‘Wouldst thou withdraw love’s faithful vow?’

The joint sonnet of the two lovers-to-be at the Capulet feast towards the end of the first act is rightly regarded as the dramatic and poetic climax of the first part of the play. Yet it constitutes, from an interactional point of view, merely a first move and the declarations of love proper occur only later in the orchard scene of the second act. This article explores the complex negotiations that precede the actual confessions of love and investigates how Shakespeare modified his rather simplistic source text, Arthur Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet (1562), in order to exploit the full interactional and dramatic potential of the situation.