The relationship between Juliet and the Nurse is the warmest bond in Romeo and Juliet, and also the one whose ending does the deepest quiet damage. The Nurse is the woman who fed Juliet from her own body, who can date the girl’s life to the hour, who carries her secrets across Verona and her marriage across the feud’s front line. Lady Capulet gave Juliet a name, a rank, and a marriage market. The older woman gave her a childhood. When the two women part in Act 3 Scene 5, Juliet loses the only adult who has ever treated her inner life as real, and the loss is not announced by any death. It happens in a few level sentences of sensible advice, and it cannot be undone. This article traces that bond as a relationship with an arc: an intimacy built on milk and memory, a partnership tested by errands and delay, a strain that shows first in small garblings of trust, and a rupture whose coldness completes the heroine’s isolation. The verdict argued throughout is that the counsel to marry Paris was protection in the speaker’s intent and betrayal in its effect, and that a relationship is finally judged by its effect. The Nurse did not stop loving Juliet. She stopped standing where Juliet stood, and for a girl of thirteen with no other witness to her marriage, that withdrawal of allegiance was the loneliest event in the tragedy.

One preliminary distinction keeps the whole arc legible. The Nurse as a solo figure, her comedy, her class position, her stock ancestry and her lament, has a full anatomy elsewhere in this series, and the single scene of the Paris counsel has its own prosecution and defence. What belongs here is narrower and, for the heroine’s story, larger: the shape the two of them make together across five days of stage time, from the dove-house wall to the wedding morning. A relationship is not the sum of two characters. It is the traffic between them, the names they use, the errands they run, the knowledge they share that no one else holds, and the moment the traffic stops. Charted that way, the bond between Juliet and the Nurse turns out to be the play’s most complete small tragedy inside the large one: it has a beginning in the body, a middle in joyful conspiracy, and an end that arrives while both parties are still alive and in the same house, which is the bleakest kind of ending the stage affords.

The pair is easy to miss because the play’s publicity has already assigned the Nurse her category. She is filed as comic relief, a bawdy old woman with a fan and a dirty laugh, and the filing is not baseless: she is funny, constantly, and the comedy is real. But the cliche performs a quiet theft. It keeps the woman and discards the relationship, and with it the play’s quiet heartbreak, the slow closing of the one door through which the heroine’s inner life had always passed. Restoring the bond restores that heartbreak to view. Watched as a pair, the two women enact the tragedy in miniature and in advance: a love that begins in the body, flowers in conspiracy, and ends not in hatred or death but in a sensible conversation, after which one of them is alone in a way she has never been alone before. The famous catastrophe at the tomb has many authors. The desolation that makes the catastrophe feel the way it feels, airless, unwitnessed, conducted by a child talking to herself, has one author, and she never learns what she did.

Juliet and the Nurse: A Bond Built Before the Play Begins

Most relationships in the tragedy start onstage. Romeo sees Juliet at the feast, the Friar is consulted in his cell, Paris applies at the door. This one predates the action by the whole of a childhood, and the text insists on the depth of the deposit before it spends any of it. The Nurse’s great reminiscent speech in Act 1 Scene 3 is often played as comic stuffing, a garrulous delay before the marriage pitch. Read as relationship evidence, it is a title deed. She remembers the weaning day by the earthquake and the dove-house wall, the wormwood on her own breast, the bump on the toddler’s forehead and her husband’s earthy joke about falling backward. “Faith, I can tell her age unto an hour,” she says (1.3.9), and the boast is exact: her knowledge of Juliet is not genealogical but bodily, stored in the flesh of the woman who did the feeding, the lifting, the watching. Barbara Everett’s celebrated reading of the Nurse rests on this speech, and it remains the strongest account of why the bond carries such weight: the speech is a submerged autobiography, the story of a woman whose own child, Susan, died, and whose maternal life was transferred entire to the child at her breast. The affection the audience later watches being spent was accumulated here, in years the play cannot stage and therefore compresses into one woman’s memory.

One feature of that founding speech belongs to the relationship rather than to the speaker, and it sets the bond’s charter. The memories the Nurse retails in the girl’s hearing are adult memories, unexpurgated: a husband’s sexual joke repeated with relish, the bawdy prophecy that the toddler will fall backward when she has more wit, the whole earthy archive of a married woman’s life, delivered before a thirteen-year-old and her mother without embarrassment on any side. The close reading of that speech, its weaning lore and its dating clues, belongs to a companion article in this series; the point here is what its performance between these two people establishes. The girl has been raised inside adult speech, not shielded from it, and raised by the woman speaking it. Her famous precocity, the sexual frankness of the orchard scene, the unembarrassed desire of the wedding-night soliloquy, does not descend from nowhere. It is a nursery’s product. The channel through which the marriage plot will run was dug, years before the plot, by a foster-mother who never talked down to her charge, and the trust of Act 2 is simply the charter of Act 1 being honoured in a larger matter.

The compression matters because it explains the terms on which the two meet in every later scene. Juliet does not introduce herself to this woman, explain herself to her, or perform rank for her. She is known. When the heroine needs a confidante for the most dangerous secret in Verona, she does not deliberate about whether the Nurse can be trusted with it; the trust is older than the secret by more than a decade. Coppelia Kahn, reading the household as a patriarchal machine that processes daughters toward advantageous marriage, locates the Nurse inside that machine as its softest gear: a servant whose love is genuine and whose wage is paid by the father. Both readings are needed for the arc. Everett explains what the bond feels like from inside. Kahn explains what it is made of from outside, and therefore what it cannot survive. A love that is also an employment has a ceiling on its courage, and the ceiling is invisible until the day the daughter asks the servant to defy the master in his own hall. The relationship’s tragedy is that neither party knows the ceiling is there. The girl believes the bond is maternal and therefore unconditional. The woman believes it is maternal too, and discovers, in the crisis, the respects in which it has always been conditional on the household that feeds them both.

Beneath the ceiling question sits the transfer that founds everything, and it deserves to be stated with the bluntness the text builds into it. The Nurse’s milk was meant, in the ordinary course of her life, for Susan. Susan died, in the phrase the play gives the loss, as a child of the same age as the Capulet daughter, and the woman’s maternity, having nowhere of its own to go, went entire into the surviving child at her breast. Everett’s essay remains the indispensable account of this substitution because it refuses to sentimentalise it: the love is real precisely because it is a survivor’s love, funded by grief. Every later phase of the arc draws on that funding. The teasing of 2.5 is a bereaved woman playing with the child who lived. The errands of Act 2 are run with a zeal no wage explains, because they are run for the daughter she has in place of the daughter she buried. And the counsel of 3.5 acquires, from this angle, an additional cruelty that pure class analysis misses: when the crisis comes, the woman is asked, in effect, to lose the second child as she lost the first, to acquiesce in a plan, the secret marriage, that has already placed the girl beyond the household’s protection and may place her beyond the woman’s reach forever. Her refusal to follow the girl into rebellion is partly the system’s reflex. It is also a survivor’s flinch. She has buried one daughter. The counsel is her attempt, clumsy, worldly, and fatal to the bond, to keep the second one alive inside the only structure she knows how to survive in. None of this acquits the advice. All of it explains why the advice comes from her with the fluency of self-preservation rather than the hesitation of treachery.

Juliet’s side of the founding scene is easy to overlook, because she barely speaks in it. Through the long reminiscent speech and her mother’s pitch, the girl of the title offers courtesies, assents, and the one guarded sentence about looking to like. The near-silence is itself relationship evidence. Children are silent in the company where they are safest, and voluble where they must manage an audience; the heroine’s famous eloquence belongs to the orchard, to soliloquy, and to this woman’s company, in ascending order of freedom. In 1.3 she has nothing to perform, because the person doing the talking has known her since before she could talk. The scene’s comedy, the mother’s impatience, the servant’s unstoppable memory, plays over a stillness at its centre that productions sometimes mistake for passivity. It is the stillness of the one relationship in the play that predates performance altogether.

Is the Nurse a mother to Juliet, or a servant playing one?

The Nurse is a mother in function and a servant in law, and the gap between those two facts is where the relationship eventually breaks. She performed every maternal office the period assigned to the body: feeding, weaning, tending, remembering.

The household paid her for the offices and never granted her the authority that blood would have carried, so her motherhood was real in experience and revocable in structure, which is precisely the combination the ending exposes.

The physical ease between the two is the first thing the scenes establish and the last thing they withdraw. The Nurse’s speech is saturated with the child’s body: the breast she sucked, the forehead she bumped, the small hands and feet of the toddler under the wall. Juliet, at thirteen, still moves inside that ease without embarrassment, teasing the older woman, pleading with her, calling her by pet names, treating her chamber as the one room in the house where speech is unguarded. Set beside the heroine’s exchanges with Lady Capulet, which run on the formal pronoun and the vocabulary of duty, the contrast is the play’s quietest piece of staging information. The mother addresses a daughter of the house. The Nurse addresses a child she raised. Critics who treat the foster bond as background colour miss how much of the plot is routed through it: the balcony confidence, the marriage errand, the wedding night, the news of the banishment, all travel along this one channel, because it is the only channel the heroine has. The feud closes the streets between the two great houses. Inside the Capulet house, rank closes almost every other door. The bond with the Nurse is the single open road, and the play’s catastrophe can be described, from Juliet’s side, as the closing of that road in stages: first narrowed by garbled news, then blocked by counsel, then abandoned altogether, until the girl who began the play wrapped in another woman’s memory ends it arranging to sleep in a tomb with no witness but a friar she has known for days.

