Apostrophe is the engine inside the great soliloquies of Romeo and Juliet, and the soliloquies are where the play keeps its real action. The familiar account of these speeches treats them as outpourings: feeling rises, the character speaks, the audience overhears a heart. The text supports a harder reading. Again and again the lovers stop describing their condition and start addressing it, turning from narration to summons, from reflection to command. Juliet does not meditate on the slowness of the day; she orders the sun’s horses to gallop. Romeo does not report despair at the news from Verona; he defies the stars to their faces, then walks into a tomb and negotiates with death, with the grave that holds his enemy, and with his own eyes and arms. Soliloquy in this play is not thought overheard. It is appeal lodged, in the vocative case, with every power the lovers believe might still be listening.
The misreading has a pedigree worth naming. The Romantic centuries taught readers to prize the soliloquy as the moment a character stops performing and starts feeling, and the lovers’ speeches, famous in extracts, were absorbed into that lesson as its prettiest evidence. On the extract page, stripped of their occasions, the speeches do look like effusions. Restored to their scenes, they look like work. Each is occasioned by a specific failure of the human network around the speaker: a marriage concealed from the house, a message delayed, a sentence of exile, a letter lost. Each responds to its occasion not by describing a feeling but by attempting an act upon the only addressees left. The outpouring account cannot explain the speeches’ grammar, their imperatives and conditions and contracts. The appeal account explains nothing else.
The verdict argued through the whole of this article is that apostrophe in Romeo and Juliet is dramatic action, not ornament and not empty convention. Apostrophe is the lovers’ characteristic deed. Barred from every human hearer who could act on what they say, since the fathers will not listen, the Nurse will not carry the message straight, and the Friar’s plans break in transit, the lovers redirect speech toward the cosmos itself. Night is summoned like a servant and a chaperone. Fortune is bargained with like a faithless guardian. The stars are defied like a court whose sentence has been read out. Death is accused, toasted, and finally welcomed with the grammar of a bridegroom. Each address performs something: a decision taken, a rite conducted, a contract signed, a farewell executed. Strip the apostrophes out of these speeches and the lines that remain describe a tragedy. With them, the speeches are the tragedy, transacted in words.
The argument is built from a catalogue rather than from isolated beauties, and the catalogue follows a strict rule of admission. An appeal counts only where speech turns and aims: a vocative, an imperative, or a second person pronoun bent toward an absent, dead, inanimate, or abstract hearer. Mere mention of the night earns no row, and neither does metaphor, however splendid. Romeo calling Juliet the sun describes her to no one in particular; Romeo ordering the sun to rise and kill the moon addresses an agent and issues an order, and only the second act earns a place. Under that rule the play yields twenty six major appeals. The strictness is the point. A generous count, sweeping in every personifying figure, would make apostrophe a synonym for figurative language and dissolve the argument. A strict count keeps the figure visible as an act with a grammar, a distribution among speakers, and a history inside the five acts.
The evidence is catalogued below in full, speaker by speaker and addressee by addressee, because the pattern only becomes visible when the appeals are counted together rather than admired one at a time. All quotations follow the Arden Third Series edition of the play edited by René Weis, cited by act, scene, and line, and quotation is kept brief as the figure itself demands: an apostrophe is a short, sharp turn of address, and its power lies in compression.
Two addresses anchor the argument and repay being flagged at the outset, since the brief for the series singles them out for verification. The first is Juliet’s summons of the civil night at 3.2.10-11, the sober suited matron hired to cloak a wedding the city has forbidden: the play’s fullest command apostrophe, delivered by its least powerful speaker. The second is Romeo’s paired address to his eyes and his poison at 5.3.112-120, farewell and toast within nine lines of each other, the catalogue’s last full entry. Between the matron summoned at a window in Act 3 and the apothecary thanked in a tomb in Act 5, the whole career of the figure is contained: the same grammar, the same confidence of address, and a world of hearers shrunk from the turning heavens to a vial of poison. Everything argued below is an unfolding of the distance between those two addresses.
What Is Apostrophe? Address to What Cannot Answer
Apostrophe, in the rhetoric the play’s first audiences learned at school, is a turning away. The Greek word names a speaker’s swerve from the hearers actually present toward a hearer who is absent, dead, inanimate, or abstract. Quintilian treats the figure in the Institutio Oratoria as a diversion of speech from the judges toward another party, an adversary, a god, a city, even the speaker’s own soul. Henry Peacham, whose Garden of Eloquence circulated in the decades before the play, defines apostrophe as the moment a speaker leaves the common course of speech and turns to a new hearer. George Puttenham, Englishing the figures for vernacular poets in The Arte of English Poesie, calls it the turne tale, the tale that turns. The definition matters because the figure is often confused with mere exclamation or with personification at large. Apostrophe is narrower and stranger than either. It is address, direct and grammatical, built on the vocative and the imperative, aimed at a hearer who by the rules of the world cannot reply.
That last condition is the figure’s whole point. An apostrophe does not fail when the addressee stays silent; silence is its native weather. The speaker who cries “Come, civil night” (3.2.10) is not expecting an answer in words. The address itself is the event: it installs the absent thing in the position of a thou, a counterpart, and thereby constitutes the speaker as an I with standing to command, to bargain, to accuse, or to beg. Rhetoricians filed apostrophe among the figures of amplification because it heightens, but heightening is a side effect. The primary work is jurisdictional. Apostrophe moves a feeling out of the private register of description and into the public register of address, where claims can be lodged, contracts witnessed, and sentences appealed. A lover who says the night is slow has made an observation. A lover who orders the night to come has filed a claim against the order of the world.
The play needs the distinction because its world is built on failed address. Verona is a city of speeches that miss their hearers. The Prince’s edicts are proclaimed to streets that brawl again within the act. Capulet’s commands land on a daughter who has already married the enemy they name. The Friar’s letter, the single most consequential piece of address in the plot, never reaches the man it is written for. Against this wreckage of human correspondence, the lovers’ apostrophes stand out precisely because their hearers are impossible. Night, stars, fortune, death: none of these can receive a letter, and none can betray one. The lovers speak to the cosmos because the cosmos is the only address in Verona that cannot be intercepted.
What is the difference between apostrophe and a plain exclamation?
An exclamation vents feeling without aiming at a hearer, while apostrophe aims. “O, I am fortune’s fool!” (3.1.131) bursts out of Romeo with no addressee named, grief escaping in a cry. “Then I defy you, stars!” (5.1.24) turns that grief outward toward a singled out power and defies it in the second person.
The first line reports a state. The second performs an act of defiance, and the difference between the two lines is the difference between the play’s weather and its plot.
Apostrophe also differs from the aside and from ordinary dialogue by the direction of its turn. Dialogue supposes a partner on stage who can answer in kind, and the aside supposes the audience as confidant. Apostrophe supposes a partner who is constitutionally silent, and borrows the energy of dialogue while denying its reciprocity. This is why the figure clusters in soliloquy. A character alone on stage has no partner for dialogue, and a playwright who wants that solitude to remain active, rather than reflective and still, gives the solitary speaker someone to address. The night, the vial, the dagger, the corpse: the play keeps furnishing its soliloquists with silent partners, and the soliloquies keep the temperature of combat long after every human opponent has left the stage.
One more distinction disciplines the catalogue that follows. Not every mention of night or death is an apostrophe. The figure requires the turn: a vocative, an imperative, a second person pronoun bent toward the absent thing. When Romeo says that Juliet is the sun, he builds a metaphor inside a speech about her. When he cries “Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon” (2.2.4), he addresses the sun as an agent and orders an execution, and the line crosses into apostrophe. The catalogue below counts only the crossings, the moments where speech turns and aims. Even with that strict rule, the count is high, and its distribution across speakers and acts is the argument of this article in miniature.
The figure arrived in this play with two pedigrees, and both governed how the first audiences heard it. The first pedigree is amorous. The sonnet tradition that Romeo speaks in his earliest scenes is built on apostrophe to an absent mistress: Petrarch addresses Laura in her absence and after her death, addresses Love as a presiding lord, addresses his own eyes and heart as separate tenants of his body. The English sonneteers of the early 1590s imported the machinery wholesale, so that a playgoer of the middle of that decade had heard hundreds of appeals to ladies who were not in the room and to abstractions that could not be anywhere. Romeo’s opening idiom is that machinery running on habit. Part of the play’s design is to show what happens when the same machinery is seized by speakers whose need is not conventional. Juliet has no sonnet sequence behind her speeches, which is one reason her apostrophes sound so different from her husband’s early ones: where his are inherited, hers are invented on the spot out of the materials of the hour, a matron night, a team of horses, a faithless goddess, a glass vial.
The second pedigree is forensic. In the law courts and pulpits from which Quintilian drew the figure, apostrophe was the advocate’s turn: counsel swings away from the bench to address the absent accused, the dead victim, the city itself, and the turn announces that argument has reached the point where it becomes summons. Grammar school declamation trained boys in exactly that swing, setting them to accuse and defend figures from history in set speeches where the opponent’s absence was the condition of the exercise. An audience raised on such training heard an apostrophe the way a trained listener hears a cadenza, as a known technique executed under pressure, and judged the execution. Conventionality, in such a culture, is not the opposite of force. It is the shared standard that makes force measurable, and the play exploits the standard relentlessly, letting Mercutio execute the figure as parody, the Friar as doctrine, the mourners as ceremony, and the lovers as if their lives depended on the vocative, which by the last act they do.
