Juliet's chamber — the Nurse brings the news

Juliet's chamber, the same afternoon. She is alone. The speech with which she opens the scene — "gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds, / towards Phoebus' lodging" — is the play's most ambitious epithalamion, sung by a thirteen-year-old calling on the sun to set so her bridegroom can come. She wants the night to "come, civil night, thou sober-suited matron." She wants Romeo. She has no idea what is happening half a mile away in the public square.

The Nurse rushes in, wringing her hands, with the rope ladder over her shoulder, wailing. He is dead, he is dead, we are undone, lady, we are undone. For the next thirty lines Juliet thinks the Nurse means Romeo. Her cries are extraordinary — "hath Romeo slain himself? Say thou but 'I,' / and that bare vowel I shall poison more / than the death-darting eye of cockatrice." The Nurse, weeping, gradually clarifies. Tybalt is dead. Romeo is banished. Romeo killed Tybalt.

Juliet's first response is fury at Romeo. She runs through a sequence of paradoxes — "O serpent heart hid with a flowering face! / Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?" — and the speech is consciously echoing the form of Romeo's earliest speeches about Rosaline. Then the speech turns. The Nurse, picking up the cue, curses Romeo: "shame come to Romeo!" Juliet stops her cold. "Blister'd be thy tongue / for such a wish! He was not born to shame... / O, what a beast was I to chide at him!" Romeo is her husband. Whatever the cost, she has chosen him over Tybalt and over her family. The Nurse, contrite, takes a ring from her and leaves to find Romeo at Friar Laurence's cell and bring him to her tonight.