Juliet’s Portentous Lammas-Eve Birthday

In the third scene of Romeo and Juliet, Lady Capulet asks the Nurse about Juliet’s age. She responds with certainty that Juliet is not yet fourteen. She knows this because she can remember the exact date of her charge’s birthday; she was born the day before Lammas (1.3.19).1 This reference to the feast offers an ominous, and previously unidentified, foreshadowing of Juliet’s eventual death because evoking the day was a proverbial way to say ‘never’. The Nurse then is unwittingly suggesting that Juliet will never reach her fourteenth birthday, which of course, she doesn’t. Lady Capulet notes that Lammas day is still ‘a fortnight and odd days’ (1.3.17) away. The narrative covers only five days of Juliet’s short life. Steve Roud, in his guide to the English festive calendar, notes that Lammas day, which traditionally falls on August 1st, was technically a celebration of the bread and wheat produced during the corn harvest, ‘Lammas’ being a corruption of the Old English word for ‘Loaf-Mass’.2 But it was also ‘a regular day for paying rents, settling debts and changing jobs and houses’.3 The association between paying debts, moving and Lammas day led to ‘latter Lammas’ becoming a synonym for Judgment Day, a day where all debts would be paid and the move to heaven or hell completed, and as Roud notes, ‘by further extension it could mean “never,” as in the phrase ‘I’ll pay you at the latter Lammas’.4 Lammas then is associated with a promised time that never seems to come.