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From the Bench
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Act 4, Scene 2
Juliet
Love give me strength, and strength shall help afford.
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One-of-a-kind vivid pink-purple sapphire set with diamonds and opals. Details drawn from Elizabethan dress.
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By Act 4, Juliet has lost almost everything. Her cousin killed, her husband exiled, the Nurse’s loyalty gone- and faces a forced marriage to a man she does not love. In that devastation, she turns to love not as feeling but as force. She has always been the more mature of the two. She’s younger in years, but the one who acts, who knows what she wants, and who finds a way. Here she resolves to take the Friar’s dangerous plan, and says: “Love give me strength, and strength shall help afford.”
This is the deepest register of love in the play. It’s not the love at first sight nor a rush of emotion but love as the thing that makes action possible when everything else has failed.
The details are drawn from the Elizabethan dress. In this period, the clothing of an elite woman - structured, layered, worked with embroidery and stones - was not a vanity but a statement. Status, identity, and a public self carefully assembled. The Elizabethan structure is the outer form; the vivid stone is the story it holds. Across the five days of the play, Juliet composes herself, changes her status, changes how she sees herself.