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The Nurse
How is the Nurse presented as an important character in Romeo and Juliet?
The Nurse, despite being a servant in the Capulet household has a role equivalent to
that of Juliet’s mother and is very maternal to Juliet, regarding her as her own
daughter. The nurse has wet fed Juliet since birth as would’ve been usual for wealthy
families and so Juliet and the Nurse have a strong bond, as denoted by the nurses’
various nicknames for Juliet, such as ‘lamb’ and ‘ladybird.’ The language both the
Nurse and Juliet use to communicate is far less formal than that of the language with
Lady Capulet. There seems to be a relaxed atmosphere around them, and they both
tell each other secrets showing their trust in one another. In one way this could be
Shakespeare’s way of telling the audience to love their children and have a good
bond with them and so he criticises them for disregarding them and leaving it up to
someone else. On the other hand, Shakespeare uses the nurse’s relationship with Juliet
to show destruction in the play, since at the beginning Juliet and the nurse have a
very loving open relationship where they confide in each other but gradually as the
play progresses Juliet gets more and more frustrated with her and her bawdy humour
before calling her an ‘Ancient Damnation! O most wicked fiend!’ The exclamation
mark adds emphasis on her anger and hurt by being betrayed by her best friend and
her level of anger is demonstrated when she swears never to confide in her again. To
some of the audience they may disagree with Juliet’s view as the nurse constantly
tries to do her best for Juliet and they may see this as practical advice as it would be
safer for Juliet to forget about Romeo, but alternatively it shows how the nurse doesn’t
understand how strong her love for Romeo is and doesn’t give thought into the fact
Juliet would be committing a sin by marrying two different people and in the
Elizabethan time when the play is set it would be classed as a grave sin and
punishable by life in hell. To counteract this the nurse is still completely grief stricken
when she learns about Juliet’s death
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