Romeo and Juliet

Part 1

The book opens not with Verona but with two prefatory voices: Michael S. Hart, Project Gutenberg’s Executive Director, and David Reed, the volunteer who prepared the electronic text. Hart explains why early modern printing looks so strange — printers packed frequently used letters into “cliches,” and when they ran short, letters like u and v traded places, leaving the kind of oddities the modern reader encounters. Reed, in turn, describes how he converted the long s into a modern s, kept the original spellings and punctuation where he could, and stitched together his text from over thirty First Folio editions, since no two copies are exactly alike.

Then the play itself begins. In a public square in Verona, two Capulet servants — Sampson and Gregory — trade crude jokes about coal and collars, sharpening their courage for a fight with the Montagues. Two Montague men enter. The standoff is wordy and deliberate: Sampson bites his thumb, an old insult, and Abraham of the Montagues demands to know whether it is meant. Benvolio, a Montague kinsman, strides in and tries to make peace. He is followed immediately by Tybalt, fiery Capulet nephew, who draws his sword, hates the very word “peace,” and attacks Benvolio. The brawl swells until armed citizens club the combatants apart, shouting “Down with the Capulets, down with the Montagues.” Old Capulet rushes in brandishing a sword; his wife hands him a crutch instead. Old Montague appears across the square, and the two old enemies nearly renew their quarrel before Prince Escalus arrives with his train. The Prince is furious: three street brawls born of a single word from the two houses have already stained Verona with citizen blood. He warns that the next outbreak will be paid for with their lives, ordering Capulet to go with him and Montague to appear that afternoon for judgment.

Once the crowd disperses, Montague asks his nephew Benvolio where Romeo was this morning. Benvolio describes finding the boy alone at dawn beneath the western sycamore grove, slipping away when spotted, lost in private sorrow. Montague confirms the pattern: Romeo has been rising before sunrise to walk in tears, then shutting himself in his chamber, closing the windows, and making “an artificial night.” Benvolio vows to draw the cause out of him. Romeo enters, and his cousin greets him. The young man is heavy with unshared feeling. He admits he is in love — out of favor with the woman he loves, Rosaline, who has sworn off love entirely. Romeo spins a famous catalogue of oxymorons — “O brawling love, O loving hate,” “feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire” — and declares that love is “a smoke raised with the fume of sighs,” a maddness, “a choking gall and a preserving sweet.” He begs to be left alone, but Benvolio follows, promising to cure him by showing him other beauties at the Capulet’s feast that night.

Part 2

A servingman, sent to invite guests, cannot read his master’s list and wonders aloud why a shoemaker should meddle with his yard and a tailor with his last. Benvolio and Romeo happen by, and Romeo cheerfully reads the names aloud — including “fair Rosaline,” with whom Romeo is besotted, and “my uncle Capulet his wife and daughters.” At Benvolio’s urging, Romeo agrees to crash the party and compare Rosaline to other beauties.

Meanwhile, Capulet walks with the County Paris and discusses Juliet. She is not yet fourteen; Capulet asks Paris to wait two more summers before wooing her in earnest. But that very night Capulet is throwing his old accustomed feast, and Paris is welcome. A servant runs in announcing the guests have arrived.

In another room, Lady Capulet sends the Nurse to fetch Juliet. The Nurse rambles on, calculating Juliet’s age from an earthquake that happened when the girl was weaned, recounting how baby Juliet tasted wormwood on the nipple and how she tumbled and cut her brow. Lady Capulet cuts her off and tells Juliet about Paris’s suit. The Nurse rhapsodizes over the young count as “a man of wax,” a flower. Juliet gives her careful answer: she will look at Paris, but will look no deeper than her mother’s consent allows. Then the Nurse is called away, and Juliet, alone, faces the question of a man she has not yet seen.

A trumpet sounds. Romeo, Mercutio, Benvolio, and five or six other maskers arrive with torches. Romeo is morose, weighted with a “soul of lead,” and asks for a torch rather than a partner; he means to watch, not dance. Mercutio jests him out of it with the great Queen Mab speech: Mab is the fairies’ midwife, who drives her tiny wagon — spokes of spiders’ legs, traces of spider-web, whip of cricket’s bone — over sleeping men’s noses. She tangles horses’ manes and bakes elf-locks in foul hair, and “when maids lie on their backs, that presses them and learns them first to bear.” Romeo silences him: “Thou talk’st of nothing.” Mercutio replies that dreams are the children of an idle brain, “begot of nothing but vain fantasy.” Despite Romeo’s misgivings that “some consequence yet hanging in the stars shall bitterly begin his fearful date with this night’s revels,” they push on.

Inside, Capulet welcomes his guests with broad good cheer, calling on the ladies to dance. The maskers enter, and Romeo’s eyes find Juliet across the room. He speaks to a servingman: “What lady is that which doth enrich the hand of yonder knight?” The servant does not know. Romeo is transfixed: “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! … So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows.” He resolves to touch her hand and blessing his own rude touch.

Tybalt recognizes Romeo’s voice and flies into a rage, calling for his rapier. He sees the intrusion as a deliberate insult to the Capulet name. But old Capulet, who thinks well of the young Montague and will not have his feast bloodied, rebukes his nephew sharply: “Am I the master here, or you? … You’ll make a mutiny among my guests!” Tybalt bites back his fury — “Patience perforce, with wilful choler meeting, makes my flesh tremble” — and withdraws.