A series of blogs identifying five general categories of the nurse character’s role in operas from the mid-seventeenth through the early twenty-first century. The categories are fluid and overlap, so that the nurse character can and usually does appear in more than one category within an opera. Taken from a careful study of librettos and available performances of a hundred-plus operas with at least one nurse character.
Motherly Nurses: Gertrude
Romeo and Juliet by Charles Gounod, Libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré
Premiered in Paris, 1867
PART 1
When thirteen-year-old Juliet’s father insists that she marry Count Paris, the young girl turns not to her mother – omitted in Gounod’s cast for Roméo et Juliette – but rather to her nurse Gertrude for counsel and comfort. Juliet, a Capulet, has secretly wed Romeo of the rival Montagues, and to marry another man would be to commit bigamy. Gertrude is privy to and accompanies Juliet to her secret marriage ceremony before facilitating the newlyweds’ wedding night together after Romeo is banished from Verona for killing Juliet’s cousin Tybalt. Seeing no way out of the current dilemma, the nurse sides with Juliet’s father, who has threatened to cast out his daughter if she disobeys him. On the fateful day of the nuptials, Gertrude fills in as mother of the bride, overseeing the preparation of her nursling for what will be her burial, not her wedding, when the soporific Juliet takes to prevent the marriage has tragic results.
Gounod’s lack of a role for Lady Capulet in his opera leaves former wet nurse Gertrude as Juliet’s surrogate mother. Given her close bond as milk-mother to the opera’s heroine, the wet nurse is in an ideal position to fulfill that role. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, on which Gounod’s opera is based, offers a picture of one such mother substitute in the Nurse, who has been involved intimately in Juliet’s life ever since the young girl was born. Before discussing the role that nurse Gertrude fills as surrogate mother in Gounod’s opera, it is useful first to consider the role of the Nurse character in Shakespeare’s play.
Shakespeare’s Nurse began her employment in the Capulet household as a wet nurse for newborn Juliet and remained with the family after their daughter was weaned. When the play opens, Juliet is thirteen years old and anticipating her “coming out” into society when she is presented – with her nurse as chaperone – at the Capulet’s feast in their Verona home some days before Lammastide, an Anglo-Saxon harvest festival occurring in early August.
The character of Nurse is not new to Shakespeare, nor is the story of Romeo and Juliet. Scholarly evidence has identified Arthur Brooke’s lengthy poem written in 1562, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, as Shakespeare’s source for his own 1595 version of the tale of star-crossed lovers. 1
The theater audience first meets Shakespeare’s Nurse in Act 1 scene 3 in her monologue known as the “Nurse’s story,” when she is prattling on about her nursling with the enthusiasm heard in a proud parent. As the garrulous nurse is telling Lady Capulet about her nursling, she also is filling the audience in on her own backstory. Writing about Juliet’s nurse, Stanley Wells identifies yet another function of the Nurse’s story – “to establish the nurse’s personality.” He considers her role essential to the play, for in that first appearance the Nurse gives theatergoers “a landmark, a constant against which the changes and developments in other characters can be measured.” 2
Nurse’s verbosity also reveals her bawdiness. In her lengthy monologue, for example, Nurse repeats not once, but three times a short exchange of words between her late husband and the then three-year-old Juliet after the young girl had fallen down. Picking her up and placing her on his knee, Nurse continues: “’Yea,’ quoth he, ‘dost thou fall upon thy face? / Thou wilt fall backward when thou has more wit; / Wilt thou not, Jule?’ and, by my halidom, / The pretty wretch left crying, and said ‘Ay.’” 3 Nurse sees matters between men and women from the “farmyard level.” 4 She is worldly, somewhat vulgar, and essentially a practical woman lacking in imagination. 5 Brenda Bruce, a long-time member of the Royal Shakespeare Company who portrayed Nurse in a production of Romeo and Juliet, sees Nurse’s bawdiness as part of her character, with her sexual jokes never intended to be leering or lascivious. 6
Created in the tradition of comic stock characters that include servants, old men, cocky soldiers, and lovers, Shakespeare’s Nurse fits within the first category. She is “a fat middle-aged woman congenitally disposed to muddle” who has lost so many teeth that she has only four left. 7 Now a widow, she once was married to a merry man, and the couple had lost their own daughter Susan shortly after her birth. Had she lived, Susan would have been Juliet’s age. 8 Thus Nurse met an important criterion for a wet nurse, for she had fresh milk ready to nourish another infant.