The InsightCrunch Apostrophe Catalogue: Appeals by Speaker and Addressee
The table below is the InsightCrunch apostrophe catalogue, a record of the play’s major appeals arranged by speaker, addressee, and location, with the act each appeal performs. It is a working instrument rather than a trophy list. Readers pursuing the figure through a personal text can keep the catalogue beside the play in a reference file such as VaultBook, marking each appeal as it arrives and testing the claims made here against the order of the scenes. Two features of the catalogue deserve notice before its rows are read one by one. First, the addressees ascend. The appeals begin with an audience and an absent mistress, rise through horses, night, and fortune, and end with a tomb, a corpse, a poison, and a dagger: the cosmos the lovers address grows steadily more funereal as their human world closes. Second, the speakers narrow. Early rows belong to a crowd of voices, the Chorus, Mercutio, the Friar, Romeo, Juliet. Late rows belong almost entirely to the two lovers, alone, addressing things. The catalogue is the tragedy’s shape drawn in grammar.
| Speaker | Addressee | Act and scene | What the appeal performs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chorus | The audience | Prologue | A plea for patient attention, the play’s one appeal certain of its hearer |
| Romeo | Love and hate as abstractions | 1.1 | A lament displaced from an absent mistress onto warring qualities |
| Mercutio | Romeo, absent and hiding | 2.1 | A mock conjuration, summoning a lover by the features of his mistress |
| Romeo | The moon | 2.2 | A dismissal, ordering the sun to kill the envious moon |
| The stars, as Romeo imagines them | Juliet’s eyes | 2.2 | An entreaty, heaven begging leave to trade places with her eyes |
| Juliet | Romeo, absent | 2.2 | A summons and a command, that he refuse his name and be some other name |
| Friar Laurence | The grace lodged in herbs and stones | 2.3 | An exclamation of doctrine, wonder addressed to a property of creation |
| Juliet | The sun’s horses | 3.2 | A command to gallop, hurrying the day toward its lodging |
| Juliet | Civil night | 3.2 | A summons for concealment, night hired as chaperone and cloak |
| Juliet | Romeo, absent | 3.2 | A summons home, the husband called across the dark by name |
| Juliet | Fortune | 3.2 | A bargain, fickleness itself asked to prove fickle and send him back |
| Friar Laurence | Sin and unthankfulness | 3.3 | A rebuke addressed over Romeo’s head to the faults themselves |
| Romeo | Fortune | 3.1 | A verdict accepted, the speaker naming himself fortune’s fool |
| Juliet | The vial | 4.3 | A summons to the test, the draught called forward like a servant |
| Juliet | Her mother and the Nurse, departed | 4.3 | A farewell flung at an empty door, retracted before it can be heard |
| Capulet | Juliet, believed dead | 4.5 | A lament over the body, grief addressing the one hearer it cannot reach |
| Romeo | The stars | 5.1 | A defiance, the sentence of heaven rejected to its face |
| Romeo | Mischief | 5.1 | A bitter salute to the speed with which despair finds desperate men |
| Romeo | The tomb, maw and womb of death | 5.3 | An accusation, the grave charged as a keeper gorged with the world’s dearest |
| Romeo | Tybalt’s corpse | 5.3 | An apology, pardon begged from the enemy his hand put there |
| Paris | Juliet, dead | 5.3 | A bridal lament, flowers strewn by the suitor the marriage passed over |
| Romeo | His own eyes and arms | 5.3 | Farewell commands, the body ordered to perform its last offices |
| Romeo | His own lips | 5.3 | A sealing order, the doors of breath commanded to close on a kiss |
| Romeo | The poison, as guide and apothecary | 5.3 | A contract and a toast, the drug hired, thanked, and drunk to love |
| Juliet | Romeo, dead | 5.3 | A reproach, the beloved chided as a churl for leaving no drop behind |
| Juliet | The dagger | 5.3 | A welcome, the blade greeted as happy and given its sheath |
Read down the final column, the catalogue tells a single story in four moods. The early appeals are commands issued in confidence: gallop, come, arise and kill. The middle appeals bargain: fortune is reasoned with, the vial is summoned to a test whose terms Juliet sets. The late appeals accuse and defy: the stars are rejected, the tomb is charged, mischief is saluted with the politeness of a man who has stopped expecting justice. The last appeals are farewells and welcomes addressed to the instruments of death themselves, and they are the calmest lines in the table. The grammar of address stays intact to the end. What changes is the size of the world in which an address can still be imagined to land.
The catalogue’s silences are as informative as its rows. Tybalt never apostrophizes. The feud’s most devoted servant addresses only present enemies, in the present tense, with a drawn sword for punctuation; his imagination has no absent jurisdiction because the code he serves has an answer for everything within reach. The Nurse never apostrophizes either, though she talks more than almost anyone: her speech requires a live hearer the way a market requires customers, and the play never leaves her alone with her thoughts because, in the economy of the household, she is not understood to have any that matter. Lady Capulet’s one flash of cosmic address is outsourced to a wish about her daughter’s grave, spoken to the daughter’s face. The pattern of the missing rows confirms the pattern of the present ones. Apostrophe in this play is the rhetoric of those who have been refused a hearing in the rooms where their lives are decided, and the refusal is distributed by rank and by age with bureaucratic precision. The young, the female, and the exiled hold the vocatives. The seated hold the floor.
A row of the catalogue is read by asking three questions of it. Who is imagined to hear? The answer locates the appeal on the play’s map of jurisdictions, household, heaven, grave, or the speaker’s own body. What act does the appeal perform? Summons, bargain, accusation, pardon, contract, and farewell are deeds, and naming the deed converts a lyrical moment back into the plot event it is. What silence follows? In every case the same silence, but its meaning changes with the deed: after a summons it is suspense, after a bargain it is refusal, after a farewell it is peace. A reader who runs the three questions down the table’s twenty six rows will find the tragedy assembling itself without a single scene being summarized, which is the catalogue’s claim to usefulness. It is not an ornament of the argument. It is the argument, in tabular form.
Commands, Bargains, Defiances: The Moods of Apostrophe
A catalogue sorted by speaker shows who appeals. A sorting by grammatical mood shows something closer to the play’s moral physics, because the mood of an appeal is a precise report on the power relation the speaker imagines between the self and the cosmos. The play uses four moods of address, and the lovers travel through all four in order.
The first mood is command, and it belongs to confidence. Its verbs are naked imperatives with the addressee as instrument: gallop, spread, come, arise, kill, look, take, seal. Command apostrophe imagines a universe staffed like a great house, in which night keeps the curtains, horses keep the hours, and eyes and arms keep their offices, and a sufficiently authoritative voice can set the whole household in motion. Juliet’s wedding night speech is the mood’s masterpiece because her actual authority is nil and her grammatical authority is absolute; the imperatives accumulate in exact proportion to her powerlessness elsewhere. Romeo takes the mood up only at the end, when the commands narrow to his own body and his hired poison, the last two servants whose obedience can still be counted on. Between her Act 3 commands to the sky and his Act 5 commands to his lips, the play measures the collapse of the imaginable staff, from the whole cosmos on duty to a face and a flask.
The second mood is bargain, and it belongs to speakers who have discovered that the addressee has interests. Bargaining apostrophe adds what command lacks: premises, concessions, conditions, a because. Juliet’s negotiation with Fortune is the type specimen, four lines that concede the goddess’s character, derive the consequence, and name the requested action. The Friar’s rhetoric runs on the same rails in doctrinal dress, his herb speech balancing womb against tomb and grace against poison in the antitheses of a man accustomed to a universe that keeps accounts. Bargaining is the mood of the play’s middle, the mood of people who still believe the cosmos can be reasoned with because it resembles, in its bookkeeping, the world of fathers and friars below. Its failure is registered quietly. No bargain in the play is ever accepted, and after Act 3 the mood vanishes from the lovers’ mouths. Juliet’s last negotiations are with a vial, conducted in the interrogative, and Romeo does not bargain at Mantua at all.
The interrogative deserves its own word here, since it is the mood of apostrophe breaking down. In the potion soliloquy the questions are aimed at circumstance without a vocative to land on: what if the mixture fails, what if the vault wakes her early, what if the Friar’s charity was poison in disguise. Grammar marks the crisis exactly. Command and bargain both presuppose a thou; the string of questions presupposes only a void with contingencies in it. The speech recovers address at its close by returning to the vocative, Romeo’s name struck three times, and the recovery registers as resolution precisely because the alternative has been heard, address dissolved into hypothesis. The play in miniature stands there: where the thou holds, the self holds; where the thou dissolves, the self is left cross examining the dark.
The third mood is defiance, command turned inside out. Defiance keeps the vocative and the second person but reverses the direction of obedience: the speaker does not order the power to act, but refuses the power’s order. “Then I defy you, stars!” is grammatically a sentence passed on heaven by the condemned, and its brevity is structural, since defiance has no terms to propose and no concessions to make. Mercutio’s dying curse belongs to the same mood family, address as sentence: the plague is not requested from any power but pronounced, the speaker appointing himself the court’s voice. Defiance is the rarest mood in the catalogue and the last to arrive, because it requires the speaker to have stopped hoping for a hearing altogether while still believing a hearer exists to be defied. It is apostrophe at the edge of unbelief, one step from silence, and the play spends it at full strength exactly twice, in the square and at Mantua.
The fourth mood is farewell, and it is the mood the play ends in. Farewell apostrophe releases rather than summons: “look your last”, “take your last embrace”, “there rust, and let me die”. Its imperatives are permissions, orders that set the addressee free from service, eyes pensioned from seeing, lips sealed and discharged, a dagger given its rest in the sheath. The mood’s tenderness is inseparable from its finality, since a farewell builds the hearer’s permanent absence into its own grammar and therefore cannot be disappointed. Every earlier mood risked the silence of the cosmos. Farewell needs nothing back. That the lovers’ most serene lines are farewells, spoken to a body, a poison, and a knife, is the catalogue’s bleakest finding and its most consistent one: in this play the only apostrophes that cannot fail are the ones that ask for nothing beyond an ending.
