*†Enter two Serving-Men of the Capulets
52 Capulet Serving-Man Ever while you live, draw your neck out of the collar*.
1 Capulet Serving-Man I strike quickly being moved.
101 Capulet Serving-Man A dog of the house of the Montagues* moves me.
2 Capulet Serving-Man To move is to stir, and to be valiant is to stand to it*. Therefore, of my word*, if thou be moved thou’t run away.
151 Capulet Serving-Man †There’s not a man of them I meet but I’ll take the wall of.
2 Capulet Serving-Man That shows thee a weakling*, for the weakest goes to the wall.
1 Capulet Serving-Man That’s true. Therefore I’ll thrust* the 20†men from the wall, and thrust the maids* to the walls. Nay, thou †shalt see I am a tall* piece of flesh.
2 Capulet Serving-Man ’Tis well thou art not fish, for if thou wert thou wouldst be but poor John.
1 Capulet Serving-Man I’ll play the tyrant: I’ll first begin with 25the maids, and off with their heads.
2 Capulet Serving-Man The heads of the maids?
1 Capulet Serving-Man Ay, the heads of their* maids†, or the maidenheads, take it in what sense thou wilt.
2 Capulet Serving-Man Nay, let them take it in sense that feel it. 30But here comes two* of the Montagues.
*Enter two Serving-Men of the Montagues
1 Capulet Serving-Man Nay, fear not me, I warrant thee.
2 Capulet Serving-Man I fear them no more than thee†, but draw.
1 Capulet Serving-Man Nay, let us have* the law on our side, let †them begin first. I’ll tell thee what I’ll do: as I go by I’ll bite my 35thumb* which is disgrace enough if they suffer it.
2 Capulet Serving-Man Content! Go thou by and bite thy thumb, and I’ll come after and frown.
1 Capulet Serving-Man I bite my thumb.
1 Capulet Serving-Man I bite my thumb. *[To 2 Capulet Serving-man] Is the law on our side?
2 Capulet Serving-Man No.
1 Capulet Serving-Man *[To the Montague Serving-men] I bite 45my thumb.
1 Montague Serving-Man †Ay, but is’t at us?
*Enter Benvolio
2 Capulet Serving-Man Say ‘Ay’, here comes my* master’s kinsman.
†They draw, to them enters Tybalt, they fight, to them the Prince, old Montague and his Wife, old Capulet and his Wife, and other citizens and part them
Prince
*Exeunt [all but Montague, his Wife, and Benvolio]
*Montague’s Wife
*Montague’s Wife
Benvolio
Benvolio
*Enter Romeo
Montague
Benvolio
Montague
*[Exeunt Montague and his Wife]
Benvolio
Romeo Is the day so young?
Benvolio
romeo Ay me, sad hopes* seem long.
Benvolio
Romeo
Benvolio
Romeo
Romeo
Benvolio
Romeo
Benvolio No coz, I rather weep.
Romeo
Benvolio At thy good heart’s oppression.
Romeo
Benvolio
Romeo
Romeo
Romeo
*Exeu[nt].
Textual variants
0 SD ] Levenson; Enter 2. Seruing-men of the Capolets. Q1; Enter Sampson and Gregorie, with Swords and Bucklers, of the house of Capulet. Q2
8 Ay] Q1 (I)
40 Ay] Q1 (I)
61 Freetown] Q1 (Free Towne)
93 love?] Q1 (loue.)
95 love?] Q1 (loue.)
Explanatory notes
Act 1, Scene 1 in the NCS edition.
Much of this scene corresponds closely to the equivalent scene in Q2. Larger cuts occur as the brawl gets out of hand, in the Prince’s speech calling his subjects to order, in Benvolio’s account of the brawl, in Montague’s description of his son’s love-sickness, and in the dialogue between Romeo and Benvolio. While these cuts total some seventy-five lines, other local omissions amount to less than ten.
0 SD Q1’s stage directions and speech headings do not specify the Serving-men’s names (‘Sampson’, ‘Gregorie’, and ‘Abram’ in Q2), though Gregory is named in the dialogue. Later in the play, the Prince is called ‘Escalus’ in Q2 but not in Q1. Similar instances in other plays include Mountjoy and Williams in Folio Henry V, who are simply called ‘Herauld’ and ‘2. Souldier’ in Q1, and Claudius (Q2) and Bernardo and Francisco (Q2 and F) in Hamlet, who are referred to as ‘King’ and ‘two Centinels’ in Q1. This suggests that Shakespeare occasionally gave personal names to characters where the players or the redactors of the short quartos were content with generic designations.
15 The beginning of this speech in Q2 has no equivalent in Q1: ‘A dog of that house shall moue me to stand’ (1.1.10).
20 It may be significant that Q1 here omits Q2’s ‘The quarel is betweene our maisters, and vs their men’ (1.1.17), as an omission later in the scene (see note at 1.48 sd) suggests that Q1 may put less emphasis on the conflict among the older generation. See Introduction, p. 32.
21–3 The ‘flesh’/‘fish’ joke constitutes the only notable instance of a transposition in this scene; the equivalent passage occurs a few lines later in Q2, immediately preceding the arrival of the Montague Serving-men. Unlike Q1, Q2 extends this passage to include further bawdy puns on ‘thy toole’ and a ‘naked weapon’.
