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?