Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?
Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name,
When I, thy three-hours wife, have mangled it?
But
wherefore, villain,
didst thou kill my cousin?
That villain cousin would have kill’d my husband.
Back, foolish tears, back to your native spring,
Your
tributary drops belong to woe,
Which you, mistaking, offer up to joy.
My husband lives that
Tybalt would have slain,
And Tybalt’s
dead that would have slain my husband.
All this is comfort, wherefore weep I then?
Some word there was, worser than Tybalt’s death,
That
murd’red me; I would forget it
fain,
But O, it presses to my memory
Like damned guilty deeds to sinners’ minds:
“Tybalt is dead, and Romeo banished.”
That “banished,” that one word “banished,”
Hath slain ten thousand Tybalts. Tybalt’s death
Was woe enough if it had ended there;
Or if sour woe delights in fellowship,
And needly will be rank’d with other griefs,
Why followed not, when she said, “Tybalt’s dead,”
Thy father or
thy mother, nay, or both,
Which modern
lamentation might have moved?
But with a rearward following Tybalt’s death,
“Romeo is banished”: to speak that word,
Is father, mother, Tybalt, Romeo, Juliet,
All slain, all dead: “Romeo is banished”!
There is no end, no limit, measure, bound,
In that word’s death, no words can that woe sound.
Where is my father and my mother, nurse?