A fifth form stands at the border of the moods and partakes of several: the toast, in which the address and the act are simultaneous. Juliet drinks to the absent Romeo; Romeo drinks to the present poison, thanking it by its professional title. The toast is command, bargain, and farewell compressed into a raised cup, an appeal whose answer is the drinking itself. Both lovers end their last solitary speeches in toasts, hers to a husband, his to a drug, and the play underlines the symmetry by giving the two speeches the same architecture, a survey of addressees narrowing to one name and one draught. Counted across the catalogue, the moods keep a chronology no character announces. Command governs wherever hope is warm, bargain flickers in the middle acts and dies there, defiance arrives only after the killings, and farewell owns the tomb. The sequence is an education run backwards: the lovers begin by treating the universe as staff, then as a court, then as an enemy, then as a congregation to be dismissed. Speakers outside the lovers’ arc sit fixed at single stations of the sequence, which is how the catalogue catches them. The Friar never leaves the neighbourhood of bargain, the Chorus never leaves its courteous petition, Paris never gets past ceremony’s threshold, and Mercutio, characteristically, reaches defiance before anyone, in a curse the lovers spend two acts learning how to pronounce.
Juliet in Act 3 Scene 2: Night Commanded, Fortune Bargained With
The densest concentration of apostrophe in the play is Juliet’s wedding night speech, and the speech earns its density because every condition for the figure is present at maximum strength. The speaker is alone. The desired hearer, her husband, is absent and cannot be summoned by any human messenger she trusts with the whole truth. The event she waits for is governed by powers no petition to her parents could move: the rotation of the day, the coming of dark. So the speech does what the play’s soliloquies characteristically do. It promotes the conditions of the wait into persons, and then it addresses them. A full scene by scene reading of the speech as desire’s hymn is available in Juliet’s ‘Gallop apace’ speech read as a hymn of desire; the concern here is narrower and more grammatical, the machinery of address by which that desire goes to work.
The speech opens in the imperative mood and never entirely leaves it. “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds, / Towards Phoebus’ lodging” (3.2.1-2): the first verb of the soliloquy is a command, and its object is the machinery of the sky. Juliet addresses the sun’s horses as a coachman addresses a team, then reaches past them to their driver, imagining a waggoner like Phaethon who would whip the team westward and “bring in cloudy night immediately” (3.2.4). The apostrophe performs a transfer of authority. In the household below, Juliet can command nothing; her wedding has been arranged in rooms she did not enter, and her husband’s fate is being decided in streets she cannot walk. In the soliloquy she commands the cosmos, and the commands are neither frantic nor decorative. They are brisk, specific, and logistical: spread the curtain, wink the runaways’ eyes, let Romeo leap to these arms “untalked of and unseen” (3.2.7). Addressed to night, the speech becomes a set of stage directions for the wedding night itself, issued by the one person Verona never consults.
The great summons follows. “Come, civil night, / Thou sober-suited matron all in black” (3.2.10-11) is the brief’s verification point, and it repays slow attention because the vocative carries an entire social fiction. Juliet does not call on night as a force of nature. She casts night as a matron, a respectable chaperone in sober dress, and hires her: “learn me how to lose a winning match” (3.2.12), hood the blushes in her cheeks with a black mantle, keep the proceedings decorous while they are anything but. The apostrophe is doing precise dramatic work. A thirteen year old bride, alone with a desire her world would call shameful, legitimizes that desire by addressing its conditions as a duenna. Night in this speech is the only elder Juliet trusts, the only guardian whose interests align with hers, and she recruits that guardian by the simple grammatical act of speaking to her in the second person. The wider pattern of the lovers’ inverted world, dark made safe and day made dangerous, is mapped in the day and night imagery that charts the lovers’ inverted world; what the apostrophe adds to that pattern is agency. The inversion is not something Juliet observes. It is something she orders.
Then the addressee narrows from the cosmos to the man. “Come, night, come, Romeo, come, thou day in night” (3.2.17) stacks three vocatives in one line, night and husband summoned in a single breath, and the grammar quietly equates them: Romeo is called with the same imperative that calls the dark, as if the husband were a condition of the weather that a sufficiently urgent address might hurry. The speech’s boldest image follows from the same logic. “Give me my Romeo; and, when I shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars” (3.2.21-22) addresses the night as an executrix, instructing her in the disposal of Romeo’s body after Juliet’s death. Even here, at the edge of the morbid, the mood is imperative and the posture is command. Juliet in this speech never once describes her longing in the past tense of reflection. She issues instructions to everything that governs it.
One strand of the summons is easy to miss and worth pausing on, the schoolroom hidden inside it. “Learn me how to lose a winning match” (3.2.12) casts the night as a teacher and Juliet as a pupil with a set lesson, the management of a body and a blush through an unprecedented examination. The address creates the school it needs. No elder in the household could teach this lesson; the mother who should have prepared her daughter for a wedding night has delivered her instead to a marriage market and a timetable. So the bride appoints the darkness itself as governess, and the appointment is made, characteristically, by vocative. Apostrophe here is not straining after effect. It is staffing a vacancy, recruiting the one instructor whose interests align with the pupil’s and whose silence can be trusted with the curriculum. The matron in black is chaperone, cloak, and tutor in a single summoned figure, and she exists because a thirteen year old, alone at a window of her father’s house, addressed the night as if it were all three.
What makes an appeal a bargain rather than a command?
An appeal is a command while the speaker imagines the addressee as a servant, and a bargain once the addressee is imagined as a power with interests of its own. Juliet commands the night because night in her fiction is hired help; she bargains with Fortune because Fortune is a guardian whose favour must be argued for.
The test is grammatical and tonal at once: commands run in bare imperatives, gallop and come, while bargains add conditions, concessions, and terms, the rhetoric of a negotiation in which the speaker offers reasoning in exchange for an outcome.
The bargain arrives in the speech’s second movement, after the Nurse’s news has shattered its errand, and it is the play’s most fully reasoned apostrophe. “O Fortune, Fortune! all men call thee fickle. / If thou art fickle, what dost thou with him / That is renowned for faith? Be fickle, Fortune; / For then, I hope, thou wilt not keep him long, / But send him back” (3.2.60-63). Every element of negotiation is present. Juliet concedes the common report of Fortune’s character, draws the logical consequence that a fickle power has no use for a constant man, and closes with the requested action: send him back. The apostrophe treats Fortune as a person because only a person can be bound by an argument. It is worth noticing that no human being in the play is argued with this carefully. Juliet’s parents receive pleas, evasions, and finally silence. Fortune receives a syllogism. The play’s distribution of rational address is itself a verdict on Verona: the cosmos, which cannot answer, gets the lovers’ best reasoning, while the family, which could answer, gets their obedience and their lies.
Set beside Romeo’s handling of the same power, the bargain sharpens. After the killings in the square, Romeo’s whole theology of fortune fits inside an exclamation, “O, I am fortune’s fool!” (3.1.131), in which Fortune is not addressed at all, merely named as the owner of the fool she has made. Juliet negotiates with the goddess; Romeo files a report on himself. The difference is characteristic, and the catalogue preserves it because it explains so much of what follows. Her apostrophes extend her agency into the heavens. His, until the tomb, mostly register his subjection to them, and the single great exception, the defiance at Mantua, is great precisely because it reverses the habit of a lifetime in five words.
The speech’s jurisdiction ends at the chamber door, and the ending is marked in grammar. When the Nurse enters with the news of the duel, the vocatives to the cosmos stop. Juliet’s address snaps back to the human channel, questions, reproaches, instructions, a ring sent by a servant’s hand, and the verse tightens from summons to transaction. The contrast inside the single scene is the whole argument in small. Alone, she commands the rotation of the earth. Accompanied, she negotiates with a messenger who will garble half of what she says. The play keeps staging that exchange rate, solitude’s absolute grammar against society’s broken one, until the final scene inverts it for the last time and leaves Romeo alone in a tomb, addressing everything in sight, in a world where the rate no longer matters because there is nothing left to buy.
Who May Speak Alone? The Distribution of Soliloquy Across the Play
Apostrophe needs solitude, so the map of apostrophe in Romeo and Juliet is also a map of soliloquy, and the play’s allocation of solitary speech is one of its quietest and firmest judgments. The lovers hold nearly all of it. Juliet’s solitary speeches grow in length and command as the action proceeds, from the overheard meditation at the window to the wedding night summons to the potion speech, the longest stretch of unaccompanied verse the play gives anyone. Romeo’s soliloquies cluster at the poles of his fortune, the orchard at one end and the tomb at the other, with the Mantua defiance between them. Between the lovers, the distribution makes an argument about inwardness that no character states outright. The play grants an interior to exactly the two people its world treats as property and as a name, a daughter to be bestowed and a son to be inherited, and the granting is done in grammar: they alone are given hearers when no human hearer is available, and so they alone are shown to have somewhere for their full speech to go.
The great exception proves the allocation. Friar Laurence opens Act 2 Scene 3 alone, at dawn, with a basket, in the play’s only adult soliloquy, and its character is pointedly different from everything the lovers produce. The Friar’s solitary speech contains apostrophe, but of a doctrinal kind. “O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies / In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities” (2.3.15-16) exclaims over a property of creation, and the speech around it builds a philosophy in balanced statements: “The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb; / What is her burying grave, that is her womb” (2.3.9-10). The Friar addresses abstractions the way a lecturer addresses a text, to unfold what is already known. His later apostrophe keeps the same posture in a hotter moment: “O deadly sin! O rude unthankfulness!” (3.3.25) is flung over Romeo’s head, in dialogue, at the faults themselves, a schoolmaster’s rebuke aimed past the pupil at the sin. The Friar’s addresses go outward to doctrine. The lovers’ addresses go outward to powers. Doctrine can be stated. Powers must be petitioned, and the petition is the lovers’ signature because petition is the speech of people who own nothing but their urgency.