27 their maids Q1’s ‘their’ may be a mistake for ‘the’ (‘their’ occurs two lines earlier), though it seems equally possible that the First Capulet Serving-man, contrary to Q2’s Sampson, is still specifically thinking of the Montagues’ maids.
32 I fear … thee Q1’s Serving-man displays macho bravery where Q2’s Gregory reacts with mock cowardice (‘No marrie, I feare thee’).
38–46 In both Q1 and Q2, the staccato dialogue is partly shaped by repetition, but the two texts repeat different sentences: Q2, ‘Do you bite your thumbe at vs sir?’ (1.1.37–9); Q1, ‘Ay, but is’t at us?’ and ‘I bite my thumb’.
46–8 The onset of the fight is considerably shorter in Q1 than in Q2, with only two as opposed to nine short speeches.
48 SD This lengthy stage direction simplifies and rearranges stage action which takes place in Q2 where no fewer than nine characters speak (Sampson, Abram, Benvolio, Tybalt, an officer, Capulet, Montague, and their wives). In the theatre, the specific words used during a fight may be difficult for an audience to hear and at times do not greatly matter. The probably theatrical Q1 – as opposed to the more literary Q2 – registers this by not specifying the words accompanying the fight. See Introduction, p. 17. The wording of the stage direction may suggest that Capulet and Montague help ‘part them’ and do not participate in the brawl as they do in Q2. See Introduction, p. 32. The Prince, called ‘Escalus’ in Q2, is nowhere given a first name. He arrives ‘with his train’ in Q2 but with no train in Q1.
49–62 The Prince’s fourteen-line speech corresponds with very few differences to the equivalent lines in Q2 but omits nine additional lines present in the longer text.
63–4 Q2 assigns this speech to Montague rather than to his wife. Rowe and other eighteenth-century editors followed the SH in Q1.
65–6 Benvolio’s two-line speech corresponds closely to the initial lines of the equivalent passage in Q2 which goes on, however, for another eight lines summarising the brawl – Tybalt’s arrival, the fight, and the Prince’s arrival. In Q1, Romeo’s parents may well arrive at nearly the same time as Tybalt and the Prince, which is why these lines may have seemed dispensable when the text was abridged for performance. The present and other differences between Q1 and Q2 suggest that a feature of the longer text is the delivery, at salient points, of long messenger-type speeches describing action the audience have already seen performed onstage.
72 grove Sycamore The line in Q1 is a syllable short, but the fact that ‘Sicamore’, as the original spelling has it, is printed in italics argues against an accidental compositor’s slip. Benvolio is referring to a grove named ‘Sycamore’ rather than to a grove of sycamore, as Q2 has it.
80–3 These four lines are all that survives of a twenty-six line passage in Q2. In particular, two speeches by Montague have been much abridged. They describe the symptoms of Romeo’s love-sickness, each speech containing an elaborate simile. One of the poetic ‘flowers’ which William Drummond of Hawthornden overscored in his copy of Romeo and Juliet stems from this omitted passage (see Erne, 228).
89 stroke A variant form of ‘struck’ in use from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries (OED Strike v.).
97 Benvolio’s personified love is masculine in Q2 (‘his’) but feminine in Q1 (‘her’). As the OED (Love n 5a) points out, the personification, though usually masculine, was ‘formerly sometimes feminine, and capable of being identified with Venus’. See also LLL, ‘Forerun fair love, strewing her way with flowers’ (4.3.356 (Oxford)).
100 Q2’s ‘Should, without eyes, see pathwaies to his will’ (1.1.163) draws on the image of blind Cupid to construct a paradox: Cupid is blindfold yet sees. By contrast, Q1’s line relies on causality rather than paradox, suggesting that since Cupid is blindfold, he is blind in the sense of heedless or reckless (OED Blind a. 3a).
101 Gods me A contracted form of ‘God save me’ (OED God, 8b).
105 create Editors usually prefer Q1’s ‘create’ to Q2’s ‘created’. The former is also a participle (see Abbott 342).
124 And if Q1 and Q2 spell ‘And if’, which existed alongside ‘An if’ (both meaning simply ‘if’ in modern English). ‘And’ or ‘an’ by itself could also mean ‘if’ (e.g. Lear 1.4.162 (Oxford)); the repetition is probably an intensifier, not a redundancy.
129 Why no The omission of Q2’s ‘Grone’ at the beginning of this line turns a headless pentameter into an iambic tetrameter.
130 Q1’s line is metrically smoother than Q2’s ‘A sicke man in sadnesse makes his will.’ As a result, a number of editions have adopted the Q1 reading, beginning with Q4.
140–1 Between these two lines, Q2 adds: ‘Nor bide th’incounter of assailing eies’ (1.1.204). The preceding fifty-six and the following three Q1 lines all have a counterpart in Q2, so the omission may be accidental, perhaps occasioned by the repetition of ‘Nor’ at the beginning of two successive lines.
143 At the point where the Q1 scene ends, Q2 has another twenty-two lines with Romeo describing his love-sickness in Petrarchan terms and Benvolio urging him to ‘Examine other bewties’ (1.1.219) and to ‘forget to thinke’ (1.1.216) of Rosaline, advice which may have been omitted because Benvolio more or less repeats it in the following scene.
