Collection 4: "The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet" by William Shakespeare, Act V

If I may trust the flattering truth of sleep
My dreams presage some joyful news at hand.

How fares my Juliet?

Your looks are pale and wild and do import
Some misadventure.

Your looks are pale and wild and do import
Some misadventure.

I do remember an apothecary,
And hereabouts he dwells, which late I noted
In tattered weeds, with overwhelming brows,
Culling of simples.

Noting this penury, to myself I said,
"An if a man did need a poison now
Whose sale is present death in Mantua,
Here lives a caitiff wretch would sell it him."

Come hither, man. I see that thou art poor.
Hold, there is forty ducats.

Put this in any liquid thing you will
And drink it off, and if you had the strength
Of twenty men, it would dispatch you straight.

Sweet flower, with flowers thy bridal bed I strew
(O woe! thy canopy is dust and stones)
Which with sweet water nightly I will dew;
Or, wanting that, with tears distilled by moans.

But if thou, jealous, dost return to pry
In what I farther shall intend to do,
By heaven, I will tear thee joint by joint
And strew this hungry churchyard with thy limbs.

The time and my intents are savage-wild,
More fierce and more inexorable far
Than empty tigers or the roaring sea.

Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death,
Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth,
Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open,
And in despite I'll cram thee with more food.

This is that banish'd haughty Montague
That murdered my love's cousin—with which grief
It is supposed the fair creature died —
And here is come to do some villainous shame
To the dead bodies.

I will apprehend him.
Stop thy unhallowed toil, vile Montague!
Can vengeance be pursued further than death?
Condemned villain, I do apprehend thee.
Obey, and go with me; for thou must die.

Let me peruse this face.

Death, lie thou there, by a dead man interred.

Beauty's ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death's pale flag is not advanced there.

Shall I believe
That unsubstantial Death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?

O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh.

O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh.

Arms, take your last embrace! and, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death!

Come, bitter conduct; come, unsavory guide!

As I discern,
It burneth in the Capels' monument.

Alack, alack, what blood is this which stains
The stony entrance of this sepulcher?

Romeo! O, pale! Who else? What, Paris too?
And steeped in blood? Ah, what an unkind hour
Is guilty of this lamentable chance!

A greater power than we can contradict
Hath thwarted our intents.

O churl! drunk all, and left no friendly drop
To help me after?

Haply some poison yet doth hang on them
To make me die with a restorative.

We see the ground whereon these woes do lie,
But the true ground of all these piteous woes
We cannot without circumstance descry.

Sovereign, here lies the County Paris slain;
And Romeo dead, and Juliet, dead before,
Warm and new killed.

Alas, my liege, my wife is dead toenight!

Seal up the mouth of outrage for a while,
Till we can clear these ambiguities
And know their spring, their head, their true descent;
And then will I be general of your woes
And lead you even to death.

I am the greatest, able to do least,
Yet most suspected, as the time and place
Doth make against me, of this direful murder;
And here I stand, both to impeach and purge
Myself condemned and myself excused.

I am the greatest, able to do least,
Yet most suspected, as the time and place
Doth make against me, of this direful murder;
And here I stand, both to impeach and purge
Myself condemned and myself excused.

Meantime I writ to Romeo
That he should hither come as this dire night
To help to take her from her borrowed grave,
Being the time the potion's force should cease.

All this I know, and to the marriage
Her nurse is privy; and if aught in this
Miscarried by my fault, let my old life
Be sacrificed, some hour before his time,
Unto the rigor of severest law.

All this I know, and to the marriage
Her nurse is privy; and if aught in this
Miscarried by my fault, let my old life
Be sacrificed, some hour before his time,
Unto the rigor of severest law.

Capulet, Montague,
See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love!

And I, for winking at you, discords too,
Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punished.

And I, for winking at you, discords too,
Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punished.