The Wet-Nurse Bond: Milk, Memory, and Class in the Capulet Household

The historical arrangement underneath the fiction deserves a section of its own, because the arc’s emotional mathematics depend on it. Elite households of the period routinely placed infants with wet nurses, women of lower rank whose milk and labour raised children they did not own. The practice created a recognised secondary kinship, intense on the child’s side and precarious on the nurse’s, since the bond’s continuation depended on the employer’s pleasure and the child’s growing past the need for it. Shakespeare builds the whole prehistory of his heroine on that arrangement and then lets its terms dictate the ending. The Nurse’s authority over Juliet is the authority of long service and total knowledge; it has no legal existence whatsoever. She cannot forbid a marriage, refuse an order, or shelter a fugitive daughter against the father’s will without risking her place, her lodging, and her livelihood at an age when she has nothing else. When the crisis arrives, the relationship is asked to bear a weight its social foundations were never built to carry. That is not an excuse entered for the counsel scene; it is the arc’s load-bearing fact, and the sections that follow keep returning to it, because the difference between a betrayal and a collapse is usually a question of what the structure could hold.

The arrangement’s ordinary course is worth reconstructing, because Shakespeare’s audience knew its terms and a modern audience mostly does not. A wet nurse was commonly engaged from outside the great house or retained within it, her own infant displaced, weaned early, fostered elsewhere, or, in the grimmest and commonest outcome, dead of the displacement. The nursling was returned to its parents at weaning, and the formal relationship ended with the milk. What is unusual in the Capulet house is the retention: this nurse stayed, passing from the breast to the chamber, from feeding the child to dressing the young woman, her office dilating as the girl grew until it covered the whole interior of a life. Retention of that kind was a privilege of the servant and a convenience of the house, and it rested, as all such privileges do, on continued usefulness and continued favour. The woman’s entire security in old age is the girl’s continued need of her. Readers who grasp that tenancy understand the peculiar intensity of her service, which is never merely professional. Every errand she runs for Juliet is also a renewal of her lease on the only home she has. The devotion is love, and the love is also rent, and the two facts do not cancel; they compound. They explain a fidelity that will carry a ladder to a forbidden wedding and also a counsel that will sell that wedding down the river, because both acts, in her economy, are ways of keeping the girl, and herself, inside the house.

There is a further turn of the screw that the arc keeps in view. A nurse’s standing in a household rises and falls with her charge. While Juliet is an unmarried daughter under her father’s roof, the woman who raised her is a fixture of the inner rooms. The moment Juliet marries, in the open course of things, she departs to a husband’s house, and her nurse’s office ends in honourable obsolescence. The secret marriage therefore threatens the older woman twice over: it is a crime against the father’s authority, and it is her own dismissal, executed without notice by the person she loves most. Her later counsel, urging the match the father wants, would restore the legible world in which she has a place, a function, and a future at the girl’s side, preparing another wedding in the same chamber. The advice is never only advice. It is a bid to go on existing, and the tragedy of the bond is that the bid and the betrayal are the same sentence.

Her own biography, so far as the play releases it, sharpens the tenancy’s terms. She is a widow; the husband of the dove-house joke is dead, and the reminiscent speech buries him in a subordinate clause between the earthquake and the wormwood. She has no living child, no property the text mentions, no kin in Verona who appear or are appealed to. The Capulet house is not her employer in the modern sense, a party to a contract either side may exit. It is her world entire, the successor to her marriage as the structure that houses, feeds, and defines her, and like a marriage of the period it is dissoluble only by the stronger party. Critics who ask why she does not simply defy Capulet and take the girl’s part to the end are asking why a woman does not walk out of her world into the street at an age when the street has nothing for her. The question answers itself, and the answer does not soften the counsel; it locates the counsel’s cause where this article has located it throughout, in a bond whose emotional terms were set by love and whose material terms were set, immovably, by the house.

The class geometry of the bond is visible in miniature in the first scene the three women share. Lady Capulet enters with a commission from her husband, dismisses the Nurse with “Nurse, leave awhile,” then recalls her within a line: “Nurse, come back again” (1.3.6 to 1.3.11, paraphrase of the stage traffic). The flicker is worth pausing on. The mother cannot conduct the marriage conversation without the servant in the room, because the servant is the household’s living archive of the daughter: her age, her growth, her disposition, the very facts the pitch depends on. The biological mother must ask the room, in effect, how old her own child is, and the archive answers unto the hour. Rank commands the scene; knowledge belongs to the servant; and the daughter sits between the two kinds of power, already learning which one she can talk to. Readers who want the full account of the Nurse as a character, her comedy, her class position and her divided loyalties examined on their own terms, will find it in the character study of the Nurse, her comedy, class, and betrayal, which this article deliberately treats as a companion rather than a rival. The point here is the pair. Every later scene between Juliet and the Nurse is already present in embryo in that first chamber: the mother’s errand, the servant’s memory, the girl’s silence, and then, the instant the mother finishes, the girl turning to the woman she actually consults.

The biological counterweight should be fixed in the reader’s mind at this point, comparatively and briefly, since the mother’s own case is argued in neighbouring articles of this series and is not this article’s brief. Lady Capulet functions in the arc as the bond’s defining absence. She appears at the market moments of her daughter’s life, the pitch, the forced match, the wedding, and is absent from every interior one; she holds no memory of the childhood, having delegated its keeping; she asks the archive for the facts and receives the pitch’s errand as a commission from her husband. The point for the relationship is not that she is cold, though the play lets the charge stand, but that her absence is the space the foster bond fills. Juliet and the Nurse are as close as they are because the alternative chair is empty. When the counsel scene arrives, the girl’s desolation has this further layer: the woman who fails her in 3.5 is not one of two mothers. She is the only one the girl has ever had, and her failure leaves the chair, this time, with no one in it at all.

What the Nurse supplies in that scene, beyond facts, is a tone. Lady Capulet sells Paris in the language of the market, a book to be read, a volume whose cover is to be admired. The Nurse sells him in the language of the body and the street: “A man, young lady! Lady, such a man / As all the world, why, he’s a man of wax” (1.3.76 to 1.3.77). The girl hears both registers and answers her mother with the famous noncommittal courtesy, “I’ll look to like, if looking liking move” (1.3.97 to 1.3.98). The exchange is usually mined for the heroine’s obedience or her duplicity. For the relationship, its interest is simpler: the Nurse’s bawdy warmth is the medium in which Juliet has grown up, the household’s one source of unembarrassed talk about bodies, marriage beds, and desire. A girl raised in that medium can say to the same woman, two acts later, things she could say to no one else alive. The conspiracy of Act 2 is possible because the nursery of Act 1 was frank. Households that speak to daughters only in the idiom of the marriage market should not be surprised when daughters take their real business to the servants’ hall; Verona’s tragedy is partly the story of where a silenced girl’s speech goes, and of what happens when the one listener changes sides.

The Names They Use: Pet Names, Pronouns, and the Temperature of Address

A relationship can be audited by its forms of address, and this one keeps unusually complete books. The Nurse calls Juliet by a small herd of pet names across the play: lamb, ladybird, love, madam, sweetheart, bride, each drawn from the nursery’s stock and each still in circulation on the wedding morning. The girl’s answering vocabulary is equally distinctive and, for a mistress addressing a servant, remarkable: honey Nurse, sweet Nurse, good sweet Nurse, honest Nurse, a run of endearments that no other servant in the play receives from any superior and that Juliet herself offers to no one else in her family. Lady Capulet is madam to her daughter throughout, addressed in the formal register of rank, and the contrast is not an accident of casting but the relationship map drawn in miniature. Blood speaks formally. Milk speaks in pet names. The audience learns the household’s emotional constitution from its salutations before it learns it from any speech.

The pronouns tell the same story in grammar. In the address system of the period, thou runs downward to children and servants and inward to intimates, while the formal form runs upward and outward to rank and strangers. The Nurse’s thou to Juliet is a nurse’s prerogative, the fossil of the years when the girl was a small child in her arms, retained unchallenged into the girl’s teens. Juliet’s thou in return, thou look’st sad, thou hast breath, is the anomaly that proves the intimacy: a mistress may thou a servant as a matter of rank, but this girl’s usage carries the nursery’s warmth rather than the hall’s hierarchy, teasing where command would use the same word with a different temperature. Against this reciprocal familiarity, set the heroine’s exchanges with her parents, where the formal forms and the vocabulary of duty hold an unbroken line from the first scene to the last. The play gives its heroine two linguistic homes. She is a formal daughter in one of them and a person in the other.

The audit’s value is that it makes the rupture measurable. In Act 3 Scene 5 the pet names vanish from the girl’s side of the exchange at the precise moment the counsel lands, and they never return. What replaces them, in the scenes that follow, is a single adjective of exquisite coldness: gentle Nurse, at the potion chamber door, the thanks of a mistress to a servant who has given satisfaction. The older woman’s usage, by contrast, does not change at all, because she has not been told anything has changed; lamb and lady and sweetheart continue on her tongue into the discovery speech of the wedding morning, where they curdle into the play’s most desolate music. A relationship can thus be watched ending in its forms of address a full act before its surviving party suspects anything. The temperature falls on one side only. That asymmetry, the girl freezing in silence while the woman warms on in ignorance, is the arc’s signature, and it is written nowhere more plainly than in the names.