The Friar’s dawn soliloquy rewards one more distinction, since it is the only solitary speech in the play delivered by a man with a profession, a garden, and a plan. Its apostrophe is exclamatory rather than urgent, the “O, mickle is the powerful grace” (2.3.15) of a lecturer pausing over a specimen, and the speech that contains it is structured as exposition, a set text on the twofold nature of things, delivered to a basket of herbs. Where the lovers’ soliloquies are attempts to change the speaker’s situation, the Friar’s is a statement of the speaker’s system, and the difference in address follows from the difference in need. A man who believes he understands the machinery does not petition it. He annotates it, in balanced clauses, at sunrise, with the day’s work in his hands. The catastrophe will teach him the lovers’ grammar soon enough; his cry against Fortune in Act 5 is the sound of the annotator discovering that annotation was not the speech the situation required.
Around these three soliloquists, the play arranges a ring of the solitary speechless, and each exclusion is legible. Mercutio, the most verbal man in Verona, never soliloquizes; his genius requires a live audience of friends, and his one great act of address to an absent person, the conjuration in the orchard, is a parody performed for Benvolio’s benefit. The Nurse narrates endlessly but always to a hearer; her inner life is never staged because her world has no use for one. The Prince speaks only in proclamation, address with a city’s authority behind it, and is granted no moment of turning toward the absent or the abstract: authority in this play does not petition, it pronounces, and the pronouncements fail. The parents address the dead and the seemingly dead in formal lament, but lament is apostrophe after the fact, address that has accepted its own futility. Soliloquy as the lovers practice it, address launched in the expectation of being somehow answered by events, belongs to the young and the dispossessed alone.
Why does an apostrophe need its hearer to be absent or silent?
Because presence would turn the appeal back into dialogue, and dialogue can refuse. A hearer on stage can interrupt, correct, bargain down, or simply leave, as the Nurse leaves and the Friar’s messenger is detained. The absent hearer can do none of these things, so the speaker’s claim stands at full strength for as long as the speech lasts.
Apostrophe is the one form of address in Verona that cannot be talked over, and the lovers reach for it in exact proportion as every present hearer fails them.
There is a staging truth inside the rhetorical one. The early modern soliloquy was not yet the sealed interior monologue of later theatrical habit. A player alone on the platform addressed the house as a matter of course, and the audience stood in the position the apostrophe describes: present, attentive, and unable to intervene. When Juliet summons the night, the appeal crosses the footlights and lands on the only hearers in the building who know the whole story. The figure’s fiction is that the cosmos is being addressed. The theatre’s fact is that the address is received, by hundreds of witnesses who can do nothing with it except remember. That doubleness is not an accident of performance to be apologized for. It is the play’s deepest statement about its own world, in which everyone who knows the truth is positioned exactly like an audience, informed and helpless, while everyone positioned to act is kept in ignorance by the failure of a letter.
One refinement of the map concerns the lovers themselves, whose shares are unequal and whose inequality is instructive. Juliet’s solitary speech grows across the play in length, in grammatical command, and in the rank of its addressees, an ascent from the overheard reasoning at the window, where the addressee is a name, to the wedding night, where the addressees are the machinery of heaven, to the chamber, where the addressee is the instrument of her own deliverance. Her development can be tracked in vocatives alone. Romeo’s solitary speech moves the other way in one respect: his early apostrophes are frequent and cheap, scattered over abstractions by a young man spending a learned idiom, while his late ones are few, short, and priced at everything he has. The play gives the woman the expanding rhetoric of address and the man its contracting one, and the crossing of those two curves, somewhere in the wreckage of Act 3, is as good a graph as criticism has found for the transfer of the tragedy’s centre from his story to hers.
The allocation has a social edge the catalogue keeps visible. In Verona, public address is a monopoly of rank: the Prince proclaims, the fathers command, the Friar preaches, and each of these voices addresses hearers who are present, subordinate, and obliged to stand still for it. Soliloquy is the address of the unranked. It costs nothing, requires no licence, and reaches no one, and the play hands it to a daughter under her father’s roof and a son in exile from his, the two principals with the least standing to speak in any public forum the city keeps. Apostrophe is what public speech becomes when it is driven indoors and upward, and the insistence on giving the most elaborate addresses to the least powerful speakers is a judgment on the forums themselves, delivered in the only court where the judgment could be heard.
The Potion Soliloquy: Juliet Addresses the Vial, the Empty Room, the Grave
If the wedding night speech is apostrophe in its confident mood, the potion soliloquy in Act 4 Scene 3 is apostrophe under siege, and the difference between the two speeches is measurable in their addressees. In Act 3 Scene 2 Juliet commands the architecture of the universe. In Act 4 Scene 3 she addresses a small glass vial, an empty doorway, and the imagined population of a tomb. The world of the appeals has shrunk to the size of her chamber, and the shrinking is the tragedy’s progress written in vocatives. The full reading of the speech as a ladder of fears is set out in Juliet’s potion soliloquy examined as fear in the dark; the address structure is the concern here, and it is stranger and more revealing than the fear structure alone.
The speech begins with an apostrophe that is immediately retracted, and the retraction is one of the most quietly devastating gestures in the play. “Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again” (4.3.14) is addressed to her mother and the Nurse, who have just left the room: a genuine farewell, spoken a breath too late to be heard. Juliet then catches herself on the edge of calling them back and refuses, on the ground that the summons would be heard and answered by the wrong loyalty. The first address of the soliloquy is thus a farewell deliberately misdelivered, address used as a lock on a door. From that moment the speech is sealed. Every subsequent appeal in it is aimed at a hearer who cannot open the door, because Juliet has chosen a world in which help is impossible over a world in which help would betray her.
The second addressee is the instrument itself. “Come, vial” (4.3.20) is two words long, and they do the work of a paragraph. The vial is summoned the way night was summoned in the earlier speech, with an imperative of approach, but the scale has collapsed: not the turning heavens but a hand’s breadth of glass is asked to come forward and be tested. What follows is not command but cross examination, the famous sequence of suppositions, what if the mixture does not work, what if it is poison, what if she wakes before Romeo comes. The questions are addressed to no one, and that is their terror. In Act 3 Scene 2 the cosmos received Juliet’s imperatives and the fiction held that it might obey. In Act 4 Scene 3 Juliet interrogates circumstance itself and circumstance does not even receive a vocative. The fears are rehearsed in the third person and the conditional mood, grammar’s way of marking the exact place where address has broken down. When the figure returns, it returns changed.
It returns, at the close, aimed at the absent husband, in the form of a toast. “Romeo, Romeo, Romeo! Here’s drink. I drink to thee” (4.3.57-58) triples the vocative, as if the name had to be struck three times to carry across the distance to Mantua, and then performs the act the whole speech has been debating. The toast is apostrophe fused with deed: the drinking is done in the drinking’s own sentence, addressed to the one hearer whose arrival the draught is meant to purchase. Editors and critics have long noted that the speech ends not on a summary but on a name. In the logic of address, that ending is exact. Juliet’s soliloquy has moved from a farewell nobody heard, through a summons to an object, through questions addressed to nobody at all, and it resolves by returning to the figure the play trusts most, a name called out to an absent beloved. The speech’s arc is the arc of the whole catalogue in one room: as the world’s hearers fail, the address does not weaken. It concentrates.
The vault terrors at the speech’s centre sharpen the point by withholding the figure altogether. Juliet imagines waking among the bones, the mandrakes, and the ghost of Tybalt “seeking out Romeo” in the dark, and the imagination is conducted entirely in hypothesis and narration. The ghost is spoken of, never spoken to. Four scenes later Romeo will stand in the actual vault and address Tybalt’s actual corpse with an apology. The contrast is a small masterclass in the figure’s conditions. In the chamber, the terrors are possibilities, and possibility cannot be apostrophized; an address requires a fixed object, however absent, and fear’s population shifts too fast to hold a vocative. Juliet’s speech keeps failing to find its thou because its subject is a future that has not yet chosen its shape. Romeo’s tomb speech, with every fact settled and every object present, can address everything in sight. Apostrophe, the pair of scenes suggests, is not the rhetoric of uncertainty at all. It is the rhetoric of certainty that has run out of human recipients.
Romeo at the Tomb: Eyes, Arms, Lips, and the True Apothecary
Romeo’s apostrophes reach their full development in the last movement of the play, and they begin with a reversal. In Mantua, handed the false report of Juliet’s death, Romeo answers with the most famous apostrophe of defiance in the language: “Is it even so? Then I defy you, stars!” (5.1.24). The line is five words of address after two of question, and its brevity is its violence. Juliet bargains with Fortune across four lines of reasoning. Romeo dismisses the stars in one clause, the whole apparatus of cosmic government repudiated in the vocative. The defiance is usually read as despair, and it is; but its grammar is the grammar of a man who has decided that heaven is a party to the case and can therefore be addressed as an opponent. Despair that still apostrophizes has not given up on the fiction that someone is listening. It has only changed its estimate of the listener’s character. Moments later the same speech produces the defiance’s bitter twin, an apostrophe of surrender disguised as a salute: “O mischief, thou art swift / To enter in the thoughts of desperate men!” (5.1.35-36). Mischief, the speed of ruin, receives the respectful second person. Between the stars defied and mischief saluted, Romeo’s Mantua speech maps his whole late theology: the high powers are enemies, the low power is a prompt and attentive servant, and address flows toward whichever of them still seems to answer.
