Nurse

• Wast the prettiest babe that she e’er nursed. 


  Nurse is a substitute maternal figure for Juliet providing emotional guidance and maternal love.

  • Superlative- J is special to her and the infinite maternal love for her.
  • She speaks retrospectively to let audience know she is the primitive carer of J.
  • This is common in Elizabethan society where they let their children raised by wet nurses( breast feed) showing how they are even more maternal than their biological mothers.
• The Nurse warns Romeo “should deal double with her”

  • Alliteration shows harsh plosive sounds. She is standoffish towards R as she is being protective over J. This shows how the nurse views J as her own daughter.
  • This juxtaposes with Lady Capulet who views materialistic benefits over her own daughter’s joy in marriage. Seen from the marriage with Paris.
• Nurse speaks in prose and in colloquial tone compared to blank verse in other characters (upper class)Nurse is the parody of working class as she is inherently the only symbol of working class in the play.
• now, by my maidenhead at twelve year old


  Nurse is bawdy in her language- comic relief character.

  This intensifies how Shakespeare mocks her as melodramatic to let upper class in the theatre to laugh and mock her.

  As she is the sole working class character in the play.