Act 2: The Messenger Scenes and the Comedy of Delay

The middle of the arc is joyful, and the joy is functional. In Act 2 the bond stops being a fact of the nursery and becomes an instrument of the plot: the Nurse is commissioned, crosses the city, endures the street, and returns with the marriage in her keeping. Juliet promises in the orchard to send a messenger the next morning, “by the hour of nine” (2.2.169 to 2.2.170), and the messenger is never in doubt. There is exactly one person in the Capulet house who can leave it on an errand, ask after a Montague in public, and report back to the daughter’s chamber without the errand becoming evidence. The relationship’s second phase is therefore a working partnership, and the scenes play it as comedy because partnership, in this play’s early weather, is still indistinguishable from love. The famous delay of Act 2 Scene 5, in which the returned messenger stretches a sentence of news across complaints about her bones, her breath, and her dinner, is the partnership’s set piece. It is also the finest evidence in the play for what the two women are to each other when nothing is wrong.

What does the delay in Act 2 Scene 5 actually prove about the pair?

The delay proves intimacy by the only test that cannot be faked: licensed teasing between unequals who trust each other completely. A servant may not toy with a mistress, and a messenger with bad discipline would simply be beaten or dismissed.

The Nurse prolongs the news because the prolongation itself is a shared game whose rules both players know, and Juliet’s answering mockery, breathless and laughing, shows the game’s other side. Delay of this kind is a luxury good. It can only be afforded inside a bond secure enough to waste time in.

Before the duet, the scene writes the partnership’s geography into a soliloquy, and the geography is worth a moment because it is the bond’s daily shape. Juliet opens 2.5 alone, counting: “The clock struck nine when I did send the Nurse; / In half an hour she promised to return” (2.5.1 to 2.5.2). Three hours have passed. The girl’s part in the partnership is stasis, a chamber, a window, a body kept in one room by rank and sex; the woman’s part is motion, legs and errands, the whole city crossed and recrossed. Every phase of the arc respects that division of labour. The daughter generates desire, decision, and eventually strategy, all indoors. The foster-mother generates all the movement those decisions require in the world. It is a workable constitution for a conspiracy and a fragile one, since it means the girl’s agency is entirely outsourced to a single pair of aging legs, and the legs belong to another person’s employee. The three-hour wait is played for comedy, the girl’s impatience mounting in verse of real technical brilliance, but it rehearses the audience in the relationship’s central risk long before the risk declares itself: everything Juliet wants from the world must come to her through this one woman, and whatever this woman cannot or will not carry simply does not arrive. In Act 5 a letter will fail to arrive by another channel. The pattern was established here, in laughter, at noon.

The scene’s mechanics repay close reading, because Shakespeare writes the teasing as a duet rather than a monologue. Juliet opens in transport: “Now, good sweet Nurse, O Lord, why look’st thou sad?” and, a breath later, “Sweet, sweet, sweet Nurse, tell me, where is my love?” (2.5.17 to 2.5.54, selected lines). The older woman answers with her body: “I am aweary, give me leave awhile. / Fie, how my bones ache! What a jaunce have I had!” (2.5.25 to 2.5.26). Juliet’s rejoinder is the surest sign of ease in the whole relationship, a piece of logic-chopping worthy of a schoolroom intimate: “How art thou out of breath, when thou hast breath / To say to me that thou art out of breath?” (2.5.33 to 2.5.34). Daughters do not talk that way to servants they merely employ, and servants do not invite it from mistresses they merely serve. The exchange is familial in the precise sense that each party is performing a known self for a known audience: the exasperating old woman, the frantic girl, both parts worn smooth by a thousand repetitions in the nursery. When the news finally lands, it lands as a benediction inside the same idiom: “Then hie you hence to Friar Laurence’ cell; / There stays a husband to make you a wife” (2.5.68 to 2.5.69), and Juliet exits blessing the messenger as “honest Nurse” (2.5.79). The arc’s peak is here, and the play marks it by making the bond briefly omnipotent: it has procured a husband, defeated the feud’s geography, and turned a daughter’s chamber into the headquarters of a secret state.

One strand of the delay scene’s comedy is usually cut in discussion and should not be, because it shows the messenger exceeding her commission in the direction of love. Woven through the complaints and the fan-waving, the Nurse delivers, in instalments, not merely Romeo’s arrangements but her own sworn assessment of the man: your love, she reports, speaks like an honest gentleman, and a courteous, and a kind, and a handsome, and, she will warrant it, a virtuous one (2.5.56 to 2.5.58, paraphrase of the instalment). She has audited the bridegroom in the street, interrogated his intentions, taken the measure of his company, and she returns as a character witness, staking her credit with the girl on the prisoner’s good report. Messengers in this play are otherwise lethal in their neutrality; letters arrive or fail to arrive with no one’s judgment attached. This messenger attaches hers, fully and on the record, which raises the stakes of everything she will say later. A witness who has vouched for the husband in Act 2 cannot unvouch him in Act 3 without the retraction being heard, by the girl who trusted the vouching, as a judgment on them both. The delay scene’s instalments of praise are therefore not decoration on the arc. They are deposits in the account the counsel will empty, each one itemised in the girl’s memory, each one making the later advice colder by exactly the warmth it cost to say.

The street half of the errand, Act 2 Scene 4, shows the partnership’s price, and the price is paid entirely by the older woman. Sent into public space on a young girl’s love business, the Nurse walks into Mercutio’s sustained bawdy mockery, a performance aimed at her age, her body, and her errand, delivered before an audience of young men. She holds her ground, gets her private word with Romeo, extracts his arrangements, and, in the scene’s most quietly impressive beat, warns him in terms that reveal how completely she has made the girl’s cause her own: if his intent is any kind of dishonest dealing toward her lady, the dealing will be answered for. The warning is usually read as comic bluster. Inside the relationship it is something rarer: the servant assuming, at personal cost to her dignity, the protective office that the girl’s father would perform if the courtship were honourable and open. She is jeered in the street so that Juliet need not be exposed in it. Romeo’s money, pressed on her at the parting and refused before it is accepted, belongs to the same ledger: the errand must not become a transaction, because transactions are what the market in daughters runs on, and this woman is, for now, outside that market, working for love in both senses. The delay comedy of 2.5 is funny partly because the audience has just watched what the news cost to fetch. The teasing is the sound of a bond spending its surplus. Two acts later, the same woman will give Juliet advice that treats her exactly as the market treats her, and the horror of that later scene is measured by the distance from this one.

The partnership had in fact been in the plot’s service before the orchard, and the earlier errand is worth recovering because it shows the bond’s instincts already formed. At the feast in Act 1 Scene 5, it is the Nurse whom Juliet sends to learn the masked stranger’s name, and the Nurse who returns with the answer that rearranges the girl’s life: his name is Romeo, and a Montague. The first fact of the love story reaches the heroine through this channel, as every subsequent fact will, and her response, the famous lament that her only love has sprung from her only hate, is spoken into the older woman’s hearing. There is no interval of deliberation, no testing of the confidante’s discretion. The girl receives the worst news of her life and turns, in the same breath, to the one auditor she has. Shakespeare establishes the pattern early and never varies it until he breaks it: whatever happens to Juliet happens first, in her experience of it, as something told to the Nurse.

Romeo’s side of the street scene completes the partnership’s credentials, because the young man audits the messenger and passes her. He draws her aside, submits to her interrogation, answers her warning with the arrangements she needs, and dismisses her with a commendation of her honesty that she carries back like a second message. The significance inside the relationship is easily missed. Juliet’s trust in the Nurse has until now been an inheritance, the unexamined deposit of childhood. In Act 2 it becomes, for the first time, a judgment confirmed by events: the woman went into the street for the marriage, withstood its dangers and indignities, dealt with the bridegroom as an equal in the negotiation, and returned with the goods. Trust that has been audited by experience is a different substance from nursery faith, and the girl’s escalating commissions of the next two days, the ladder, the ring, are drawn on the audited account. When the counsel scene arrives, it is this account, the tested one, that the advice bankrupts, which is why the loss cannot be written off as the bursting of a child’s illusion. The woman had proven herself in the world, in the open, at cost. The proof is what makes the withdrawal unforgivable in the girl’s accounting: she knew the price of standing with Juliet, had paid it gladly in the street, and declined it in the hall.

One more feature of the partnership deserves record, because the rupture will invert it. In Act 2 the traffic between the two is reciprocal in kind if not in rank. Juliet gives orders, increasingly, but she also gives trust, news, and delight; the Nurse gives service, but she also gives judgment, warning, and the benefit of a whole life’s knowledge of men and households. Each woman is the other’s audience. The heroine’s soliloquies in the orchard are addressed to an absent lover; her spoken self, the self that laughs, schemes, and despairs aloud, exists only in this woman’s company. That is why the partnership scenes feel like the play’s warm interior. They are the one place where the heroine is wholly legible to another person onstage.

Act 3 Scene 2: The Wedding Night, the Ladder, and the First Strain

The arc’s third phase begins in triumph and ends in a hairline crack, and both the triumph and the crack run through the same channel. The wedding night is the partnership’s masterpiece of logistics. The Nurse has carried the word, Romeo has promised the cords, and the older woman bustles between the lovers as the marriage’s only staff: “Hie to your chamber. I’ll find Romeo / To comfort you” (3.2.137 to 3.2.139, selected lines), she tells the waiting girl, having already undertaken the ladder by which the bridegroom will climb. Consider what the ladder means in relationship terms. The Nurse is no longer merely carrying messages between the daughter and the world; she is rigging the father’s house against the father, admitting the enemy’s son to the daughter’s bed under the roof of the feud. Every stage of complicity the plot requires, she supplies without hesitation, and she supplies it in the idiom of care: comfort, haste, the practical kindness of a woman arranging a wedding night as she might have arranged a thousand bedtimes. If the bond is ever to be called maternal without qualification, it is here, where the foster-mother performs the one office the biological mother exists, in the period’s imagination, to prevent until the market has cleared the match.

