romeo and juliet?

Question

im homeschoold and i have no idea how to do this. you have to translate what the nurse is saying to juliet into modern english.

Is your man secret? Did you ne'er hear say, 'Two may keep counsel, putting one away

I am aweary, give me leave awhile. Fie, how my bones ache! What a jaunce have I


I pray you, sir, what saucy merchant was this that was so full of his ropery


But she, good soul, had as lieve see a toad, a very toad, as see him


Then hie you hence to Friar Laurence cell; There stays a husband to make you a wife

Answer 1

You're not just looking at those lines in isolation, right? You have a copy of the whole play? If not, see if your local library has one. You can look just for a copy of "Romeo & Juliet" or for a volume of Shakespeare's complete works. Any good edition of the play will have notes (probably down the side or across the bottom of each page) defining the archaic words, or the ones that are being used differently in the play from the way we would use them in conversation today. If there are words you still don't understand after looking them up in the play's notes, you can probably find them in a good dictionary.

Only two of those lines -- "I am aweary. . . ." and "Then hie you hence. . . ." -- are from a scene between Juliet and the Nurse (Act 2, Scene 5). The other three are from the previous scene. The Nurse says them to Romeo. If you read the scenes, you'll be able to work out a lot of the meaning from context. I'll give you some tips on the first quote and trust you to figure out the rest yourself. When the Nurse asks Romeo about "your man," she's referring to his servant. She's asking, "Does your man know how to keep his mouth shut? Is he somebody you can trust not to give away a secret?" The quotation marks around the last part of her line mean that's she's quoting a proverb, an old saying. The words in quotation marks mean something like "Two people can keep a secret as long as one of them isn't there, or as long as one of them doesn't know the secret." In other words, once you've shared a secret with somebody else, you can't consider it a secret anymore because you can't be sure the other person won't pass the information along. In this case, of course, the private informatioin is that Romeo is planning to climb up a rope ladder to visit Juliet's bedroom that night, after their secret marriage.