The tomb speech then does something no other speech in the play attempts. It conducts, by apostrophe alone, a complete funeral rite for a marriage, in a vault, over a living woman, with the speaker as officiant, mourner, and corpse to be. The complete speech is anatomized in Romeo’s last speech in the Capulet tomb; what the address structure shows is the rite’s order of service. Romeo opens by accusing the building. “Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death, / Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth” (5.3.45-46) addresses the tomb as a beast and a keeper, a defendant charged with theft, and Romeo appoints himself its prosecutor and its next victim in the same breath, forcing its rotten jaws to open for one more morsel. He turns next to the enemy his hand has placed in the vault, begging pardon of Tybalt’s corpse, “li’st thou there in thy bloody sheet” (5.3.97), an apology addressed to the one man in Verona who can neither grant nor withhold forgiveness, and therefore the only apology in the play that cannot be refused. Address by address, the speech clears the ground around the central act: the building accused, the enemy pardoned, the beloved praised in a long central panel that hovers at the edge of address and twice breaks into it, “O my love! my wife!” (5.3.91), before retreating into description, as if the direct summons were rationed by a speaker who knows that the fiction she could answer is the one fiction he cannot afford to test at length.
Then the speech turns on the speaker’s own body, and the apostrophe becomes an instrument of self command unlike anything earlier in the play. “Eyes, look your last! / Arms, take your last embrace!” (5.3.112-113) divides Romeo into a commander and a company of organs, each ordered to perform its final office. “And, lips, O you / The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss / A dateless bargain to engrossing death” (5.3.114-115) completes the sequence: the lips are addressed as doors and ordered to seal a contract, the legal language of bargains and engrossments turning the kiss into a deed executed before witnesses who are all body parts. This is apostrophe at its limit. The addressee is the speaker. The absent hearer whose silence guarantees the speech cannot be interrupted is the self, already withdrawing from the world organ by organ. Romeo, who began the play apostrophizing abstractions because a mistress would not hear him, ends it apostrophizing his own face because no one else is left to address.
The placing of the addresses inside the speech is as deliberate as their content. Romeo’s apostrophes stand at the tomb speech’s joints, one at each turn of its action: the accusation of the tomb at the forcing of the door, the apology to Tybalt at the recognition of the body, the flash of direct address at the sight of Juliet, the commands to the body at the resolve, the hiring and thanking of the poison at the act. Between the joints, the verse runs in description, narrative, and resolve, the connective tissue of a mind proceeding in order. Address is reserved for the moments when proceeding requires a counterparty, when something must be charged, pardoned, dismissed, or paid. The structure is liturgical in the strict sense: a service is a sequence of addresses punctuating a sequence of acts, and Romeo, who has no priest and no congregation, builds the service out of vocatives and performs every part himself. Critics who call the speech a suicide note miss its genre. A note is written to be read later by others. This speech is a rite, conducted in the present tense, for an audience of the addressed.
What work does the single word “O” do when it opens an appeal?
The vocative O is the hinge on which a statement turns into an address. Without it, a claim about the stars is astronomy, a statement that asks only to be believed. With it, “I defy you, stars” becomes litigation. The particle summons its object into the position of a thou and marks the syllable where description stops and appeal begins.
The particle also lends the speaker a posture, petitioner, prosecutor, or priest, and it costs one syllable to buy the entire fiction on which the play’s soliloquies run.
The final apostrophes of the tomb belong to the poison, and they close the catalogue’s argument about address and agency. “Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide” (5.3.116) hires the drug as a conductor, a pilot for the voyage, in the imperative mood Juliet used on the heavens. “Here’s to my love! O true apothecary! / Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die” (5.3.119-120) then thanks the poison in the vocative, in a toast that mirrors, almost line for line in situation, Juliet’s toast over the vial. The symmetry is the play’s last word on the figure. Both lovers end their solitary speeches by addressing the draught that is supposed to unite them, hers a feigned death drunk to an absent husband, his a real one drunk to a wife he believes dead. Apostrophe, which began as the rhetoric of longing across distance, finishes as the rhetoric of union across the one distance it cannot cross, and the figure’s constitutive silence, bearable in every earlier scene, becomes in the tomb the whole meaning of the tragedy.
Apostrophe Beyond the Lovers: Conjuration, Lament, and the Bridal Bed
The lovers hold the play’s soliloquies, but apostrophe itself is distributed more widely, and the minor instances are not decoration around the major ones. They form a control group, a set of addresses by speakers who stand outside the lovers’ inward empire, and their comparative failure or parody throws the lovers’ practice into relief.
Mercutio’s conjuration in the orchard is the great parody. Hunting for the hidden Romeo, he performs the lover’s own figure back at him in burlesque: “Romeo! humours! madman! passion! lover!” (2.1.7), then the formal summons, “I conjure thee by Rosaline’s bright eyes, / By her high forehead and her scarlet lip” (2.1.17-18), an inventory of the mistress’s body deployed as a spell. The parody is precise about how apostrophe works. A conjuration is apostrophe with the stakes made literal: the absent is summoned by naming the powers that bind him, and the speech pretends that the right vocatives, uttered in the right order, compel appearance. Mercutio’s spell fails on stage, as every apostrophe in the play fails to move its object; Romeo stays hidden and emerges only when the conjurer has gone. But the joke cuts deeper than its failure. Mercutio treats address to the absent as a game for an audience of friends, rhetoric as sport. The lovers treat it as the last court of appeal. The same figure, in the mouth of the play’s skeptic, is a party trick; in the mouths of the dispossessed, it is a constitution. Apostrophe in this play measures the speaker’s desperation as reliably as a pulse.
Formal lament supplies the second control group. When Juliet is found seemingly dead, the household’s grief speaks in apostrophe by reflex: Capulet’s “Death is my son-in-law, Death is my heir” (4.5.38) promotes death to a relation, and his cry over the body, “O child! O child! my soul, and not my child!” (4.5.62), addresses the daughter who cannot hear him with the directness he never managed while she could. The irony is structural and the play underlines it. Capulet achieves fluent apostrophe to his daughter at the exact moment she has removed herself beyond address, by a draught taken in a soliloquy whose first gesture was a farewell he was not in the room to hear. Verona’s elders can speak to their children only as corpses. The lovers’ apostrophes to night and stars, so often patronized as adolescent extravagance, begin to look by comparison like the sanest rhetoric in the city: at least the lovers know their hearers are absent.
Paris at the tomb completes the control group with the figure’s most conventional performance. His address to the dead Juliet, “Sweet flower, with flowers thy bridal bed I strew” (5.3.12), is apostrophe as ceremony, the appointed suitor conducting the rite of a bridegroom at a bridal bed that is a tomb, in lines of polished and feeling formality. Nothing in the speech is insincere, and nothing in it is his; it is what the occasion prescribes, spoken by the man the marriage market selected. Set beside Romeo’s entrance minutes later, where address accuses, apologizes, contracts, and seals, Paris’s lament shows by contrast what the lovers’ apostrophes have that convention cannot supply. Their appeals are instruments built for use, each one shaped to the exact impossibility it faces. His is a wreath laid at the right address by the wrong claimant, and the play kills him, mid rite, almost as an afterthought of the plot: the man of prescribed address dispatched by the man whose addresses are all self authored.
The Prince deserves a place in this control group, because his speeches are the play’s standing example of address with everything apostrophe lacks: a present audience, legal force, and sanctions. He proclaims to the street, sentences the exile, and sums up over the bodies, and not one of his addresses turns toward an absent or abstract hearer. There is no vocative in his repertoire for fortune, for heaven, or for the dead, although his own kinsmen are among the dead by the final scene. The omission defines his office and his failure together. Authority in Verona speaks only to what it can punish, and the catastrophe is in part a long demonstration that the punishable is not where the action is. His closing summation, fluent, judicial, and addressed to the assembled living, ends the play in the register that has failed throughout, while the two speakers who addressed the unanswering cosmos lie silent before him, their appeals preserved in the only record that kept them, the memory of the house that heard them.
At the bottom of the social scale the pattern inverts once more. The servants who open the play address only one another, in prose, in the present tense of appetite and insult; no servant is granted a soliloquy, and no servant turns a vocative toward the sky. The one message a servant carries with perfect fidelity, Balthasar’s report to Mantua, is the deadliest sentence in the play, delivered promptly, accurately, and to catastrophic effect. Fidelity in transmission, the catalogue suggests, was never the virtue the lovers lacked. They lacked a hearer who could receive the whole truth without acting on a fraction of it, and the cosmos, whatever its other defects, at least never repeats what it is told.
One further instance stands outside the fiction altogether and frames all the rest. The Chorus opens the play by addressing the only hearers an apostrophe in this theatre can actually reach: “The which if you with patient ears attend, / What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend” (Prologue 13-14). The appeal is modest, a request for attention, and it is the single apostrophe in Romeo and Juliet that is answered, nightly, by the simple fact of an audience staying in its seats. The play thus begins by demonstrating the figure’s one success, on the cheapest possible terms, and then spends five acts withdrawing that success from its characters. The lovers inherit the Chorus’s posture, address launched at a silent house, and discover what the posture costs when the stakes are not attention but a life.
Critics on Apostrophe and Soliloquy: Convention, Lyric Fiction, or Action
The brief’s complication, whether apostrophe in these speeches is mere convention or dramatic action, is a live critical quarrel, and the play adjudicates it more decisively than the critics have. Three positions frame the argument.
Jonathan Culler, in the essay on apostrophe collected in The Pursuit of Signs and developed in Theory of the Lyric, gives the figure its strongest theoretical account. For Culler, apostrophe is not one ornament among others but the constitutive event of lyric address: the speaker who cries out to the absent, the dead, or the inanimate makes a thou where none exists, and in that making constitutes a self with a voice. The figure is, on this account, slightly embarrassing, since nothing in the world answers or changes; the west wind does not blow harder for being addressed. Apostrophe is a fiction of animation whose real product is the speaker. Applied to Verona, Culler’s account explains the lovers’ magnification under address. Juliet commanding the night is larger than Juliet describing the night, not because the cosmos obeys but because the commanding builds the commander.
