Patterns, the Shakespearean Sonnet, and Epistemologies of Scale

Abstract

At the risk of casting aspersions, it has to be admitted outright: Lady Capulet is not quite sure how old her own daughter is. To answer this pressing question, Juliet’s mother must turn to the woman who has long stood in loco parentis: Juliet’s aging wet nurse. “I’ll lay fourteen of my teeth,” the fond woman wagers, that Juliet is not quite fourteen; her birthdaywill come about a fortnight (or fourteen days) hence, on the harvest festival of Lammastide. We learn much more, too, as the nurse’s fulsome memories tumble forth: that she had a daughter, now deceased, named Susan; that Juliet was weaned with the help of a bitter herb eleven years ago, while her parents were away in Mantua; that, the day before her weaning, Juliet had fallen forward and cut her forehead, prompting a dirty joke from the nurse’s husband, heartily anticipating when an adolescent Juliet would, instead, “fall backward”; and that, during the very time of Juliet’s weaning, “of all the days of the year,” there was, simultaneously, an earthquake. Even in this highly edited summary, it is a lot to process. But if the nurse’s memories seem jumbled together, their underlying coherence surfaces when we consider that each of these details actually means something. The dead daughter. The absent parents. The harvesttime, which symbolizes sexual fruition. The bitter herb (apothecary’s poison). The number fourteen (the lovers’ cocreated sonnet). The enforced absence in Mantua (this time Romeo’s). The bleeding girl who has fallen on her back (conflated: “the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads”). And—for those directly involved—the earthshaking events: in short, the remembered mock tragic scene of Juliet’s prelapsarian tumble shows the audience precisely, albeit