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See note on Juliet’s “sweet repose and rest” above. Romeo does not feel the restfulness she has wished for him, and doesn’t plan on getting sleep; he is anxious to get help in dealing with the obstacles to their love.

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In other words, I wish your heart as sweet a sense of tranquility as I feel in mine.

“Sweet repose and rest” does not come easily to characters in Shakespeare, so many of whom suffer from insomnia that readers since the 19th century have wondered whether Shakespeare himself was a sufferer. In the larger context of the plays, Juliet’s tranquility in this moment is a true testament to her happiness.

Notice, though, that she later says it feels like “‘tis twenty years till” 9 a.m., when she will send for Romeo. And at the end of the scene, Romeo wistfully says: “Would I were sleep and peace”–he is anxious about the obstacles to their love, and hurries off to get help rather than sleeping.

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This is the first of several goodnights before the famous “Parting is such sweet sorrow” at the end of the scene. The two lovers can’t get enough of seeing each other and keep delaying their departure.

https://youtu.be/sMel13nY0PE?t=2m6s

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The summer air may have made the bud of our love blossom into a beautiful flower by the next time we meet.


This image draws on the conventional idea of summer as a season of love, as well as the idea that “absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW0DfsCzfq4

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thy bent of love: your intentions as a lover.

Sorry, kids: no free-love ideals in medieval Italy (or Elizabethan England). Sex outside of marriage carried a considerable social stigma, for women especially, and could be punishable under law (though the severity of punishment varied depending on social class and other factors). Any lover whose intentions toward a woman didn’t include marriage was considered dishonorable by definition.

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Juliet bids a hasty goodnight and hurries inside. This may also be a final instance of Juliet interrupting Romeo before he can make a promise.

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I would it were: I wish I had it.

See Juliet’s vow of love at the beginning of the scene.

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Shakespeare is winking at the idea of sexual as well as emotional satisfaction. Whether and how seriously the lovers intend this meaning is a matter of interpretation. If he had anything besides vows of love in mind, Romeo doesn’t say so openly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEjkftp7J7I

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i.e., One last, quick thing, and then I’ll say good night for real.

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Juliet’s lines throughout this scene reflect a fundamental distrust of language (“What’s in a name?”; “if thou swear'st, / Thou may prove false”). This suspicion may be rooted in family context: e.g., she is questioning everything her family has told her about the feud. But it also aligns her with numerous other Shakespearean characters, from Hamlet (who complains that he “must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words”) to Cordelia in King Lear (who refuses her father’s demand for public praise because “I am sure my love’s / More richer than my tongue”).

In their 2009 study Negotiating Shakespeare’s Language in Romeo and Juliet, Lynette Hunter and Peter Lichtenfels argue that this distrust also has a broader cultural context:

During the sixteenth century [the rise of] psychology and modern experimental science challenged previous ideas about emotion, sexuality, beauty, truth and moral good and radically undermined notions of the self.This had an impact on attitudes toward communication, specifically neoplatonic ideas of visual probity and and rhetorical concepts of verbal skills, forcing to the surface their distrust of language and gesture respectively. Romeo and Juliet explores these areas of dissimulation, precariousness, confusion, feigning, and the artificial… (pp. 177-78)

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