Mantua, a street — the apothecary

Mantua, midmorning Thursday. Romeo enters in unusually high spirits. He has had a dream — "I dreamt my lady came and found me dead... and breathed such life with kisses in my lips, / that I revived" — and reads it as a good omen. The audience knows what kind of omen it is. Balthasar enters, dusty, at speed. Romeo's questions tumble out — how is Juliet, how does my father do, how does the Friar — and Balthasar, unable to soften it, gives the news in three lines. Juliet is dead. Her body lies in the Capulet vault. He saw the funeral that morning and rode straight on.

Romeo's reply is the play's most-quoted defiance of the prologue. "Is it e'en so? Then I defy you, stars." There is no further deliberation. He sends Balthasar to hire horses; he will ride for Verona tonight. Balthasar, frightened by his master's pale and wild looks, asks him to be patient; Romeo dismisses him. Has there been any letter from the Friar? Balthasar shakes his head. No letter. The audience now sees the broken link.

Alone, Romeo remembers an apothecary's shop he had passed earlier in the week — a poor, gaunt seller whose shop displayed a stuffed alligator and whose shelves were almost empty. He goes there and demands "a dram of poison... such soon-speeding gear / as will disperse itself through all the veins." The apothecary refuses; Mantuan law forbids it on pain of death. Romeo presses gold into his palm: "the world is not thy friend." The apothecary surrenders the poison. Romeo's parting line is to call his own gold the worse poison — committing more murders in this loathsome world than the drug. He leaves for Verona.