For he hath still been tried a holy man. How if, when I am laid into the tomb, I wake before the time that Romeo Come to redeem me? There’s a fearful point! Shall I not then be stifled in the vault, To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in, And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes? Or, if I live, is it not very like, The horrible conceit of death and night, Together with the terror of the place, As in a vault, an ancient receptacle, Where for this many hundred years the bones Of all my buried ancestors are pack’d, Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth, Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say, At some hours in the night spirits resort— Alack, alack, is it not like that I, So early waking, what with loathsome smells, And shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth, That living mortals, hearing them, run mad.
Table of Contents
ACT IV
169