Then the news arrives, and the channel garbles for the first time. The Nurse enters with the ladder in her hands and death in her mouth, and her grief is so unshaped that Juliet hears the wrong catastrophe entire: the older woman wails for Tybalt, curses Romeo, beats her breast, and lets the girl assemble, from the fragments, the belief that her husband of three hours is dead or a killer past pardon. “O God! Did Romeo’s hand shed Tybalt’s blood?” the girl asks (3.2.71), and for a run of lines the partnership fails at its core function, which is accurate transmission between Juliet and the world. The failure is not treachery; it is temperament. The same volubility that spun the delay comedy now spins panic, and the scene is careful to show the girl repairing the channel herself, seizing the facts one by one until the true shape stands clear: cousin dead, husband banished, marriage intact and worthless in the same breath. Something has quietly changed in the relationship’s balance. In Act 2 the Nurse managed the girl’s ignorance for sport. In Act 3 the girl must manage the Nurse’s disorder for survival. The partnership survives the scene, sealed by the ring Juliet sends after her husband, “Give this ring to my true knight, / And bid him come to take his last farewell” (3.2.142 to 3.2.143), but it survives with its hierarchy reversed. The child has begun, under pressure, to do the steadying for both of them.

Inside the garbling scene sits a smaller exchange that the arc cannot afford to skip, because it contains the first flash of the girl’s later coldness, aimed for once in the other direction. When the Nurse, in her undifferentiated grief, joins the household’s chorus against the banished husband, “Shame come to Romeo,” the girl turns on her with a violence that startles the scene: “Blistered be thy tongue / For such a wish” (3.2.90 to 3.2.91). It is the first time Juliet has ever cursed the woman who raised her, and the curse is a defence of the marriage against its own midwife. The moment passes; the Nurse retreats into her general lament that there is no trust, no faith, no honesty in men (3.2.84 to 3.2.85, paraphrase of the outburst), and the girl softens into self-reproach for chiding her husband at all. But the alignment of the flash matters for everything that follows. The girl has now, once, experienced the Nurse as being on the wrong side of the marriage’s line, aligned by instinct with the world’s judgment against Romeo. In 3.5 that alignment will return as settled counsel. In 3.2 it arrives as grief’s reflex and is forgiven as such, yet the forgiveness has to be performed, talked through, reasoned into place by a thirteen-year-old at midnight on her wedding night. Relationships of the nursery’s kind do not usually require their junior party to perform forgiveness by argument. The requirement is the crack, widening.

The hours before the Nurse’s entrance belong, in the arc, to the partnership’s strangest division of experience, and they complete the picture of what the bond was for. Juliet spends the wedding evening alone in her chamber in the great soliloquy of impatience, summoning night and her husband in verse of mounting erotic confidence, while the woman who made the evening possible is out in the city executing it, finding the bridegroom, settling the ladder, carrying the marriage on her back through the darkening streets. The speech itself, its falconry and its Phoebus, is another article’s territory and is touched here only for its relationship frame: the girl can speak that desire aloud, even alone, because she was raised in a house where one woman never flinched at such speech. The nursery’s charter, adult talk delivered without shame before a child, matures in that soliloquy into the play’s most unembarrassed poetry of wanting. And then the charter’s keeper enters with the cords in her hands and death in her mouth, and within a hundred lines the girl is cursing her tongue and forgiving her by argument. The wedding night thus contains the whole late arc in miniature: inheritance spent gloriously, channel garbled, allegiance flashed wrong, forgiveness manufactured, confidence continued on reduced terms. Nothing in 3.5 should surprise a reader who has watched 3.2 with the relationship in view. The counsel is the garbling grown systematic, the flash of wrong allegiance hardened into policy.

The older woman’s lament in the same scene repays a colder look than it usually receives. There is no trust, no faith, no honesty in men is not information; it is her characteristic processing of catastrophe, proverb in place of plan. Faced with the marriage’s first disaster, she produces weather: general, blaming, unactionable. Juliet, who needs a route to Mantua, an account of the banishment’s terms, a decision about the morning, gets a threnody. The scene thus teaches the audience how to hear the counsel two scenes later. The woman’s mind, loving and capacious in the register of memory and the body, has no register for strategy at all. When strategy is demanded of her in 3.5, she will borrow the household’s, and the borrowing will sound, to the girl who knows the whole truth, like the voice of the enemy speaking through the voice of the nursery.

The ring errand and the ladder errand, taken together, mark the exact summit and the exact limit of the bond. Both errands serve the marriage; both are executed with total loyalty; neither involves the Nurse exercising independent judgment about the girl’s good. Her genius in the partnership is execution animated by love, and her limitation, invisible while the orders are joyful, is that she has no strategy of her own to offer when execution is no longer enough. The girl is growing a strategist’s mind at terrible speed; within a day she will be constructing feints inside her father’s hall that require an accomplice of real nerve. The older woman, confronted in 3.5 with a crisis that execution cannot solve, will reach for the household’s own strategy instead: compliance, survival, the match that is still open. The crack of 3.2 is thus diagnostic rather than accidental. A channel built for carrying messages cannot carry a rebellion, and the play spends the next act proving it, scene by scene, until the channel is closed for good.

Where does the bond break: in the counsel, or in Juliet’s hearing of it?

The bond breaks in the hearing, and the distinction decides how the whole arc should be judged. The counsel, considered as advice from an elderly servant to a ruined girl, is defensible and even kind: the husband is banished, the match is honourable, survival lies that way.

What Juliet hears, alone among the speakers in that room in knowing she is already a wife, is her one witness reclassifying her marriage as an inconvenience to be forgotten. The words are the Nurse’s. The breakage is the meaning they acquire in the ear of the only person who knows the whole truth.

That hearing is prepared by everything the arc has built. A stranger’s advice to commit bigamy would be an outrage to be dismissed. This woman’s advice is a catastrophe to be absorbed, because she is the marriage’s midwife: she fetched it, rigged it, blessed it, and mourned over its first wreckage. Her counsel therefore does not read to Juliet as one opinion among others. It reads as the withdrawal of the marriage’s only witness, and a secret marriage with no witness is, for practical purposes in Verona, a marriage unhappening. The girl’s icy response, examined in the next section, is proportional to exactly that loss.

Act 3 Scene 5: Defence, Counsel, and the Coldest Parting in the Play

The rupture scene must be read whole, because its relationship meaning lives in the sequence. The Nurse does not enter the crisis as Juliet’s enemy. Minutes before the counsel, she does the bravest thing her position allows: she interposes her body and her tongue between Capulet and his daughter, telling the master of the house, in his own hall and at the height of his rage, that he is to blame for rating the girl so. Capulet’s answer teaches the room the price of advocacy: “Peace, you mumbling fool” (3.5.173, as the retort is numbered in the Weis edition), and the threat of worse behind it. Lady Capulet, the biological mother, has already withdrawn with the scene’s most desolate exit line, leaving her daughter to whatever follows. The comparative geometry is exact and should be stated plainly, though the mother’s case belongs to other articles in this series: the woman of blood departs, the woman of milk stays and speaks, and the staying and speaking are not nothing. Any verdict on the counsel that erases the defence has not watched the scene. The relationship does not end because the Nurse was faithless from the start. It ends because her fidelity had a perimeter, and the perimeter ran exactly where Capulet’s authority began.

Inside that perimeter, she gives the counsel: “I think it best you married with the County” (3.5.217). The speech that follows is a small masterpiece of the household’s realpolitik. Romeo is banished and as good as dead; Paris is handsome, wealthy, loving, and present; the girl’s honour, the family’s standing, and her own future all point one way. She even reaches for the pair’s old idiom, the praise of Paris from the nursery scene, the eagle’s eyes and the man of wax, as if the marriage market’s slogans could still be spoken in the voice of the nursery. That recycling is the moment’s true obscenity for Juliet. The intimate register, the bawdy warmth in which she was raised and in which her marriage was plotted, is now being used to sell her erasure. The counsel speech’s every term denies a fact the speaker knows in her body: that the girl is a wife. “Your first is dead,” she says of the living husband, in the counsel’s coldest figure, or as good as dead, which in a witness’s mouth is a sentence, not a metaphor. The full prosecution of this speech, its images weighed one by one and the competing defences heard at length, stands in the article-length verdict on the Nurse’s betrayal at Act 3 Scene 5, and the present article does not retry that case. The relationship question is different. It is not whether the counsel was wicked. It is what the counsel did to the bond, and the answer is that it converted the bond’s own capital, trust accumulated over thirteen years and spent gloriously for three days, into the instrument of the girl’s abandonment. Advice from the market could have been resisted. Advice from the nursery had to be survived.

