# The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (Dowden)/Appendix 3

APPENDIX III
Runaway's Eyes
(Footnote to Page 100)
An editor has to consider whether the word runaway is to be retained; and if it is, whether runaway's or runaways' should be printed. The proposed substitutes are not happy; among them are Rumour's, Renomy's, Luna's, unawares, rumourors', Cynthia's, enemies, rude day's (Dyce, ed. 2), sunny day's, sun-weary, and others of equal infelicity. The word runaway is strongly supported by the parallel (with variations) in ideas and language of Merchant of Venice, II. vi. 34–47. Jessica is on the balcony; love, she says, is blind, and lovers cannot see their pretty follies. Lorenzo bids her "come at once, For the close night doth play the runaway." When Lorenzo speaks it is night; when Juliet speaks it is day, and she is gazing at the sun.
I believe the genitive singular runaway's to be right, and I agree with Warburton that the sun or Phœbus is meant. It is objected that Juliet has complained of the slow pace of the sun; but now she imagines night as having arrived, and the tardy sun has proved himself to be the runaway he actually was.
I do not wish to innovate in the text, and I have left the commonly received punctuation. But a different punctuation might solve the difficulty. The word That (before runaway's) may be the demonstrative pronoun, as in "That 'banished,'" line 113. "That runaway" may mean "yonder runaway," or "that runaway (of whom I have ​spoken)." The central motive of the speech is "Come night, come Romeo." Having invoked night to spread the curtain, Juliet says, with a thought of her own joyful wakefulness, "Yonder sun may sleep" (wink having commonly this sense); and then she calls on Romeo to leap to her arms.
I am not quite sure that "untalk'd of and unseen" is rightly connected with "Romeo." Possibly we should connect it with what follows. Lovers unseen seeing is in the manner of the play. This is a secondary question; but perhaps the whole might be pointed thus:
Spread thy close curtains love-performing night! —That [=Yonder] runaway's eyes may wink—and Romeo, Leap to these arms! Untalk'd of and unseen, Lovers can see, etc.
If following Delius we read runaways' eyes, the runaways (if not the stars) must be wanderers in the streets. Attempts have been made to produce an example of runaway in such a sense, but, I think, without success, and Professor Hales (Longman's Magazine, Feb. 1892) has to admit that the word in this sense is a ἅπαξ λεγόμενον not only in Shakespeare, but in all English literature. Expressions of the desire of lovers for silence and the absence of babblers can of course be found, and Spenser's Epithalamium may be compared with Juliet's soliloquy, but the points in common are not, I think, such as prove more than that a community of subject suggested like ideas.
Theobald read "That th' Runaway's" (after Warburton). Allen suggests the absorption of the by the final t in that. Commentators have named as the runaway the Night, the moon, Phaeton, Romeo, Juliet, etc. Halpin, with learning and ingenuity, argues that he is the runaway Cupid. See thirty closely printed pages on this line in Furness's Romeo and Juliet.
White, who, after resisting it, came round to ​Warburton's explanation, quotes from The Faithful Friends (Dyce, Beau, and Flet. vol. iv.):
The all-seeing sun, that makes fair virgins blush, But three short nights hath hid his peeping eyes, Since that uniting Hymen tied our hearts, etc.
So Mucedorus (noted by Professor Littledale), p. 35, ed. Delius: "The crystal eye of heaven shall not thrice wink," i.e. the sun shall not thrice set.
I would ask the reader to consider my suggestion as to "That runaway's eyes" as offered with some degree of assurance; but to observe that I throw out the notion of pointing "arms! Untalk'd of" merely as a possibility, which ought not to be wholly lost sight of in studying the passage.