James Hirsh, in Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies, attacks the premise from the stage’s side. Hirsh argues that the solitary speech in early modern drama was conventionally addressed to the audience, and that the familiar idea of soliloquy as private thought accidentally overheard is a later construction laid over a public form. On this account, the lovers’ speeches are not inwardness at all in the first instance: they are addresses, delivered outward to the house, and apostrophe within them is a turn inside an already turned speech, the speaker pivoting from the real hearers in the theatre to an imaginary hearer in the fiction. Hirsh’s history usefully dissolves the cliché of the outpouring heart. These speeches were built as rhetoric for listeners, and their urgency is the urgency of advocates, not diarists.
The editor stands between the theorist and the historian with the physical text. René Weis, in the Arden Third Series edition quoted throughout this article, prints the speeches from the second quarto of 1599, and the textual facts he lays out bear directly on the quarrel. The first quarto of 1597, a shorter and rougher text, compresses Romeo’s tomb speech drastically; the great sequence of addresses to the tomb, the corpse, the eyes, the lips, and the poison survives in full only in the fuller text Weis follows. Apostrophe, in other words, is not scaffolding that transmission happened to preserve. It is load bearing verse that the play’s best text expands and its worst text cuts, the very material a hurried version sacrifices. Weis’s pointing makes a quieter point of the same kind. The early texts mark these vocatives lightly, and the thickets of exclamation in modern reprints are an editorial inheritance; the appeals in the copy Shakespeare’s company used were turns of address first and cries second, rhetoric before outburst.
How does apostrophe differ from prayer, when both address the unseen?
Prayer presupposes a hearer with the power and the office to answer, and asks in the grammar of submission. Apostrophe presupposes nothing about its hearer except absence, and keeps every grammatical mood: the lovers command the night, bargain with Fortune, defy the stars, and accuse the tomb, none of which a petitioner would dare toward a listening god.
The play knows the difference and spends it. Its prayers go unanswered in decorous forms. Its apostrophes, launched without faith in an answering office, do all the work prayer was supposed to do.
The convention charge deserves its history before the verdict, since it is older than the scholarship that repeats it. Apostrophe embarrassed the centuries that prized restraint. The figure was the first item mocked when the early plays were taxed with rant, and the schoolroom pedigree that had made it legible to Shakespeare’s audience made it suspect to audiences who associated declamation with the classroom. Culler’s account begins from that embarrassment and treats it as evidence, the sign that the figure exposes the pretension at the root of lyric address itself. The embarrassment is real, but its logic runs backwards. A handshake is a convention, and it still binds; a verdict is a form, and it still condemns when the form is executed by the right speaker in the right place. Conventionality describes an act’s pedigree, not its force. The operative question is never whether a figure is conventional but what a given speaker does inside the convention, and on that question the play’s internal evidence is unusually complete, since it supplies the same figure in parody, in doctrine, in ceremony, and in extremis, and lets the differences convict or acquit. Hirsh’s history strengthens the point from the other side. If the solitary speech was always already a public act for its first audiences, then the charge that apostrophe is a private indulgence collapses: the figure was public rhetoric, deployed in a public place, and its successes and failures were as visible to the house as a fencer’s hits.
The adjudication follows from the catalogue. Culler is right that the cosmos stays silent, and right that the speaker is the figure’s first product; the lovers are never more fully themselves than when addressing what cannot reply. Hirsh is right that the speeches are public acts aimed at a house full of witnesses, which is why they feel like deeds rather than reveries. But the case for action does not rest on theory. It rests on what the appeals do inside the fiction. Juliet’s summons to the night organizes a waiting girl into a bride conducting her own wedding. Her bargain with Fortune talks her down from despair into strategy. Romeo’s defiance converts a rumour into a resolve within five words. His tomb addresses conduct a funeral, execute a contract, and seal it, each a transaction completed in speech because no other instrument remains. A convention does not bear that much plot. The schoolroom figure is inherited, certainly; Puttenham’s turne tale was a commonplace of the curriculum. What the play does with the inheritance is the opposite of commonplace. It gives the figure to the two characters with the least power to act in any other way, and lets it carry the action that the world forbids them.
Tested against the two anchor addresses flagged at the outset, the verdict holds without strain. The civil night summons is convention in its materials, a schoolroom figure in a matron’s dress, and action in its effects: it converts a waiting girl into the officiant of her own wedding, staffs her chamber with a chaperone of her own appointing, and issues the night its orders in the hearing of the only witnesses the play trusts. The eyes and poison addresses at the tomb are convention in their materials likewise, farewell and toast being among the oldest forms in the figure’s repertoire, and they are the most consequential actions in the play’s last movement, the sealing of a contract no living party will ratify and no living voice will answer. If a figure can carry a wedding and a funeral, the distinction between convention and action has been drawn in the wrong place, and the catalogue’s evidence suggests the play knew exactly where to draw it: not between forms inherited and forms invented, but between speakers who address the world as a pastime and speakers who address it because the world has left them nothing else.
The Letter That Never Arrives: Address in a City of Failed Messages
Apostrophe flourishes in this play for a reason the plot states outright: every other channel of address in Verona is broken. The city runs on messages, and the messages miscarry with a regularity that amounts to a system. A challenge from Tybalt travels to the Montague house as a letter and reaches its addressee only as reported speech, filtered through Mercutio’s contempt. The guest list for the Capulet feast is handed to a servant who cannot read, and the invitation that changes everything is delivered by accident to the one young man it was meant to exclude. The Nurse, the busiest human channel in the play, delays, embellishes, and finally counsels against the very marriage she brokered, a medium whose noise becomes indistinguishable from betrayal. Above the whole network sits the catastrophe’s hinge, the Friar’s letter to Mantua, a document of perfect clarity and total failure, undone because its bearer was sealed into a plague house by officers doing their duty. Against this record, the lovers’ turn to the cosmos reads less like extravagance than like engineering. Apostrophe is the one channel in the play that cannot be intercepted, delayed, misdelivered, or read aloud by the wrong servant. Its delivery is guaranteed. Only its reply is missing.
The contrast sharpens around the play’s one faithful messenger. Balthasar rides to Mantua with a report that is prompt, accurate in every particular he witnessed, and fatal in the one particular he could not witness, the potion. Human address in Verona fails in both directions: the false message arrives, in the Nurse’s counsel; the true one kills, in Balthasar’s news; and the saving one never leaves the city. Romeo’s response to the report is the plot’s bleakest joke about channels. He does not write back, send a question, or address the Friar whose plan he half remembers. He apostrophizes the stars, the least answerable address in the play, and buys poison. A man ruined by messages stops sending them and starts addressing the void, and the void, being empty, at least cannot make the news worse.
The Friar stands at the network’s centre and embodies its double nature. He is the great arranger of addresses: he receives confessions, conducts the marriage, drafts the letter, and narrates the whole catastrophe at the end in one long report to the Prince. His own solitary speech is the play’s most doctrinal, the work of a man at home in statements. When his channel fails, his cry of “Unhappy fortune!” (5.2) is the network’s keeper discovering that the system has no keeper, that the letters run on a Fortune who files nothing. The lovers learn the same lesson earlier and at less cost in machinery. Their apostrophes begin where Verona’s postal service ends, and by Act 5 the only addresses either of them still trusts are the ones that need no carrier: a name called into a tomb, a toast drunk to a drug, a welcome spoken to a knife. The play’s communications tragedy and its rhetoric of address are the same story told at two heights, and the catalogue is where the two tellings meet.
The one human address in the play delivered complete, to the right hearer, with its contents intact, is the Friar’s closing narration in the tomb, and its fate seals the argument. The report is accurate, comprehensive, and believed. It moves its hearer to exactly the outcome the lovers’ whole correspondence was designed to make unnecessary, a reconciliation conducted over two bodies. Delivery, in Verona, turns out not to be the bottleneck of meaning; timing is, and timing belongs to the powers the lovers address. A letter that arrives after the deaths it would have prevented is a historical document, and the Friar’s narration is received as one, filed under sorrow rather than acted on as news. The lovers’ apostrophes, undeliverable by definition, suffer no such demotion. A summons to the night, issued on the wedding night, keeps its freshness forever, a command still standing in the air of a chamber long after commands delivered by hand have expired into evidence.
The city’s official channel deserves the last word in this survey, since it is apostrophe’s civic mirror. The Prince’s edicts are broadcast address: spoken once, to everyone, with penalties attached, and no mechanism for reply. An edict is what an apostrophe would be if the cosmos could punish, a one way transmission from a speaker who cannot be answered to hearers who cannot respond. Verona’s tragedy can be stated as the failure of both one way channels at once. The edicts travel perfectly and change nothing, because the feud does not live where proclamations can reach it. The apostrophes change everything in the speaker and reach nothing outside, because the powers addressed do not live where voices can reach them. Between the throne that is heard and disobeyed and the heaven that is obeyed in imagination and never hears, the play leaves no third channel standing, except the one the audience itself provides, night after night, by staying to listen.
The Arc of Address: From the Overheard Window to the Dagger
Read in sequence, the catalogue draws the play’s arc without a single plot summary. In Act 1, apostrophe is secondhand: Romeo, in love with a woman who never appears, addresses the qualities of his own feeling, “O brawling love! O loving hate!” (1.1.176), because the form he has learned from books requires a thou and the only candidates available are abstractions. The beloved is absent in the strongest sense, nonexistent as a partner, so the address falls back on the furniture of the sonnet tradition.