The scene’s choreography sharpens the wound, and the arc should register who is in the room and in what order they leave it. Capulet rages and departs. Lady Capulet delivers her abandonment and departs. The Nurse, alone of the household’s adults, remains with the girl after the storm, and the privacy of what follows is therefore the old privacy, the chamber’s two-person world in which everything has always been sayable. It is inside that preserved privacy that the counsel is given, which is why it cannot be received as a public act of prudence. It is spoken in the confessional. Minutes earlier, in the same room, Juliet had practised on her mother the equivocal style she uses upward, language with two edges, satisfied with Romeo’s death in a sense the speaker does not mean. With the Nurse she has never needed the double edge; the whole history of the bond is single-edged speech, plain dealing, secrets told straight. The counsel’s deepest injury may be that it obliges the girl, for the first time, to use the upward style downward: the level thanks, the performed gratitude, the dismissal errand dressed as trust. She leaves the scene bilingual, fluent now in the household’s lying idiom in every direction, and the fluency is the tragedy’s quiet measure of what the counsel cost her. The girl who could not dissemble in 1.3 dissembles flawlessly by the end of 3.5, and she learned the necessity in the one room where she had never needed it before.

Juliet’s response is the arc’s most controlled writing, and it belongs to her side of the relationship. She does not rage. She tests: “Speak’st thou from thy heart?” and receives the fatal confirmation, and then performs gratitude for comfort she has not received, in a voice so level that the older woman hears nothing wrong. The test deserves a beat of its own, because it is the bond’s last procedural act and the girl conducts it like a judge giving a condemned institution its formal hearing. She knows the answer before she asks; the question is not inquiry but opportunity, one final doorway held open for the woman to walk back through into allegiance. Had the answer faltered, had the counsel been withdrawn or softened into doubt, the arc might have bent. The answer does not falter. The counsel is confirmed as heart-speech, and with the confirmation the girl closes the file: what was said was not a slip, not the hall’s ventriloquism, but the woman’s own settled mind, and a settled mind cannot be appealed to twice. The procedural fairness of the execution is what makes the subsequent coldness feel judicial rather than petulant. Juliet does not sulk out of the relationship. She hears the evidence, confirms it on the record, and pronounces sentence in the woman’s absence, which is how courts, and now daughters, dispose of what they once held dear. The performance is the break, executed by the injured party with a strategist’s calm. The moment the Nurse leaves, the truth is spoken to the empty room: “Ancient damnation! O most wicked fiend!” (3.5.235), and the sentence that closes the relationship’s account: “Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain” (3.5.240). Every term is chosen from the bond’s own vocabulary and inverted. Bosom: the breast that fed her, the confidence that housed her secrets. Twain: the pair, the two who were one household within the household. The vow of distrust, flagged in the brief for this article as a verification point, is not a tantrum but a severance instrument, drafted by a girl who has just learned that her witness has resigned. From this line forward, the Nurse will be used, thanked, and sent on errands. She will never again be told anything true. The relationship continues in form for two more acts, as service. In substance it is over in this room, and both the pathos and the terror of Act 4 derive from the fact that only one of the two women knows it.

One act of the girl’s in the scene’s tail deserves the arc’s attention before the verdict is weighed, because it is the channel’s last use and its most prophetic. Dismissed in her own heart, the Nurse is immediately re-employed as an instrument: Juliet sends her to Lady Capulet with a constructed story, that the girl has gone, displeased with her father, to Friar Laurence’s cell for confession. The errand is a lie told through the channel to the house, the first time the pair’s traffic has ever carried a falsehood in that direction. Its relationship meaning is bleak and exact. The channel still works; messages still pass; what has changed is the sender’s intent, from confidence to management. Juliet has begun, within the hour of the rupture, to operate the Nurse as she will operate everyone for the rest of the play, as a surface on which a useful story is displayed. The woman leaves the room believing herself trusted with an errand of reconciliation. She has in fact been used to lay a false trail toward the one man who now holds the whole truth, and the transfer of the confiding function, from the nursery to the cell, is completed in the same gesture that conceals it. Act 4’s geography of sealed rooms is already present here, in embryo: a message that travels the old road and means the opposite of what it says.

The counterfactual the scene invites is worth one paragraph, because it calibrates the verdict. Had the Nurse refused the counsel, had she simply held her tongue or counselled delay and prayer, the bond would have survived Capulet’s rage and entered Act 4 as the marriage’s staff and shelter. The plot would still have ground toward the tomb; the feud, the banishment, and the plague saw to that. But Juliet would not have walked there alone, and the play’s final movement would lose the specific desolation it in fact possesses: a heroine conducting her own funeral arrangements in a house full of people, every one of them unusable. The counsel’s damage is therefore not measured in outcomes. Romeo dies by other machinery. It is measured in the texture of the girl’s last days, which the counsel condemns to total solitude, and in the audience’s knowledge that the solitude was chosen for her by the person she trusted most. Betrayal, in the arc’s final accounting, is the correct word for the effect and the wrong word for the motive, and the relationship is the ground on which both halves of that sentence must be held at once.

After the Break: Service Without Trust in Act 4

Act 4 conducts a quiet experiment: it keeps the two women in the same rooms, on the same errands, inside the same routines, and empties every exchange of the one thing that made the earlier scenes glow. The Nurse bustles over the wedding clothes, is sent to wake the bride, weeps over the body with a grief no one in the play doubts, and none of it is the relationship. It is the relationship’s shell, worked by habit after the life has gone out of it. Shakespeare’s construction here is pitiless in a way readers underrate, because the scenes look like continuity. The audience, alone with Juliet in the secret, watches the forms of intimacy performed by a woman who does not know she has been dismissed. The girl’s courtesy to her former confidante in these scenes is flawless and glacial: instructions given, thanks rendered, nothing confided. The contrast with Act 2 could not be more deliberate. In 2.5 the Nurse knew the news before Juliet did and teased her with the knowing. In Act 4 the positions reverse exactly: Juliet knows the one fact that matters, that the seeming corpse will wake, and the Nurse is the last person in Verona who will be told.

The apology scene of Act 4 Scene 2 shows the new order in public session, and its relationship detail is easy to walk past. Juliet returns from the Friar’s cell and performs, before her father, the complete submission the household has demanded: kneeling, begging pardon, promising to be ruled in all things. Capulet, transported, advances the wedding. The audience knows the performance is a feint covering the potion plot. What the arc notices is who else is watching, and what the watching costs the scene. In the old order, a performance by Juliet in that hall would have had one spectator who could read it to the syllable, who had heard the girl’s every register since infancy and could not have been deceived by any of them. That spectator is present in the household’s rooms during these days, busy with the wedding clothes, and she detects nothing, because detection requires the confidence that has been withdrawn. The girl’s new bilingual fluency, learned at such cost in 3.5, is proof against the one reader who should have been proof against nothing. There is a special desolation in being successfully deceived by a person one has raised, and the play leaves it unplayed, offstage in the older woman’s contented bustle, which is where dismissed confidantes live out the remainder of other people’s tragedies.

The dismissal is made textual in the potion scene’s threshold. Alone at last in her chamber, the girl detaches herself from the household person by person, and the Nurse is handled first and fastest: “Ay, those attires are best; but, gentle Nurse, / I pray thee, leave me to myself tonight” (4.3.4 to 4.3.5). The courtesy is exquisite and the adjective is the wound: gentle, the word for a valued servant being thanked and sent away. She then explains to the empty room why the room had to be emptied: “My dismal scene I needs must act alone” (4.3.19). The line is usually read as the heroine’s general resolve. In the arc it is a specific epitaph. The dismal scene is dismal in part because the one companion of every previous scene has been excluded from it by name and adjective, and the girl drinks the potion in the first true solitude of her life. Readers tracing what the loss of the confidante does to the heroine’s conduct from here on, the feigned apology, the solitary resolve, the command of every room she enters, will find the full account in the study of how Juliet outgrows the Nurse and her parents, which owns that development; the present point is narrower. The bond’s ending is the tuition fee for the heroine’s terrible competence. She becomes capable of the tomb because the nursery closed.

The night before that morning deserves its own paragraph, because the play divides the household into two tracks and lets the audience watch both. In the small hours, the Nurse is downstairs in the great chamber, deep in the wedding machinery, exchanging seasoned banter with Capulet, an old servant at ease in the house’s festivities, her service flowing along its accustomed channels toward a wedding she believes in. Upstairs, behind a locked door, the girl she raised is drinking a potion that will counterfeit her death, in a solitude she has specifically engineered against the woman downstairs. The two tracks never meet. No scene in the play stages the Nurse seeking the girl that night, or the girl wavering toward confession; the machinery of the house runs at full cheerful power in one register while the catastrophe assembles itself in silence in the other. That separation is the broken bond rendered as stage geography. In Act 2 the pair inhabited one continuous space of talk, the chamber and the street connected by her comings and goings. By Act 4 the same house contains two sealed worlds, and the woman who was the connecting corridor now walks the lower world only, joking with the master, laying out the bride’s clothes, in perfect ignorance that the corridor has been bricked up above her head.

Then comes the wedding morning, and the arc’s most lacerating piece of construction. Of every soul in the Capulet house, the person sent to wake the bride is the Nurse, because waking her is the Nurse’s office, as it has been since the girl was small enough to be lifted. The discovery speech begins inside the old intimacy, all pet names and routine: “Why, lamb! Why, lady! Fie, you slug-a-bed! / Why, love, I say! Madam! Sweetheart! Why, bride!” (4.5.1 to 4.5.3, selected lines), and curdles in a dozen lines into “she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead” and the repeated “O woeful day” (4.5.23 to 4.5.30, selected lines). The lament that follows is the play’s most unstudied grief, and its relationship meaning is savage: the woman is mourning, in perfect sincerity, a death that her own counsel made necessary and her own exclusion made undetectable. Had the bond held, she would have been inside the potion plot, as she was inside every previous plot, and the morning would have been theatre. Because the bond broke, the morning is genuine, and she grieves over a living girl who is lying there listening to the one person she once told everything, now told nothing, weeping the truth by accident. The scene also quietly completes the substitution the arc has tracked from the start. The parents’ laments in 4.5 are formal, rhetorical, arranged in set speeches. Hers is the mother’s grief in everything but blood, arriving from the body’s knowledge, and it changes nothing. Verona’s order has already decided whose grief will be commemorated. The final scene will raise golden statues to the children of the two houses. The woman who raised one of them is not in the tomb scene at all, and no one asks where she is.

