatise a mind that cannot hold two truths together. Romeo is beautiful and beloved; Romeo has just killed her cousin. Juliet's language fractures into contradictions because her feelings have. M. M. Mahood, in Shakespeare's Wordplay (1957), showed how the play's puns and paradoxes are not mere decoration but carry its meaning, and these oxymorons are a clear case: the form of the speech – opposites jammed violently together – is the meaning. The pairing of fair surface and foul content ("serpent heart, hid with a flowering face") also taps the play's recurring anxiety that beauty may mask evil. Crucially, the turmoil is brief. Within a few lines Juliet reverses herself entirely, which suggests these contradictions are the sound of a loyalty being tested, not abandoned.
Why does Juliet defend Romeo after he has killed her cousin?
The turning point comes when the Nurse, agreeing with Juliet's anger, cries "Shame come to Romeo!" The moment someone else attacks her husband, Juliet's instinct flips, and she rounds on the Nurse for the wish.
Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?
Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name...
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Shall I malign the man who is my husband?
Ah, my poor husband, who'll speak well of you...
Juliet's reasoning is both emotional and logical. Emotionally, she cannot bear that no one will defend Romeo, so she must; logically, she works out that if Romeo had not killed Tybalt, Tybalt would have killed Romeo – so Romeo's survival is "comfort", not crime. Coppélia Kahn, in Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (1981), reads the play as a study of how the feud forces its young people to choose between family bonds and adult selfhood, and this is the moment Juliet makes that choice: she transfers her primary loyalty from the Capulet blood-line to her marriage. It is a strikingly mature decision. The girl whom the play repeatedly reminds us is not yet fourteen weighs cousin against husband and, in a few lines, decisively chooses the husband – an act of independence that sets her against her whole family for the rest of the play.
Why is the word "banished" worse to Juliet than Tybalt's death?
Once Juliet has decided to stand by Romeo, she discovers that her real grief is not Tybalt's death at all but Romeo's banishment, and she spends the rest of the scene weighing the single word "banished" against every other loss she can imagine.
That 'banished,' that one word 'banished,'
Hath slain ten thousand Tybalts. Tybalt's death...
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
That 'banished,' that one word 'banished,'
Hurts like ten thousand Tybalts. Tybalt's death...
Her logic is that Tybalt's death is a single, finished grief, but banishment is endless: it takes Romeo from her while leaving him alive, so there is no limit to the longing it creates. She imagines the word doing the work of her father, mother, Tybalt, and Romeo all dying at once. This obsessive turning-over of one word anticipates Romeo's own reaction in the very next scene, where he too insists that "banished" is a fate worse than death – the two lovers grieve in the same idiom even when apart. It also marks how completely Juliet's priorities have realigned: her cousin's death, which should be the family's great loss, has become for her merely the lesser of two sorrows, eclipsed by the separation from her husband.
How does the scene use dramatic irony?
The whole opening of the scene runs on dramatic irony – the gap between what the audience knows and what the character on stage does not. We have just watched, in Act 3, Scene 1, Tybalt kill Mercutio, Romeo kill Tybalt, and the Prince banish Romeo. Juliet knows none of this. So when she steps into the orchard and begins one of the happiest speeches in the play, longing for the night that will bring her husband to her, every word is poisoned for the audience by knowledge she does not have.
The effect is a kind of suspended dread. We are not waiting to find out what happened – we already know – but waiting, with a wince, for Juliet to find out. Susan Snyder, in her essay 'Romeo and Juliet: Comedy into Tragedy' (1970), described how the play's first half borrows the shapes of comedy before the tragic mechanism takes over; this scene sits right on the hinge of that turn. The comic device of two characters at cross-purposes – the Nurse wailing about one death, Juliet imagining another – is played for almost unbearable tension rather than laughs. The irony makes Juliet's joy painful to watch and her grief, when it arrives, feel inevitable.
What does this scene reveal about Juliet's character and her growth?
Act 3, Scene 2 is one of the great showcases of Juliet's maturity. In a single scene she moves through rapturous desire, terror, fury, moral struggle, and settled resolve – and she comes out the other side having made a decision that defines the rest of the play. The girl who at the feast was quick-witted and a little melodramatic here proves capable of weighing the deepest loyalties against each other and choosing, clear-eyed, where she stands.
Harley Granville-Barker, in his Prefaces to Shakespeare (1930), admired how Shakespeare gives Juliet a steadiness and a growing seriousness that outpaces Romeo's, and this scene is strong evidence. Where Romeo, in the next scene, collapses on the Friar's floor and has to be lectured into composure, Juliet reasons her own way through her crisis. She condemns Romeo, corrects herself, defends him, and then sets her grief in order, deciding what she can bear and what she cannot. Harold Bloom, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), went so far as to call Juliet the play's most impressive consciousness, more grown-up than any adult around her. The scene shows exactly why: faced with the worst news of her young life, she does not break but chooses, and the choice – husband over family – commits her to the tragic course the rest of the play will follow.