Romeo’s solitary life starts late, and the lateness is part of the arc. Through the whole of the first act he has no soliloquy at all: his unhappiness is performed in dialogue, explained to Benvolio, teased by Mercutio, a young man whose interior is entirely social because his love is entirely literary. His first true solitude arrives in the Capulet orchard, trespassing, at night, and it arrives already apostrophic, the hidden speech that begins by answering an absent Mercutio and ends by addressing the moon and the stars’ business with Juliet’s eyes. Juliet, by contrast, is granted her interior from her first scene’s threshold and never surrenders it. The play’s distribution of solitude thus has a direction as well as a map: his inwardness is an acquisition of the love itself, learned in her garden; hers is a native country the love merely arms. In Act 2, address becomes reciprocal in fact while remaining apostrophic in form. Juliet at the window addresses the absent Romeo, “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” (2.2.33), and orders him to doff his name, unaware that the addressee is standing in the dark below, receiving the appeal in person. It is the play’s one answered apostrophe, answered by accident, and the lovers’ whole brief happiness flows from that accident: for three acts they are the only speakers in Verona whose addresses reach their hearers, because for a few scenes they are each other’s hearers.
The window scene’s own appeals deserve a closer look as instances, since they establish the figure’s local habits before the catastrophe raises its stakes. Romeo, hidden below, opens with an act of cosmic housekeeping: “Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon” (2.2.4) addresses the sun as an executioner and the moon as a sickly rival, a command issued by a speaker with no conceivable authority over either body, and all the more revealing for that. He goes on to imagine heaven itself in the posture of address, its fairest stars having business that requires them to entreat Juliet’s eyes to twinkle in their spheres until the stars return (2.2.15-17): even in description, Romeo peoples the sky with petitioners. Juliet’s turns are commands aimed at the name that governs her world, imperatives instructing the absent Romeo to refuse his name, to be some other name (2.2.42), to doff the name and take all herself in exchange. The scene’s close reading belongs to its own study; here the appeals matter as the hinge of the catalogue, the one stretch of the play where an apostrophe’s fiction and the stage’s fact coincide, the absent hearer standing in the dark below, receiving in person an address designed for his absence.
One further instance from the same scene sets the pattern for Romeo’s later self address. “O, that I were a glove upon that hand, / That I might touch that cheek!” (2.2.24-25) is apostrophe collapsed inward, a wish addressed to no power at all, in which the speaker petitions fortune for a demotion into an object. The line is usually mined for its erotic wit, but its grammar is the tomb speech in embryo: Romeo dividing himself into a wisher and a thing wished for, rehearsing the night when he will address his own eyes, arms, and lips as separate servants ordered to their last duties. The lovers’ appeals to the cosmos draw the attention; the self addresses, quieter and stranger, are where the figure finally leads, and they begin here, in a garden, as a joke about a glove.
Act 3 withdraws the accident. The marriage made, the feud reasserts its jurisdiction, and address goes back to the cosmos, now with the full force of people who have known what an answered appeal feels like. Juliet commands the heavens and bargains with Fortune. Romeo, his fortune collapsed in the square, manages only the exclamation that names himself a fool. Act 4 seals the chamber and shrinks the address book to a vial, an empty door, and a husband three cities away. Act 5 completes the pattern at full scale: defiance to the stars, accusation to the tomb, apology to a corpse, commands to a body, a toast to a poison, a reproach to a dead man, and a welcome to a knife. The arc is not a decline in eloquence. The tomb speech is the most accomplished rhetoric in the play. It is a decline in the world’s answerability, tracked exactly by the addresses, each act’s vocatives reporting how much of creation still seems, to the speaker, worth talking to.
Why do the appeals grow shorter as the play’s world closes in?
Because length in apostrophe is a measure of hope. A speaker who believes the address might work argues, stipulates, and charms, as Juliet argues with Fortune across four lines of terms. A speaker past belief compresses the appeal to its vocative core: a name and a verb.
The play’s appeals shrink in step with the shrinking of everything else, time, allies, and exits, until the final address in the tragedy is three words long and is spoken to a dagger. Brevity at that point is not exhaustion. It is address with nothing left to negotiate.
Juliet’s last speech is the pattern’s proof. She wakes in the vault to a world in which every appeal has already been spent by someone else, and her own share of the figure is reduced to two strokes: the reproach to the dead Romeo, “O churl! drunk all, and left no friendly drop / To help me after” (5.3.163-164), intimate and furious, addressed to the one hearer she ever had, one scene too late; and the welcome to the weapon, “O happy dagger! / This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die” (5.3.169-170). The dagger is the perfect final addressee of this play: present, silent, and certain to do exactly what it is addressed to do. After fifty appeals to powers that would not act, the last one is addressed to the only thing in Verona that never failed to answer a summons.
The Verdict: Apostrophe Is the Lovers’ Deed of Will
The cliché reads the soliloquies as outpourings and apostrophe as their decoration, the foam on feeling. The catalogue reverses the picture. Apostrophe is the load bearing structure of the play’s solitary speech, the mechanism by which inwardness becomes conduct. The lovers of Romeo and Juliet live in a city that controls every channel of their lives: their marriages are arranged, their movements watched, their messages carried by intermediaries and lost. The single jurisdiction left to them is address, and in that jurisdiction they are sovereign. They summon the night and it is, for the length of a speech, summoned. They bargain with Fortune and the bargain steadies them. They defy the stars and the defiance decides them. They accuse the tomb, pardon the enemy, dismiss their own organs, hire the poison, and greet the dagger, transacting in vocatives the entire business that Verona transacts in deeds, marriages, contracts, funerals, because the vocative is the only instrument the world has left in their hands.
That is why the figure’s famous failure, the silence of everything addressed, does not refute the reading but completes it. The play never pretends the cosmos answers. It measures, act by act, the distance between the lovers’ flawless rhetoric of appeal and the world’s refusal to be appealed to, and the tragedy lives in that distance. Apostrophe is dramatic action of the only kind the tragedy permits its heroes: speech that performs a will the plot will not ratify. To read these speeches without their addresses is to read a report of the love story. To read them with the addresses restored to the centre is to watch the love story happen, in the imperative mood, one summoned night and one defied star at a time.
The monument Verona raises in answer makes the point in metal. The golden statues are the city’s last act of address to the lovers, and they are not address at all: the fathers speak about the dead in the third person, commission images of them, and set the images where speeches used to be. A statue is an apostrophe inverted, a figure built to receive the gaze of thousands and return nothing, erected by the very men whose refusal to hear made rhetoricians of the void out of their children. The play ends with the statues promised and the Prince’s sentence pending, its world of public speech restored to order, and the catalogue closes beside them, twenty six appeals filed against a silence that the gold will commemorate forever. What productions cut when they trim the wedding night summons or shorten the potion speech is therefore not decoration but jurisdiction: every trimmed apostrophe is one less deed in the only court where the lovers were ever sovereign, and a tragedy about the failure of address can least afford to have its addresses abridged.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is the InsightCrunch apostrophe catalogue, and what pattern does it expose?
The InsightCrunch apostrophe catalogue is the table in this article recording the play’s major appeals by speaker, addressee, and act, scene, with the deed each appeal performs. Its pattern is a double movement. The addressees ascend and darken, from the audience of the Prologue and the abstractions of Romeo’s bookish first act, through horses, night, and Fortune, to a tomb, a corpse, a poison, and a dagger. At the same time the speakers narrow, from a crowd of voices to the two lovers alone. The catalogue exposes address itself as the tragedy’s graph: the moods run from command through bargain and defiance to farewell, and the shrinking world of things worth addressing is the plot told in grammar.
Q: What is apostrophe in rhetoric, and how does it differ from speaking to someone present?
Apostrophe is the figure in which a speaker turns away from the hearers actually present and addresses someone or something absent, dead, inanimate, or abstract, in the vocative and often the imperative. Speaking to a person present opens a dialogue: the hearer can answer, interrupt, refuse, or leave, and the speech adjusts to the replies. Apostrophe permits none of that. Its hearer is constitutionally silent, so the claim lodged in the address stands at full strength, unopposed and uncorrected. The figure therefore suits speakers whose real hearers have failed or are forbidden, and its intensity comes from the gap between the confidence of the address and the certainty that nothing will answer it.
Q: Under what name did Renaissance schoolrooms teach apostrophe, and what exercise trained it?
The Latin rhetorical tradition knew the figure as a turning aside, an aversio from the appointed hearer toward another party, and Quintilian discusses it in those terms. English handbooks naturalized it for the play’s generation: Henry Peacham defines it in The Garden of Eloquence, and George Puttenham, in The Arte of English Poesie, Englished it as the turne tale. The grammar school exercise that trained the underlying muscle was ethopoeia, the progymnasma in which a boy composed the speech a named person, absent, dead, or mythical, might have delivered at a crisis. A schoolroom that drilled pupils to invent words for the absent produced adult writers for whom addressing the absent was second nature.
Q: Why does Romeo’s last speech end by addressing his own eyes, arms, and lips?
Because every other addressee has been exhausted in sequence. The stars have been defied, the tomb accused, Tybalt’s corpse pardoned, and Juliet praised in description rather than summoned, as if calling her directly had become the one appeal too dangerous to make. What remains is the rite itself, and a rite requires an officiant. Romeo supplies one by dividing himself into a commander and a company of organs: the eyes are ordered to look their last, the arms to take their last embrace, the lips to seal the bargain with death. Self address lets the speech conduct a funeral with no priest, no mourners, and no congregation outside the speaker’s own body, each organ dismissed from service in turn.
Q: How does Romeo’s address to the poison differ from his defiance of the stars?
The two addresses run in opposite directions, with opposite grammars. The stars are addressed upward, as a hostile government, and dismissed in five words: “Then I defy you, stars!” (5.1.24). Nothing is asked of them, because nothing is expected; the vocative is a door slammed. The poison is addressed downward, as a servant and a professional. It is summoned with imperatives, “Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide” (5.3.116), and then thanked in a toast, “O true apothecary! / Thy drugs are quick” (5.3.119-120). Romeo speaks to the drug with more courtesy than he ever speaks to heaven, because the drug is the one agent in the last act that does precisely what it is told.
Q: Why does Juliet give the night commands she would never give any person in Verona?
