How if, when I am laid into the tomb,30
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?35
Or, if I live, is it not very like,
The horrible conceit of death and night,
Together with the terror of the place,
As[E 1] in a vault, an ancient receptacle,[E 2]
Where, for this[C 1] many hundred years, the bones40
Of all my buried ancestors are pack'd;
Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,
Lies festering[E 3] in his shroud; where, as they say,
At some hours in the night spirits resort:
Alack, alack, is it not like that I,45
So early waking, what with loathsome smells
And shrieks like mandrakes'[C 2][E 4] torn out of the earth,
- ↑ 39. As] Schmidt takes "As" here to mean "to wit," and cites many other passages of Shakespeare, where, he maintains, it has a like meaning. Steevens supposes that the charnel at Stratford-on-Avon was in Shakespeare's mind when he wrote these lines.
- ↑ 39. receptacle] Rolfe: "For the accent compare Titus Andronicus, I. i. 92: 'O sacred receptacle of my joys.'"
- ↑ 43. festering] becoming loathsome by corruption, as in Henry V. IV. iii. 88.
- ↑ 47. mandrakes'] The mandrake, or mandragora (the opiate properties of which are spoken of in Othello, III. iii. 330), having a forked root, was supposed to be like a man, to have a proportion of animal life, and (as T. Newton in his Herball of the Bible, 1587, notices) possibly to be engendered by dead criminals who had been executed and buried. When torn from the earth the mandrake uttered shrieks; the uprooter went mad; it was wise, as Bulleine notices (Bulwark of Defence against Sickness, 1575), to tie a dog to the root and let him be the victim, stopping one's ears meanwhile "for feare of the terrible shriek and cry." References in Elizabethan dramatists to the mandrake and its terrors are not uncommon. See 2 Henry VI. III. ii. 310: "Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake's groan?"
