A churchyard; the Capulet vault — the end

Late Thursday night, the churchyard outside the Capulet vault. Paris arrives first with his page, carrying flowers and a torch — "sweet flower, with flowers thy bridal bed I strew." The page hears footsteps and whistles; Paris hides. Romeo enters with Balthasar, carrying a crowbar. He sends Balthasar away and begins to break open the vault. Paris takes him for a vandal and challenges him. They fight. Paris falls; with his last breath he asks to be laid beside Juliet. Romeo, only now, recognizes the face and lifts the body in. He has killed three men in five days.

Inside the vault he lays Paris beside Juliet and turns to her. He marks Tybalt's body across the vault and asks his forgiveness. He marks Juliet's beauty — pale but fresh, untouched — and reads it, mistakenly, as the beauty of the recently dead. The audience reads it as the beauty of the alive. "O my love, my wife! / Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath, / hath had no power yet upon thy beauty." He kisses her, drinks the apothecary's vial, kisses her again. "Thus with a kiss I die."

Friar Laurence arrives too late. Juliet wakes. The watch is heard; he tries to lead her to a sisterhood; he flees. Juliet, alone, sees Romeo dead: "what's here? A cup, closed in my true love's hand?" She kisses him for any poison on his lips. Then she finds his dagger — "O happy dagger, this is thy sheath" — and uses it. By morning the Prince has gathered the houses. The Friar confesses the secret marriage. Verdict: "all are punish'd." Capulet and Montague take each other's hands across their children's bodies. The feud is over. The play's last couplet: "for never was a story of more woe / than this of Juliet and her Romeo."