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Act 2, Scene 1
Juliet
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep. The more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.
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A large marquise diamond in the engagement style, with rubies set beneath the stone and visible in movements, on a full, voluminous seat.
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This is the marriage ring, but the lines are not from the wedding. They come from the balcony: Juliet in the dark, hours after meeting Romeo, describing not her feelings of him but the nature of love itself.
Most things shrink when you give them away. But love grows. The more she gives, the more she has. She understands this- young, in the middle of the night, before the vow and marriage even has a name and before Romeo has asked.
The speech is not aimed at Romeo. It is Juliet working something out, arriving at what love is in the act of saying it. Romeo’s presence occasions the discovery, but she reaches it on her own. She is also the first to name marriage. The one who cuts through the poetry and says if this is real, make it permanent.
Her image for it is the sea. It’s not the soft, romantic sea, but the vast and ungovernable one. Capable of storms and of feeding whole countries, destruction and sustenance at once. To compare her love to the sea is not a tender gesture but a statement of force. Throughout the play Romeo describes Juliet: her beauty, her light, what she does to him. In this speech Juliet describes love, a force.
The diamond at the centre is that infinite thing. The rubies beneath it, seen through in movements, are the emotions that surrounds their love on every side. The deep red that runs through the whole play, and the overflow of a love too boundless to be held.