Does the relationship recover after Act 3 Scene 5?

It does not recover, and the text gives the non-recovery a precise shape: continued service, continued affection on one side, and a total, permanent withdrawal of confidence on the other. Juliet never confides in the Nurse again, never explains, never reproaches her to her face, and never readmits her to a single true fact.

The forms persist because households run on forms. The bond, which was made of confided truth, ends at the moment the confiding stops and is not revived by any later kindness.

The absence from the tomb deserves a final sentence of its own. The Friar’s great summary in Act 5 Scene 3 names every agent of the catastrophe in sequence: the feud, the marriage, the banishment, the potion, the letter. The Nurse, who fetched and carried the marriage into being, is not named, because in the official story of the houses she does not exist. The arc thus closes where it opened, on the difference between the two kinds of motherhood the play sets side by side. One kind is inscribed in gold at the city’s expense. The other, which did the work, walks out of the play unthanked by the plot and unforgiven by the daughter, carrying a grief the record does not keep.

What the Bond Costs Each of Them: A Reckoning

Before the critics take the floor, the arc supports a plain reckoning of what the relationship costs each party, because the verdict on its ending depends on understanding what each stood to lose by its survival. Juliet’s stake is total and simple to state: the bond is her world’s only load-bearing relationship. Her parents are authorities, her cousin is a kinsman of the feud, her husband is an exile she has known for days, her confessor is a friar met in crisis. The Nurse is the sole continuous witness of her existence, the only person in Verona who knows her as a whole life rather than as a function. The dependence is not a weakness of character; it is the designed condition of a daughter raised by proxy, and its danger is structural, the danger of any system with a single channel. When the channel closes, there is no redundancy, no second confidante to promote, no reserve of trust to draw on. The girl’s subsequent career, the feints, the potion, the tomb, is conducted in the first person singular because the plural, the small we of the chamber that had carried her since birth, has been dissolved. Her solitude in the last acts is not a mood. It is an inventory: one channel, closed.

The Nurse’s stake is the reckoning’s harder side, because it is easier to miss and uglier to name. She has invested a whole adult life, her youth’s milk, her middle years’ service, her widowhood’s whole emotional estate, in a child she does not own and cannot keep. The investment pays her in the only currencies available to her: place, purpose, affection, the run of the inner rooms. It pays nothing she can bank against the day the investment is called in. A mother by blood who loses a daughter to marriage loses her to honour and gains a son, a standing, a future claim. A nurse who loses her charge to a secret, criminal marriage loses the charge, the place, and the future in a single stroke, and gains a share in the crime. Her counsel in 3.5 can be read, with complete accuracy and complete inadequacy, as the defence of her portfolio. The inadequacy is that portfolios are not usually defended with a breaking heart, and hers breaks audibly in 4.5. The accuracy is that hearts in service break along the lines their employment draws, and hers was drawn, from the first day, by a household that could dismiss her between one sentence and the next.

The reckoning has a final entry, the replacement. A confiding function does not vanish from a life like Juliet’s; it migrates. Within hours of the rupture, the girl is on her knees in Friar Laurence’s cell, transferring the whole weight of her confidence to a man she has known for three days, and the transfer’s terms expose by contrast exactly what the closed channel had provided. The Friar receives her strategy, her desperation, and her obedience to a plan; he never receives her childhood, her laughter, her pet names, or her unguarded self. The new channel is sacramental and transactional, built for a single crisis, operated by appointment, in a cell, under the seal. The old one was continuous, domestic, and total, a presence in the room rather than a destination across the city. Juliet survives the substitution because the crisis requires a strategist more than a witness, and the Friar, whatever his failures, can plot. But the play insists on the cost accounting: the girl who goes to the cell has already lost the person to whom the plot’s outcome would have mattered as her story, and she conducts the rest of her life among functionaries, a priest, a servant with a letter, a husband in exile, each holding one piece of her and none holding the whole. The Nurse held the whole. That is the reckoning’s bottom line, and no subsequent arrangement in the play ever balances it.

Set the two stakes side by side and the rupture’s asymmetry stands clear. For Juliet, the bond’s survival would have cost danger: a conspiracy maintained under her father’s roof, at rising risk, toward an uncertain rescue. For the Nurse, the bond’s survival, on the terms Juliet needed, fidelity against the household in open crisis, would have cost existence: place, home, livelihood, name. The girl asks, without knowing she asks it, for an unconditional love. The woman discovers, without being able to say it, that her love has always had the condition her employer’s roof imposed. Neither discovery is a choice made in malice or in cowardice; both are the structure disclosing itself at the moment of maximum pressure. That is why the scene plays, in performance, as something worse than villainy. Villainy can be hated cleanly. The counsel scene gives the audience a woman choosing survival in the voice of love and a girl recognising the substitution in real time, and recognition, not rage, is what empties the room of air. The verdict this article has carried from its opening, protection in intent and betrayal in effect, is simply the reckoning written as a sentence: the intent was priced in survival, the effect was paid in trust, and the two currencies were never exchangeable.

Barbara Everett, Coppelia Kahn, and the Editor: Three Readings of One Bond

The criticism of this relationship divides along a fault line the arc itself predicts: whether the pair is read from inside, as an emotional reality, or from outside, as a social arrangement. Barbara Everett’s reading, the foundational one for any modern account of the bond, works from inside. In her essay on the Nurse, Everett treats the great reminiscent speech of 1.3 as the woman’s submerged autobiography, the record of a life, a marriage, a dead husband, a dead daughter, carried almost silently beneath the bawdy surface. On Everett’s account the bond is the play’s one portion of ordinary, continuous, bodily love, and the Nurse’s earthiness is not a comic defect but the medium of a real maternity transferred from the lost Susan to the living Juliet. The counsel scene, read this way, cannot be a revelation of hidden selfishness; it must be something sadder, a good love reaching the edge of its world. Everett’s Nurse advises the Paris match the way her whole class and century would advise it, because she cannot imagine a good that requires defying the household, and the failure is finally the world’s narrowness wearing the face of a friend.

Coppelia Kahn’s reading works from outside, and it is the necessary cold water. In her account of the play as a coming of age obstructed by the patriarchal family, the Capulet household is a system for transferring a daughter from father to husband with her value intact, and every adult inside it, the tender Nurse included, is finally an officer of that system. The foster-mother’s love, on this reading, is genuine and irrelevant at the decisive moment, because the system does not pay her to have a conscience about its transactions; it pays her to keep the girl fed, cheerful, and marriageable. When the transaction is threatened, the officer reasserts herself inside the mother. Kahn’s framework explains what Everett’s cannot: why the counsel arrives so fluently, in the household’s own slogans, from a woman who three days earlier rigged a ladder against the household’s will. The ladder served the daughter’s desire while desire still ran in a channel the system could have ratified, a marriage, to a gentleman, with the forms observed. The counsel serves the system at the moment desire becomes rebellion. Between those two services lies the whole distance the arc travels, and Kahn’s cold eye measures it exactly.

Whose reading of the bond is right, Everett’s or Kahn’s?

Kahn’s reading explains the break and Everett’s explains the pain, and the relationship needs both because it is the thing each describes: a real love housed inside a real employment. Kahn is right that genuine affection was never the bond’s constitution, only its content, and that constitutions decide crises.

Everett is right that the affection is the genuine article, the play’s warmest substance. The verdict of this article follows Kahn on the mechanism and Everett on the value: the counsel is the system speaking through the mother, which is why it lands as betrayal rather than as mere disagreement.

The third voice the brief requires is the editor’s, and on this relationship the editorial tradition speaks most usefully through René Weis’s notes to the Arden Third Series edition. Weis’s commentary on 3.5 performs a service neither critic attempts: it keeps the scene’s chronology and pressures in view, noting how the counsel follows within minutes of the Nurse’s own confrontation with Capulet, so that the advice arrives from a woman who has just been reminded, in the crudest terms, of her place in the house. Where Everett generalises the woman and Kahn generalises the system, the edition restores the afternoon: a servant who has been threatened into silence attempts, with the tools silence leaves her, to steer the girl toward the one outcome that keeps them both housed. Jill L. Levenson’s Oxford edition notes press a complementary point about the girl’s answer, glossing the severance lines as the moment Juliet assumes sole management of her case. The disagreement among the three is therefore genuine and three-sided: the bond as emotional substance, the bond as social mechanism, the bond as a sequence of pressures legible only in the scene’s grain. The adjudication this article has argued from its first section is that the mechanism decides what happens and the substance decides what it costs, and that any account of the relationship that suppresses either term will misjudge 3.5, either by acquitting the counsel as mere prudence or by convicting it as mere treachery. The arc is the reconciliation of the three readings: milk first, then errands, then the perimeter, then the silence.

