A room in Capulet's house — the marriage proposal

A room in Capulet's house, evening. Lady Capulet calls for Juliet and asks the Nurse to stay. She begins by asking how Juliet feels about marriage. Juliet answers carefully: it is "an honour that I dream not of." The Nurse interrupts. She remembers weaning Juliet by putting wormwood on her breast and Juliet making a face and toddling off. The earthquake was eleven years ago this Lammas-eve. Juliet fell on her face. The Nurse's husband, since dead, joked that the child would fall backwards when she had more wit, and the Nurse has been telling the story ever since.

Lady Capulet hears the monologue out and steers her back. Marriage. Juliet is not yet fourteen, an age at which other young women of Verona are already mothers. The valiant Paris seeks her love; she will see him at the feast tonight. Lady Capulet describes him in formal couplets — "read o'er the volume of young Paris' face" — and asks how she feels. Juliet answers with grave precision: "I'll look to like, if looking liking move; / but no more deep will I endart mine eye / than your consent gives strength to make it fly."

The answer is the play's first hint that Juliet is the careful one. She will not commit a feeling she has not yet felt. She has agreed to look, and to like only as far as her mother's consent allows. It is exactly the contract she will break, in less than three hours, with a stranger across the dance floor. A servant rushes in: the guests are arriving, the Nurse is wanted, the supper is on the table. They go to the feast. The play has now placed its protagonists — Romeo with Benvolio, Paris with the Capulets, Juliet at her mother's elbow — within fifty yards of one another for the first time.