Juliet's chamber — the discovery

Juliet's chamber. The Nurse arrives, candle in hand, and crosses to the bed. She calls cheerfully — "mistress! What, mistress! Juliet! Fast, I warrant her, she" — pulls back the curtain, and stops. Juliet lies cold and pale. The Nurse cries out. The cry brings Lady Capulet, then Capulet, both half-dressed and expecting only that the bride is slow. They find a body. Lady Capulet's lament is short and broken — "O me, O me! my child, my only life" — and Capulet's, longer, runs the same image: "death lies on her like an untimely frost / upon the sweetest flower of all the field."

Music is heard outside; Paris is arriving with Friar Laurence and the wedding musicians. They walk into a household in collapse. Paris's lament — "beguiled, divorced, wronged, spited, slain" — is conventional and rhetorical; the audience has no way to know whether to take it as grief or as performance. The Nurse and the parents take turns at their own. The play allows the formality of the language to do its job: the audience knows Juliet is alive; the laments register as sincere on the family's side and as cruelly ironic on the audience's.

Friar Laurence, the only person on stage who knows the truth, intervenes briskly. The will of heaven is not to be questioned; "the most you sought was her promotion"; she is now in heaven. He directs the household: the rosemary meant for the wedding may now lie on her in the vault; the wedding music must turn to "sullen dirges"; the bridal flowers will serve at the funeral. The body is to be carried to the family monument on the open bier, in her best clothes, before the day is out. The household, dazed, agrees. The Friar, alone, exits to write the letter to Romeo.