Lady Capulet's Relationship In Romeo And Juliet

Shakespeare uses this scene to demonstrate the relationship between Lady Capulet and Juliet. This is the first scene in which Lady Capulet appears, and so her first interaction here is what the audience will base their impressions on. Lady Capulet is not affectionate towards her daughter, and her language throughout this passage conveys this to the audience clearly. Shakespeare perhaps did this to foreshadow why Juliet rebelled against her parents, as his audience would already have known the outcome of the play from the narration at the beginning. The first line of this extract, ‘Marry, that “marry” is the very theme I came to talk of’ (65), suggests that Lady Capulet is so distant from Juliet that she cannot bring up the topic of marriage by herself, but instead requires Nurse’s

The stage director could physically display this distant relationship by positioning his actors onstage in a suitable manner, for example having them opposite each other to demonstrate their differences, and having Juliet stand closer to the Nurse to illustrate how she is closer to the Nurse than her own mother. This allows the audience to have a visual exhibit of the relationship between Juliet and Lady Capulet. However, although this relationship appears problematic to a modern, 21st Century audience, it would not have seemed out of the ordinary for a Shakespearean audience. In Elizabethan times, children would never and were not expected to disobey their parents, so Lady Capulet’s attitude is not exceptional. In fact, ‘mothers of rank scarcely ever nursed their own children’, and so it does not appear unusual that Lady Capulet and her daughter are not close, as there may not have been a bond formed in the early years of Juliet’s