Because every person in Verona stands inside a chain of command that ends at her father, and speech addressed to persons must be obedient, evasive, or silent. Juliet cannot order her mother, dismiss the Nurse’s counsel to her face until the final break, or instruct the Friar. The night stands outside the household’s jurisdiction. Addressing it, she can use the imperative mood at full stretch: gallop, spread, come, give. The commands are possible precisely because the hearer is not a person subject to Capulet authority. The soliloquy’s grammar rehearses a sovereignty that dialogue forbids her, which is why the wedding night speech sounds less like a girl waiting than like a ruler issuing the orders of the night watch.
Q: Which speakers address Fortune in the play, and how do their appeals to her differ?
Three speakers handle Fortune, in three distinct postures. Juliet bargains with her in Act 3 Scene 2, conceding the common report of fickleness and drawing the consequence: a fickle power has no use for a constant man and should send Romeo back. The address is reasoning addressed to a guardian whose favour might be argued into changing. Romeo, in Act 3 Scene 1, does not address Fortune at all; he files a verdict on himself, “O, I am fortune’s fool!”, accepting ownership by the power his wife will later negotiate with. Friar Laurence, discovering the failed letter in Act 5 Scene 2, cries “Unhappy fortune!” in professional exasperation, the planner blaming the one clerk whose error no plan of his can correct.
Q: How does the audience’s position change when a soliloquy turns into apostrophe?
In an ordinary soliloquy the audience sits as confidant, the recipient of thoughts no character on stage may hear. When the speech turns into apostrophe, the audience is displaced. The address is now aimed elsewhere, at the night, the stars, a vial, and the house becomes a witness rather than a recipient, watching an appeal it cannot answer go past it toward a hearer who cannot answer either. In the theatre the displacement is doubled, since the player’s voice physically lands on the audience while the fiction sends it to the cosmos. The play’s characteristic helplessness is built there: the people who know everything are stationed exactly where an apostrophe’s bystanders stand, informed, attentive, and unable to intervene.
Q: If Romeo is listening below the window, is Juliet’s speech still a soliloquy?
By intention, yes; by event, it becomes something rarer. Juliet speaks believing herself unheard, and the speech’s honesty, its reasoning about names and its orders that Romeo refuse his, depends on that belief: it is soliloquy in design. Romeo’s presence below converts the address into the play’s one answered apostrophe, an appeal to an absent beloved who turns out to be present after all. Once he reveals himself, the same vocatives become dialogue and begin to negotiate in earnest. The scene therefore runs the figure in both states within a single speech, first as the lovers’ usual condition, address launched into silence, then as the accident on which their whole brief happiness depends.
Q: Why does Friar Laurence address abstractions such as sin and unthankfulness instead of absent people?
Because his relation to the unseen is professional and doctrinal. The Friar addresses what his office authorizes him to expound: the grace lodged in herbs and stones, the opposed kings of virtue and vice in nature and in man, the sins he rebukes over Romeo’s head in the cell scene. Such addressees are topics, and topics can be unfolded in balanced statements without being petitioned. The lovers address powers because they need outcomes; the Friar addresses abstractions because he already possesses, or believes he possesses, the knowledge outcomes depend on. His one helpless apostrophe, the cry against Fortune when the letter fails, is the exception that exposes the habit: the doctrinal addresses stop the moment his doctrine stops working.
Q: How does Juliet’s greeting of the dagger answer her address to the vial two acts earlier?
The two addresses are built as a pair, and their difference is the measure of the interval. The vial is summoned, “Come, vial” (4.3.20), and then cross examined through a long sequence of conditions: whether it will work, whether it is poison, whether she will wake too soon among the bones. The dagger is greeted with no conditions at all: “O happy dagger! / This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die” (5.3.169-170). The first address negotiates with an instrument that might fail her; the second welcomes the instrument that cannot. Between them, Juliet has learned what the play teaches all its speakers, that an appeal is safest when its object has no freedom to refuse.
Q: Why does the potion soliloquy keep changing the person or thing it addresses?
Because the speech is a search for a hearer, conducted under pressure, and each candidate fails in turn. The departed mother and Nurse are farewelled and nearly recalled, then refused, since their help would betray the secret. The vial is summoned and interrogated, and found to be an object, not an ally. The imagined terrors of the vault are rehearsed without vocatives, addressed to no one, which is their horror. Finally Romeo is named, three times, and toasted, the one addressee the whole speech has been travelling toward. The shifting address is the fear’s itinerary: each new object of address is a new place where rescue might live, checked and abandoned before Juliet acts alone.
Q: Why are apostrophes almost entirely confined to verse in the play?
Because apostrophe belongs to soliloquy, and soliloquy in this play belongs to verse. Prose is the medium of the transactional world: servants clearing a feast, a Nurse running an errand, musicians haggling over payment. In prose, speech is answered, interrupted, and haggled down; no address can sustain itself against the world’s reply. Verse, and especially the unaccompanied verse of the lovers and the Friar, holds a single voice unbroken long enough for an appeal to absent powers to build and land. The figure needs elevation and duration, the pentameter’s held breath, and the play rations both to the same speakers. Where the verse stops, at the musicians’ prose in Act 4 Scene 5, developed apostrophe stops with it.
Q: What is the difference between apostrophe and prosopopoeia, and which figure governs the addresses to Death?
Apostrophe is the turn of address: the speaker speaks to the absent or abstract as a thou. Prosopopoeia goes one step further and lends the absent a voice and a face, speaking as the thing rather than to it. The addresses to Death in this play are apostrophe working on personified material. Death is given titles, kinships, and appetites, a son in law, an heir, an engrosser of the world’s dearest morsel, yet Death is never given a line in reply. The silence is the point of classification. The moment Death answered, the figure would become prosopopoeia and the tragedy would become an allegory. Kept as apostrophe, the addresses measure only the speakers, who go on courting a bridegroom that never speaks.
Q: Why do editors print so many exclamation marks inside the lovers’ soliloquies?
Largely because the exclamation mark is an editorial deposit rather than an authorial one. The early texts, above all the second quarto of 1599 on which modern editions rest, point these speeches comparatively lightly; many vocatives that shout in a modern reprint stand in the early copy as turns of address marked by a comma. From the eighteenth century onward, editors regularized and intensified the pointing of the plays, and the lovers’ appeals, thick with vocatives, collected exclamation marks the way a slope collects water. The marks matter because they prejudge delivery: an exclamation instructs an actor to cry out, where a lighter stop would let the line be argued. René Weis’s Arden text is comparatively restrained, and its restraint restores the rhetoric inside the cries.
Q: What separates the apostrophe of a lament from the apostrophe of a soliloquy?
Direction in time. The lament’s apostrophe is retrospective: it is spoken over what is already finished, by mourners at a bedside or a tomb, and its futility is accepted in advance as part of the ceremony. Capulet addressing his seemingly dead daughter is performing grief for the household, in a grammar whose failure costs nothing. The soliloquy’s apostrophe is prospective: it wants an event, night to fall, Fortune to relent, a draught to work, and it is spoken privately by someone still bargaining with the future. The vocatives are identical in form and opposite in function. One kind of address closes an account. The other kind is an attempt, the last available, to keep the account open.
Q: Why does Romeo’s earliest apostrophe fasten on abstractions instead of on Rosaline herself?
Because Rosaline is a function in a script rather than a partner in a scene. She never appears, never speaks, and never answers, and the Petrarchan idiom Romeo has learned from books is designed for exactly that arrangement: its addresses travel to the beloved’s effects, her eyes, her cruelty, the lover’s own brawling love and loving hate, rather than to a woman who might reply. Addressing abstractions keeps the performance safe. An abstraction cannot correct a metaphor, refuse a premise, or laugh. The contrast is structural. Juliet answers Romeo inside their first exchange, completing and correcting his figures, and from that meeting his address has a person to aim at, which is why the abstractions drain out of his speech as the play proceeds.
Q: How should an actor decide where to aim an apostrophe in performance?
The choice is a genuine fork, and productions divide on it. One route follows the early modern platform practice reconstructed by historians of soliloquy: the appeal is played outward to the house, which stands in for every absent power and receives the address in person. The other route builds the fiction’s geometry, the gaze travelling upward for the stars, outward for the night, down to the object in the hand for the vial or the dagger. Either can work; incoherence cannot. The audience reads the arc of the play through where the voice is sent, a Juliet whose summons to the night goes to the same place as her toast to Romeo tells one story, and a Romeo who defies the stars into the flies and thanks the poison at his breast tells the sharper one.
Q: Why does apostrophe disappear from the play once both lovers are dead?
Because apostrophe is the speech of a will still in play, and after the tomb there is no will left to petition with. The survivors speak in the modes of settlement: the Friar narrates, the Prince sentences, the fathers bargain over statues. Nobody addresses the corpses in the vocative, and nobody summons a power, since nothing remains that a summons could hope to change. The golden statues complete the reversal. The lovers, who spent five acts addressing a world that would not answer, are converted into objects the world describes, gold figures spoken about in the third person by the very men whose deafness drove them to the stars. The play’s last speeches are fluent, public, and entirely without appeal.
Q: How can a student use the apostrophe catalogue in an essay on fate and free will?
By treating the catalogue as the evidence table for both sides of the question and letting its columns do the arguing. For the fate side: every appeal in the catalogue goes unanswered by its addressee, and the appeals to the stars and Fortune cluster at the plot’s hinges, as if the characters themselves believed the government of events sat where they were shouting. For the will side: the decisive turns of the action are taken inside apostrophes, Juliet resolving over the vial, Romeo resolving against the stars, both lovers sealing their ends in addressed toasts. An essay that sets speaker, addressee, mood, and outcome side by side can show the play’s actual position: fate in this tragedy is the name the characters give to the silence that answers their will.