Everything in Act IV demonstrates the desparation people
feel when things happen that are out of their
control.
Juliet is going to be married to Paris and she
doesn't want to, so she goes the the friar ready to kill herself. He notes her
desparation with the word desperate:
Which craves as desperate an
execution.
As that is desperate which we would
prevent.
He says this having
an idea about a solution to her problem. Juliet then uses
hyperbole to model what great lengths she would go to in
order to ensure their marriage doesn't happen:
O, bid me leap, rather than marry
Paris,
From off the battlements of yonder tower;
Or walk in thievish
ways; or bid me lurk
Where serpents are; chain me with roaring
bears;
Or shut me nightly in a
charnel-house,
She'd jump
from a tall building, or go get locked in a tomb, or chain herself up with roaring
bears...
Later, upon hearing Juliet's fake confession,
Capulet hurries to get the wedding all ready. It's almost as if he wants to get it done
before she changes her mind and they go into a fight
again.
Next, Juliet has her scene taking the potion.
Desperation is further demonstrated in this scene because she takes the action of laying
down a dagger just in case the potion doesn't work. She has a preventative waiting right
there. She asks several rhetorical about what different ways the potion might not
work.
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.
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,
Environed 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 desperate
brains?
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