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Juliet, Lines 14a-57
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Act 4,
Scene 3
Lines 14a-57

Juliet performs a speech from Act 4, Scene 3 of myShakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. 

myShakespeare | Romeo and Juliet 4.3 Performance: Juliet, Lines 14a-57

Juliet

Farewell.
 [Exit Lady Capulet and Nurse]
                      God knows when we shall meet again.
I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins
That almost freezes up the heat of life.
I'll call them back again to comfort me. —
Nurse! — What should she do here?
My dismal scene I needs must act alone.
Come, vial. What if this mixture do not work at all?     
Shall I be married then tomorrow morning?
[Laying down her dagger]
No, no. This shall forbid it. Lie thou there.
What if it be a poison which the friar
Subtly hath ministered to have me dead,
Lest in this marriage he should be dishonored,
Because he married me before to Romeo?
I fear it is, and yet methinks it should not,
For he hath still been tried a holy man.
How if, when I am laid into the tomb,
I wake before the time that Romeo                                
Come to redeem me? There's a fearful point!
Shall I not then be stifled in the vault,
To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in,
And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes?
Or if I live, is it not very like
The horrible conceit of death and night,
Together with the terror of the place —
As in a vault, an ancient receptacle,
Where, for these many hundred years, the bones
Of all my buried ancestors are packed;                          
Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,
Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say,
At some hours in the night spirits resort —
Alack, alack, is it not like that I,
So early waking, what with loathsome smells,
And shrieks like mandrakes' torn out of the earth
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad —
O if I wake, shall I not be distraught,
Environèd with all these hideous fears,
And madly play with my forefather's joints,                  
And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud,
And, in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone
As with a club, dash out my desp'rate brains?
O look! Methinks I see my cousin's ghost
Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body
Upon a rapier's point. Stay, Tybalt, stay!
Romeo, Romeo, Romeo! Here’s drink — I drink to thee.
[She drinks the potion and falls upon her bed behind the closed curtain]