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Summary GCSE English - The Nurse Essay
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  • August 15, 2023
  • 2
  • 2022/2023
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  • english
  • romeo and juliet
  • english literature
  • gcse
  • aqa
  • ocr
  • cie
  • edexcel

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® ENGLISH GCSE – ROMEO AND JULIET

The Nurse
How is the Nurse presented as an important character in Romeo and Juliet?

The Nurse, despite being a servant in the Capulet household has a role equivalent to
that of Juliet’s mother and is very maternal to Juliet, regarding her as her own
daughter. The nurse has wet fed Juliet since birth as would’ve been usual for wealthy
families and so Juliet and the Nurse have a strong bond, as denoted by the nurses’
various nicknames for Juliet, such as ‘lamb’ and ‘ladybird.’ The language both the
Nurse and Juliet use to communicate is far less formal than that of the language with
Lady Capulet. There seems to be a relaxed atmosphere around them, and they both
tell each other secrets showing their trust in one another. In one way this could be
Shakespeare’s way of telling the audience to love their children and have a good
bond with them and so he criticises them for disregarding them and leaving it up to
someone else. On the other hand, Shakespeare uses the nurse’s relationship with Juliet
to show destruction in the play, since at the beginning Juliet and the nurse have a
very loving open relationship where they confide in each other but gradually as the
play progresses Juliet gets more and more frustrated with her and her bawdy humour
before calling her an ‘Ancient Damnation! O most wicked fiend!’ The exclamation
mark adds emphasis on her anger and hurt by being betrayed by her best friend and
her level of anger is demonstrated when she swears never to confide in her again. To
some of the audience they may disagree with Juliet’s view as the nurse constantly
tries to do her best for Juliet and they may see this as practical advice as it would be
safer for Juliet to forget about Romeo, but alternatively it shows how the nurse doesn’t
understand how strong her love for Romeo is and doesn’t give thought into the fact
Juliet would be committing a sin by marrying two different people and in the
Elizabethan time when the play is set it would be classed as a grave sin and
punishable by life in hell. To counteract this the nurse is still completely grief stricken
when she learns about Juliet’s death

The Nurse is acts as a sense of comic relief and Shakespeare draws parallels to
Mercutio in this sense as well. The nurse acts in a highly dramatic way and
complaining ‘how my head aches! what a head have I!’ Her exclamatory sentence
where she appears to theatrically complain about her headache belies her
reluctance to convey news and information from Romeo, which Juliet is keenly
waiting for. At this stage in the play, we discover that the Nurse is acting as the go-
between who is facilitating Juliet’s communication with Romeo as they plan to
secretly wed. The Nurse highlights this role as a go-between later on in the extract
when she instructs Juliet to ‘do your messages yourself.’ Although the Nurse is
reluctant to see the relationship between Romeo and Juliet develop given, she is
keenly aware that they are from warring families and Juliet marrying a Montague will
be an abomination to the Capulet family, she is still keen to see Juliet happy, hence
she agrees to help her communicate with Juliet. This reveals that the nurse is a good
support for Juliet because even if she does not approve of her relationship with
Romeo, she wants to support her and help her. On the other hand, if the nurse was a
real mother figure she would’ve stopped her because she is aware of the dangers
that this will lead to and in some ways she’s portrayed as a bad mother figure. Some
of the audience may believe she does this because she’s attempts to demonstrate
the love for Juliet that she didn’t have a chance to give to her daughter Susan. This
®
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