The three readings can be tested against the one scene none of them was built to explain, the discovery of Act 4 Scene 5, and the test sharpens the adjudication. Everett’s account predicts the lament’s authority: the grief of the woman who holds the child’s whole history should be, and in performance invariably is, the scene’s emotional centre, outranking the parents’ formal sorrows in the audience’s belief. Kahn’s account predicts the lament’s nullity: the household’s record will make no room for it, the funeral will proceed as a transaction of the houses, and the servant’s grief will alter no one’s arrangements by a hair. The editorial attention to sequence predicts its sincerity: a woman performing a part she has been assigned would have been given the part’s lines by the plot, and she has been given none, because the plot she was inside ended in 3.5 without her knowledge. All three predictions come true in the same ten minutes of stage time, which is the strongest evidence the article can offer that the adjudication is not a compromise but a description. The bond was substance, mechanism, and sequence at once, and its ending must be mourned, analysed, and timed simultaneously to be understood at all.

One consequence of the verdict deserves stating for readers who will meet this pair in the classroom, where the Nurse is still too often introduced as comic relief with a dirty mind. The cliche keeps the Nurse comic by keeping the relationship invisible; restore the bond, and the play acquires a second, quieter catastrophe that runs underneath the famous one and explains its texture. The lovers’ deaths are the tragedy’s public event. The severance in 3.5 is its private precondition, the moment the heroine’s world narrows to a corridor with one door, marked Friar Laurence. An audience that has watched the arc whole does not experience Act 4 as a girl ingeniously solving problems. It experiences Act 4 as a girl talking to herself in a house full of people, which is a far more desolate spectacle, and a far better account of why the ending, when it comes, feels less like romance than like abandonment completed. Students assembling the pair’s scenes for study often find it helps to lay the arc out as a single chart before writing; the chart below is built for exactly that use, and it transfers cleanly into slide form through a presentation tool such as the ReportMedic PPT Viewer, which keeps the table’s columns legible when the arc is projected for a class.

The InsightCrunch Surrogate-Mother Arc

The table that follows is the article’s findable artifact, named in the brief as the InsightCrunch surrogate-mother arc. It charts the relationship phase by phase, giving for each stage the scenes in which it plays, what passes between the two women, and the state of the bond at that point. Read down the final column and the arc’s shape stands bare: a bond that begins in the body, rises through conspiracy to total trust, and then declines, not through hatred or exposure, but through a single act of well-meant counsel, into service without confidence. No other relationship in the play is given so complete a rise and fall inside so small a compass, and none of the play’s louder catastrophes, the duels, the banishment, the tomb, costs the heroine as much daily warmth as this quiet one.

Phase	Scenes	What passes between them	State of the bond
Milk and memory	1.3	The Nurse recounts the weaning, the earthquake, the dove-house wall; her knowledge of Juliet is bodily and total	Intimacy founded before the action; the girl is known entire
The pitch witnessed	1.3	Lady Capulet sells Paris as a book; the Nurse sells him as a man of wax; Juliet answers her mother with courtesy and keeps her counsel	The servant is the real audience; the mother is a visitor
The commission	2.2	Juliet promises a messenger by nine; the messenger’s identity is never in question	Trust converts into conspiracy; the bond becomes an instrument
The street errand	2.4	The Nurse endures Mercutio’s mockery, warns Romeo against false dealing, and guards the errand from becoming a transaction	Allegiance proven at personal cost; protection runs downward
The delayed news	2.5	Complaints of bones and breath spin out three words of news; Juliet answers teasing with teasing	The bond at its peak; surplus trust spent as play
The wedding night	3.2	The ladder is rigged, Romeo is fetched, the father’s house is turned against the father	Complicity total; the foster-mother performs the forbidden office
The garbled news	3.2	Grief scrambles the report of Tybalt’s death; Juliet must extract the facts herself	First crack; the channel fails at transmission and the child steadies the adult
The defence	3.5	The Nurse rebukes Capulet to his face and is silenced for it	Fidelity at its perimeter; courage real and bounded
The counsel	3.5	Paris is urged, the living husband pronounced as good as dead, the nursery’s idiom used to sell the market’s match	The witness resigns; protection in intent, betrayal in effect
The dismissal	3.5 and 4.3	Juliet performs gratitude, vows her bosom twain, and sends the gentle Nurse from the potion chamber	Confidence withdrawn permanently; service continues
The discovery	4.5	The Nurse wakes the bride with pet names and finds the seeming corpse; her grief is the scene’s most sincere	The shell of intimacy worked by habit; the mourner knows nothing
The absence	5.3	The official account of the catastrophe is given; the woman who carried the marriage is not named in it	The bond erased from the record; statues for the houses, silence for the servant

The middle column of the chart, the traffic, is where the arc’s argument lives, and it rewards a reader’s second pass. In the early rows the traffic runs in both directions and in every currency: memory downward, trust upward, errands outward, news home. In the middle rows the traffic reaches its maximum volume and its maximum risk, ladders and rings, the furniture of a marriage carried piece by piece through a hostile city. In the late rows the column does not empty; it corrupts. Messages still pass, clothes are still carried, a bride is still woken, but the traffic’s truth content falls to zero in one direction while its volume holds, and that combination, full service and no confidence, is the precise definition of the relationship’s afterlife. A bond does not always end when the traffic stops. This one ends while the traffic continues, which is why its ending is so easy to miss and so hard, once seen, to forget.

The chart also settles, by accumulation, the complication the brief instructs this article to hold open: whether the Nurse betrays or protects. Row by row, the answer refuses to simplify. The same woman protects at the ladder and betrays at the counsel, defends at the rebuke and resigns at the advice, and the rows are one woman, not two. What changes down the column is not her heart but her perimeter, the line where the household’s power crosses the nursery’s love. Juliet’s tragedy inside the tragedy is that she discovers the perimeter exists only by striking it, at the one moment of her life when she cannot afford the discovery. For the wider account of what the severance makes of the heroine, her command, her feints, her solitary authorship of the plot’s last movement, the companion study of Juliet’s agency, the girl who drives the plot, takes the story forward from the point this article ends. The bond is finished. What it built in her is not.

An epitaph, then, in the article’s own terms. The relationship between Juliet and the Nurse is the play’s proof that a tragedy can be complete inside a household while the famous tragedy is still assembling itself outside. It has a founding in the body, a flourishing in joy, a perimeter discovered under pressure, and an ending executed in courtesy and never announced. Its two parties part without a farewell scene, a reconciliation, or a gravestone; one dies believing, so far as the text allows anyone to know, that the other still loves her in the old way, and the other lives on in a house of mourning with no office, no function, and no recorded line. The golden statues that close the play memorialize the love the city can use. Nothing memorializes the love that raised the bride, fetched her husband, rigged her wedding night, and woke her on the last morning with pet names on its tongue. Readers who restore the bond to the centre of the heroine’s story, as this article has argued it must be restored, will find the tragedy’s emotional arithmetic altered throughout: every solitude deepened, every errand weighted, and the silence of the final scene, where the woman should be and is not, the loudest silence in the play.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What does Juliet call the Nurse across the play, and when does the warmth leave her forms of address?

Juliet’s names for the Nurse chart the arc by themselves. In the conspiracy scenes the addresses are confectionery: honey Nurse, sweet Nurse, good sweet Nurse, honest Nurse, a vocabulary of endearment no other character in the play receives from her. In the rupture scene the endearments stop before the argument does, replaced by a testing question and a performance of thanks. Afterward the surviving form is gentle Nurse, spoken at the potion chamber door: courtesy intact, warmth withdrawn, the address of a mistress dismissing a valued servant. The names are the relationship’s thermometer, and they fall in a single afternoon.

Q: What does the Nurse endure from Mercutio in Act 2 Scene 4 to complete Juliet’s errand, and what does her endurance cost her?

She endures a sustained public mocking of her age, her body, and her errand, delivered by Mercutio before a laughing audience of young men in the open street. The cost is dignity, the one currency a servant of her years possesses in public. She pays it without flinching, extracts her private conference with Romeo, warns him against any false dealing toward her lady, and completes the errand entire. The scene is the bond’s proof of allegiance under fire: she absorbs the street’s contempt so that the girl in the chamber need never be exposed to it, and she does so for no wage the play records.

Q: What does the Nurse’s teasing delay in Act 2 Scene 5 reveal about the pair’s ease with each other?

The delay reveals a security so complete that the two can waste the play’s most urgent news as a game. The Nurse stretches the announcement across complaints about her bones, her breath, and her errand’s labour, precisely because the bond can afford the waste: the messenger knows she will be forgiven, and the mistress knows the news is safe in the delay. Ease of this order cannot be commanded or purchased. It is the deposit of thirteen years, and Shakespeare spends a whole scene displaying it so that the audience will know, two acts later, exactly what quantity of trust the counsel scene is destroying.

Q: Why can Juliet tease the Nurse about being out of breath in Act 2 Scene 5, and what does that licensed mockery show?

Juliet can tease because the relationship licenses insubordination in both directions, a privilege no other pair in the Capulet house enjoys. Her logic-chopping reply, that a woman with breath to plead breathlessness has breath enough, is a schoolroom joke between intimates, and the Nurse receives it as one. The mockery shows that the girl’s wit, suppressed into courtesy before her parents, has a native home in this company: she is funnier, freer, and more herself with the servant than with anyone in the play until Romeo. Licensed teasing is intimacy’s signature, and its total absence after Act 3 is one measure of the loss.

Q: Who arranges the rope ladder for the wedding night, and what does that errand reveal about the Nurse’s place inside the marriage?

