Juliet feels desperate because she is left to do this to be with Romeo “and there die strangled ere my Romeo comes?” (Act 4 scene 3 lines 35)
We can see the full extent of Juliet’s moods as they vary. At the beginning of the play we see Juliet happy because she had met Romeo and she got married to him, but as her father revealed that she must marry County Paris she then becomes upset and due to her desperation to be with Romeo she drinks the poison and during this time she is confused as to whether she should drink the poison.
During Juliet’s soliloquy we see that she has scary thoughts about waking up alone surrounded by her deceased relatives “of all my buried ancestors are pack’d” (line 41). Moreover in line 49 Juliet says “o, If I wake, shall I not be distraught”, this says to the audience that she is scared by the thought of waking up alone “I wake before the time that Romeo come to redeem me”. She then remembers her cousin Tybalt and remembers that Romeo killed Tybalt. A different way in which Shakespeare makes the scene dramatic is through his use of vivid description such as when Juliet has the thought of waking up alone in the Capulet family vault then she says “foul mouths no health some air breathes in”. This tells us that Juliet has thoughts which scare her and Shakespeare also shows this by describing clearly what is going through Juliet’s mind.
The soliloquy links to the end of the scene as we see that if she drinks the potion then if it works then she wakes up and it would be a happy ending or if the plan goes wrong for any other reasons then she will be miserable for the rest of her life. So it is quite a dramatic part of the play as the decision affects the rest of the play.
At the beginning of the soliloquy we see Juliet with a brave face in front of her mother and nurse and at the end she has had so many mood changes that we begin to see the real change in her and the and the contrast from the beginning of the scene to the end.
This is a key scene in the play because we learn about Juliet’s affection for Romeo and we learn that she loves Romeo so much that thinking about waking up alone in the Capulet family vault that she could go mad.
In the scene the way Shakespeare makes the scene dramatic is through the ranger of emotions shown, because at one point Juliet is looking at the fact that she will wake up with her husband and everything will be happy for the rest of her life, she then thinks what happens if she wakes up and Romeo is not there and she is left alone. Or maybe if she wakes up and her family are surrounding her, or the friar had planned to kill her. All these thoughts drive Juliet mad and in the end she is so confused that she comes to the conclusion that she does not know what to do and she drinks the poison for her husband.
The scene is important as it tells us the rest of the play, because when she drinks it she falls asleep, and her family think that she is dead and they put her in the vault like planned but then Romeo comes and he sees her and because it had not gone to plan and the messenger had got held up Romeo did not know that she was taking the potion and he had thought like everybody else that she was dead and he then killed himself then Juliet got up and to her horror her Romeo lay and she then killed herself, all of this was seen by the friar however he had not said anything.
What would the end of the play be like if Juliet had not taken the potion? Could she have died anyway for the love of Romeo? Or would she have runaway with Romeo and they lived together in their own life. Or maybe her parents may have found out that Juliet had married Romeo and they had killed her, but they may have found out and supported her and let her be with Romeo and they all lived happily ever after.