Saturday, January 30, 2016

What is an example of hyperbole in Act 1, scene 3 of Romeo and Juliet?


I’ll lay fourteen of my teeth –


And yet, to my teen be it spoken, I have but four –


She’s not fourteen.



The Nurse uses hyperbolic expression to make a joke at her own expense in Act 1, scene 3 of Romeo and Juliet. She and Lady Capulet are discussing Juliet’s age, and the Nurse, having raised Juliet almost from birth, knows her age better than anyone. First she claims that she will bet her own teeth on Juliet being under 14 – a bet that no one expects her to make in seriousness, after all (she’s really going to have teeth pulled if she is somehow wrong?) and then bemoans the fact that she can’t bet fourteen teeth because she only has four. It’s hyperbole because no one is expected to think that the Nurse truly has only four teeth – in fact, unless there’s a great deal of makeup involved, the audience will be able to plainly see that she has more teeth than that – but tooth loss was very common in old age at the time, and so the nurse is actually making a self-deprecating joke about her age: so old she only has four teeth left. It’s typical of the Nurse’s breezy, jokey attitude in the first part of the play, an attitude that gets increasingly grim and serious as the play progresses toward its tragic end.

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