Page:Romeo and Juliet (1917) Yale.djvu/105

Romeo and Juliet, IV. iii

My dismal scene I needs must act alone.

Come, vial.

What if this mixture do not work at all?

Shall I be married then to-morrow morning?

No, no; this shall forbid it: lie thou there.

What if it be a poison, which the friar

Subtly hath minister'd to have me dead,

Lest in this marriage he should be dishonour'd

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.

I will not entertain so bad a thought.

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 pack'd;

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:

 25 minister'd: supplied

29 tried: proved

30 Cf. n.

33 redeem: save

40 As: namely

43 green in earth: freshly buried

48 mandrakes'; cf. n.

