Romeo and Juliet Foreshadowing Quotes

Look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east:
Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops.
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.

– William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 5. A beautiful dream mood is created here, but also an ominous and foreboding one. The banished Romeo is preparing to leave his young wife Juliet after a night of passion. A dream mood is created in lines two and three, as day is personified as "jocund" with the ability to stand "tiptoe," while "night’s candles" is a metaphorical representation for the stars and moon. But the happy mood is shattered by the first and last lines, which speak of envy and dying, foreshadowing the death of Romeo later in the play.

Let me be ta’en, let me be put to death;
I am content, so thou wilt have it so.
…I have more care to stay than will to go:
Come, death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so.
How is ‘t, my soul? let’s talk; it is not day.

– William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 5. As Romeo and Juliet face their moment of final separation following their wedding night, Romeo offers to stay with his beloved Juliet and die. They are both aware that the Prince has banished him from Verona and to be caught there is a death sentence. There is dramatic irony and foreshadowing in Romeo’s words, since the audience is aware that both of them will tragically die later in the play.

JULIET: O God, I have an ill-divining soul!
Methinks I see thee, now thou art below,
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.
Either my eyesight fails, or thou look’st pale.
ROMEO: And trust me, love, in my eye so do you:
Dry sorrow drinks our blood.

– William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 5. In their final scene together alive, Juliet foresees a tragic fate for Romeo, as she has a vision of him lying dead in a tomb. She reveals her sense of foreboding as Romeo departs and descends the ladder from her balcony. This is foreshadowing of how Romeo will visit Juliet’s tomb after she takes a potion that makes her appear dead and poisons himself. The heavy foreshadowing and dramatic tension are further heightened when they comment on how pale they both look, with Romeo personifying sorrow as having the human ability to drink their blood. The young lovers are both trapped by their tragic fates.

Delay this marriage for a month, a week;
Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed
In that dim monument where Tybalt lies.

– William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 5. There is heavy foreshadowing of the lovers’ deaths in this scene, including in Juliet’s plea to her mother Lady Capulet to delay her forced marriage to Paris. Otherwise, she warns, her marriage bed will be the tomb where her dead cousin Tybalt lies buried. A few scenes later her premonition of tragedy proves sadly accurate.

I’ll to the friar, to know his remedy:
If all else fail, myself have power to die.

– William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 5. Juliet is disgusted at what she sees as the Nurse’s disloyalty in advising her to go through with the marriage to Paris. She hurries off to Friar Laurence, saying that if he is unable to help her she will kill herself. This is one of the scene’s many examples of foreshadowing of the inevitable tragedy that the young lovers Romeo and Juliet will face.

God join’d my heart and Romeo’s, thou our hands;
And ere this hand, by thee to Romeo seal’d,
Shall be the label to another deed,
Or my true heart with treacherous revolt
Turn to another, this shall slay them both.

– William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, Act 4, Scene 1. Juliet threatens to commit suicide with the knife she is holding unless Friar Laurence can stop her marriage to Paris and re-unite her with Romeo. She points out that God joined her heart to Romeo’s. The end of the play when Juliet kills herself with a dagger is foreshadowed here.

Or bid me go into a new-made grave
And hide me with a dead man in his shroud;
Things that, to hear them told, have made me tremble;
And I will do it without fear or doubt,
To live an unstain’d wife to my sweet love.

– William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, Act 4, Scene 1. Shortly before her arranged marriage to Paris, Juliet vows that she will not be in his bridal bed with him. She would rather lie in a grave beside a dead man, she declares. Juliet is secretly married to Romeo and intends to remain faithful to him. The passage is a testimony to her uncompromising love for Romeo. It is also an example of foreshadowing of things to come, since Juliet will lie in the Capulet tomb with her dead cousin Tybalt, when she fakes her death.

Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again.
I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins,
That almost freezes up the heat of life.

– William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, Act 4, Scene 3. This quote shows how afraid and nervous Juliet is just before she drinks Laurence’s sleeping potion. Her mother and the Nurse have left her alone in her room with her thoughts and fears about the Friar’s plan. Juliet worries about the things that can go wrong and wonders when she will meet Lady Capulet and the Nurse again. Foreshadowed here is that she will indeed never see them again.

Heaven and yourself
Had part in this fair maid; now heaven hath all,
And all the better is it for the maid.

– William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, Act 4, Scene 5. Friar Laurence attempts to comfort the Capulet family and Paris, who cannot come to terms with the senselessness of Juliet’s apparent death. He reminds them of the teachings of their religious faith and assures them that Juliet is now in a better place in heaven. The Friar’s words foreshadow that Juliet, who is feigning death after taking the Friar’s sleeping potion, will not be very long for this world.

Your part in her you could not keep from death,
But heaven keeps his part in eternal life.
The most you sought was her promotion;
For ’twas your heaven she should be advanced:
And weep ye now, seeing she is advanced
Above the clouds, as high as heaven itself?
O, in this love, you love your child so ill,
That you run mad, seeing that she is well.

– William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, Act 4, Scene 5. Attempting to comfort Juliet’s family, Friar Laurence tells them that she is now in heaven enjoying eternal life. He chides them for weeping with grief for Juliet, accusing them of loving her wrongly, because she is "well" and in heaven. The Friar is not being honest with the Capulets. We know that he has given Juliet a sleeping potion to fake her death in order to get out of marrying Paris. This passage foreshadows Juliet’s real death later in the play.

Dry up your tears, and stick your rosemary
On this fair corse; and, as the custom is,
In all her best array bear her to church:
For though fond nature bids us an lament,
Yet nature’s tears are reason’s merriment.

– William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, Act 4, Scene 5. As Friar Laurence bids the Capulets and Paris to dry their tears and get on with Juliet’s funeral arrangements, everything is not as it appears. The audience knows that the Friar has given Juliet a sleeping potion to simulate death which will wear off in 42 hours. So he is anxious that the body be brought to church and the funeral held before she wakes up. The rosemary, a symbol of fidelity and also remembrance, will now be used for her funeral instead of her wedding. Nature is personified in this passage.
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