The Nurse arranges it, undertaking to fetch the cords by which Romeo will climb to the chamber, as she undertakes to fetch Romeo himself for the girl’s comfort. The errand reveals that she is not the marriage’s messenger but its staff: quartermaster, chaperone in reverse, and sole domestic officer. A go-between carries words. This woman rigs the father’s house against the father, admitting the enemy’s son to the daughter’s bed, and performs the office in the idiom of bedtime care. Her place inside the marriage is therefore structural. When she resigns at the counsel, the marriage loses not a servant but its only infrastructure.

Q: Why does the Nurse complain of her aching back and bones in Act 2 Scene 5 yet keep running Juliet’s errands?

The complaints are partly genuine, an aging body’s honest ledger after a morning crossing Verona, and partly performance, the recognised overture to the teasing delay. She keeps running because the errands are the bond’s working form: service is how her love moves through the world, and she no more experiences the running as a burden than the complaining as a refusal. The pairing of groans and obedience is the character in miniature. Her body protests every commission and her allegiance executes every one, a rhythm that holds until Act 3, when for the first time the allegiance, not the body, is what fails to arrive.

Q: What does the Nurse’s garbled report in Act 3 Scene 2 make Juliet believe about Romeo for a few terrible lines?

The garbled report makes Juliet believe, for the space of the Nurse’s wailing, that Romeo himself is dead, or dead in effect: the lament pours out Tybalt’s name, curses Romeo, and beats its breast without sorting killer from killed, and the girl assembles the worst construction the fragments allow. The misunderstanding is the arc’s first crack made audible. The channel that carried the marriage flawlessly now fails at plain transmission under grief, and Juliet must interrogate the facts out of her own messenger line by line. The partnership survives the scene, but its hierarchy has quietly reversed: the child steadies the adult.

Q: Why does Juliet send her ring to Romeo through the Nurse in Act 3 Scene 2, and what trust does the errand carry?

Juliet sends the ring because the Nurse is the only road between the chamber and the banished husband, and because a ring is not a message but a pledge: the errand carries the marriage itself, in token, across a city where its existence is a capital secret. The trust is therefore total in kind. She is placing the physical sign of her wifehood in the hands of the one person who knows everything, at the moment of that person’s demonstrated unsteadiness under grief. The ring errand is the bond’s last complete act of confidence, which is why its memory hangs over the counsel scene: this is the woman, and this is what she was trusted with.

Q: At what point in the arc does Juliet begin directing the Nurse instead of asking her, and which scene marks the turn?

The turn is gradual through Act 2, where petitions acquire the polish of commands, and unmistakable in Act 3 Scene 2, where the girl interrogates her garbling messenger, corrects her, absolves Romeo against her curses, and issues the ring commission in a single commanding sequence. The scene marks the relationship’s inversion: the nursling becomes the officer, the officer becomes the instrument. The change is the heroine’s growth registering inside the bond, and it matters for the rupture, because the counsel of 3.5 is delivered to a girl who has already stopped being a child in the partnership, whatever the speaker still believes.

Q: During Lady Capulet’s pitch for Paris in Act 1 Scene 3, what does the Nurse supply to the conversation that the mother cannot?

She supplies the daughter. Lady Capulet brings the commission, the suitor’s name, and the book metaphor, but she cannot say how old Juliet is, how she was raised, what she was like at three, or how her body and temper run, and she must keep the servant in the room to furnish every one of those facts. The Nurse supplies the child’s whole history and, with it, the scene’s only warmth, praising Paris in the idiom of flesh while the mother praises him in the idiom of print. The pitch scene thus quietly establishes the household’s true wiring: authority speaks first, knowledge speaks longest, and the girl listens to the second.

Q: Why is Paris, rather than Romeo, the subject on which the bond finally breaks?

Paris is the breaking subject because he is the one topic on which the Nurse’s two loyalties cannot both be served. Over Romeo, her service to the daughter and her instinct for the girl’s happiness ran together, and the feud was an external obstacle both could conspire against. Paris reverses the geometry: he is the father’s candidate and the market’s remedy, so that advising him means advising the daughter to dissolve her marriage in the household’s interest. Romeo made the Nurse a conspirator. Paris makes her an officer again. The bond breaks on him because he is the point where her employment and her love issue opposite orders, and the employment speaks first.

Q: Why does the Nurse’s counsel wound Juliet more than Capulet’s rage had done minutes earlier?

Capulet’s rage wounds as weather wounds, from a quarter where storms are expected: a father’s fury at a refused match is inside the period’s script, and Juliet has been armoring against that script since the feast. The counsel wounds from inside the armor. It comes from the marriage’s midwife and only witness, in the nursery’s own idiom, and it reclassifies the girl’s wifehood as a youthful error to be discarded, by the one voice whose recognition made that wifehood real. Rage threatens the daughter’s future. The counsel annuls her past, and it is spoken by the keeper of that past, which is why the answer is not defiance but a vow of permanent distrust.

Q: What does the Nurse stand to lose if she defies Capulet openly in Act 3 Scene 5?

She stands to lose her place, her lodging, her livelihood, and her identity, at an age when a dismissed servant of her years has no second household waiting. Capulet has just demonstrated the tariff in the same scene, silencing her intercession with contempt and the threat behind it, in her employer’s hall, before witnesses. Her entire material existence is a tenancy inside his favour, and her defiance of him, minutes earlier, already spent more credit than a servant safely holds. The calculation does not acquit the counsel, but it prices the alternative honestly: open defiance would have cost her everything she is, for a gesture that could not have stopped the wedding by one hour.

Q: Does the Nurse ever expose Juliet’s secret marriage after the break, and what does her silence prove about the bond?

She never exposes it. Through the forced wedding preparations, the discovery of the seeming corpse, and the catastrophe itself, the secret she alone holds in that house is never traded, threatened, or used, though it might have purchased her safety or her absolution a dozen times. The silence proves that the bond’s failure was a failure of courage and imagination, not of loyalty’s root: she will not harm the girl even after the girl has dismissed her, even in ignorance of the dismissal. It is the arc’s final complication. The allegiance she could not speak in counsel, she keeps in discretion, and the keeping saves no one, which is the tragedy’s waste in miniature.

Q: How do Juliet’s two partings in Act 3 Scene 5, from her mother and from the Nurse, differ?

The parting from her mother is a dismissal suffered; the parting from the Nurse is a dismissal executed. Lady Capulet withdraws first, closing her part with a sentence of abandonment, and Juliet receives it kneeling, as a daughter receives a sentence. The Nurse remains, counsels, and is then dismissed by the daughter herself, in a performance of gratitude so controlled that the older woman leaves suspecting nothing. One parting is done to Juliet by blood. The other is done by Juliet to milk, and the difference measures her growth inside the scene: by its end she is no longer the person things are done to. She is the author of the colder of the two farewells.

Q: What excuse does Juliet give to send the Nurse from the room on the potion night in Act 4 Scene 3?

Her excuse is devotion. She asks the gentle Nurse to leave her to herself for the night because she has need of many orisons, prayers to move her to a fitting state for the ceremony ahead. The pretext is perfectly chosen: piety is the one reason a servant cannot question and a household cannot refuse, and it converts the dismissal into a mark of the girl’s supposed submission to the wedding. Behind it stands the truth she speaks once alone, that her dismal scene must be acted by herself. The excuse is the bond’s epitaph disguised as a courtesy: the confidante is sent away so that the confiding can stop forever.

Q: Why is the Nurse the person who finds Juliet’s body on the wedding morning in Act 4 Scene 5?

She finds the body because waking the girl is her office, as it has been since the girl was small: she is the household’s appointed first presence of every day of Juliet’s life, come with the wedding clothes and the morning’s pet names. The construction is the arc’s cruelest rhyme. The woman who first held the living child is sent, by routine, to discover the seeming corpse, and her ignorance of the potion plot, the direct consequence of the broken bond, makes her grief the only wholly genuine mourning in the scene. Had the confidence survived, she would have been acting. Because it died in 3.5, she is discovering.

Q: How do productions stage the pair’s physical closeness early in the play, and how do they withdraw it after the break?

Early scenes are conventionally staged in contact: the girl in the older woman’s lap or against her shoulder in 1.3, hands held and faces close in 2.5, the chamber played as a two-woman world from which rank is absent. After 3.5 the same productions discover the distance the text has built: errands taken standing, thanks rendered across the room, the potion-night dismissal played at the door. The withdrawal is rarely underscored, which is its power. Audiences feel the temperature drop before they can name it, and the wedding morning lands harder because the woman who enters with the clothes is reaching, by habit, for a closeness the play has already buried.

Q: What is the InsightCrunch surrogate-mother arc, and what pattern does it expose?

The InsightCrunch surrogate-mother arc is this article’s chart of the relationship across its twelve phases, from milk and memory in Act 1 to the absence of the final scene, recording what passes between the two women at each stage and the state of the bond as it changes. The pattern it exposes is a rise and fall driven not by affection, which never fails on one side and never wavers on the other until the counsel, but by perimeter: the bond thrives wherever the household does not press, and breaks at the exact point where the father’s authority crosses the nursery’s love. Read down its final column, intimacy becomes service, and service becomes silence.

Q: Why does the Nurse go on calling Juliet her lamb and her ladybird after their interests have split?

She goes on because the names are not a policy but a reflex, the sediment of thirteen years deposited in her tongue, and because she does not know the interests have split. Juliet’s dismissal was executed in a performance the older woman could not read, so the Nurse continues inside a relationship that, unknown to her, has already ended. The persistence of the pet names is thus the arc’s saddest mechanic: they survive the bond they named, arriving on the wedding morning in the discovery speech, where lamb and lady are addressed to a girl the speaker believes dead, by the only person who ever used them, who will not use them again.