Nicholas Brooke sees the rich comedy of the Nurse’s role in Romeo and Juliet as something new in Shakespeare’s output. This “earthy, sentimental, warm-blooded, bawdy, repetitious” character, at “all levels delightful, and most refreshing in its unselfconsciousness” contrasts with the “hollow courtliness” of the characters in the previous scenes. 9
Authors describe Shakespeare’s Nurse as a fool, stupid, simple-minded – her comment in Act 1 scene 3 “Nay, I do bear a brain” as she recalls the events surrounding the day that she weaned Juliet from her breast suggests that some people do not treat Nurse as having one. 10 Nurse seems to accept that view, for when in the same scene Juliet answers Lady Capulet’s question about marriage with “It is an honour that I dream not of,” her nurse responds self-deprecatingly, “An honour! were I not thine only nurse, / I would say thou hadst sucked wisdom from thy teat.”
When Lord Capulet calls Nurse “my Lady Wisdom” in Act 3 scene 5 for placing the blame on him and sticking up for Juliet in the argument between father and daughter, he is speaking ironically, belittling the Nurse’s intelligence. The Nurse cannot let the father’s tirade about Juliet’s refusal to marry Count Pâris go unchallenged after he has cursed his daughter’s birth:
Nurse: God in heaven bless her! You are to blame, my lord, to rate her so.
Capulet: And why, my Lady Wisdom? Hold your tongue, Good Prudence, smatter with your gossips, go.
Nurse: I speak no treason.
Capulet: O God-i-goden!
Nurse: May not one speak?
Capulet: Peace, you mumbling fool! Utter your gravity o’er a gossip’s bowl, For here we need it not.
Barbara Everett considers Nurse a “randy and treacherous advocate of bigamy” for having advised Juliet to marry Count Pâris; to Rex Gibson, Nurse’s advice “that Juliet should marry Pâris seems like a heartless act of betrayal” that leaves the young woman “quite isolated.” 11 Other authors, however, are kinder in their assessment of Shakespeare’s Nurse. Mitsuo Shikoda sees Nurse as an essentially good-natured woman who loves Juliet “from the bottom of her heart.” 12 But as a worldly figure, Nurse’s interests are immediate and material, which might explain how Shikoda can justify Nurse’s questionable advice to the distraught Juliet regarding the Count: to Nurse, love and happiness are connected closely with married life, which is why she persuades Juliet to marry Pâris after Romeo has been banished from Verona and dares not return. 13
Nurse is Juliet’s surrogate mother, and in her mind, she wants Juliet to be happy and well taken care of, whatever that entails, now that Romeo is gone. Nurse’s bond to her “foster daughter” – who endearingly calls her “honey nurse” – is stronger than the bond between Lady Capulet – whom Juliet refers to as “Madam” – and her natural daughter. Clearly Nurse has Juliet’s best interests at heart, even though her advice seems to contradict that sentiment. 14
Bruce offers additional insight from having portrayed the Nurse character on stage. After Lord Capulet threatens to disown his daughter, “Nurse could advise Juliet to run away with her to Friar Laurence, seek refuge in a nunnery, follow Romeo into Mantua, call her mother and father, confess to them, pray for their understanding and forgiveness, and with their help plead with the Prince to forgive Romeo.” But any of these options would turn the tragedy into simply a drama. Yet “Nurse is incapable of sending Juliet out into the world.” Simple-minded and pragmatic, in her mind even bigamy is better than starving in the streets. Thus marriage to Pâris, Nurse reasons, is the only sensible advice at that time for a girl of Juliet’s age. But Nurse does not believe her own advice – does not believe a word of it in her heart. 15
Shakespeare has given a prominent role to the Nurse, who appears either onstage or audibly offstage in twelve of the drama’s twenty-four scenes, during which she often conveys warnings or information. 16 Although scenes in which Lady Capulet appears in Shakespeare’s drama equal those of the Nurse, her speaking lines are fewer and delivered in support not of Juliet, but of Lord Capulet. Her opening line in Act 1 scene 3, “Nurse, where’s my daughter? call her forth to me” brings to mind a woman who is distanced from her daughter, as do Lady Capulet’s words in Act 3 scene 5 to Juliet, who has refused to marry Count Pâris: “Talk not to me, for I’ll not speak a word. / Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee.”
The libretto that Barbier and Carré prepared for Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet strengthens the nurse’s role as surrogate mother when they include her in the cast list but omit a role for Lady Capulet. The nurse’s prominence in the drama, however, has not transferred to the opera stage.
An understanding of how Gounod modified the Romeo and Juliet story offers the context in which to appreciate the nurse’s role both in the original drama and in the opera.
When Gounod adapted Shakespeare’s drama for the opera stage, he included the character of the nurse but presented her merely as a shadow accompanying Juliet. 17 The reviewer for The Times (London) who attended the Covent Garden premiere of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette in July 1867 three months after its Paris premiere had no issue with the composer’s decision to curtail the role of Shakespeare’s Nurse. Comparing this latest production to another Gounod opera, he wrote: “True there are a greater number of characters than in Faust; but the French librettists have made the hero and heroine conspicuous by toning down the others. Thus, for example, the Nurse, who would hardly have been amenable to musical treatment, becomes almost a nonentity.” 18 Given no arias to sing, Gertrude’s musical role is limited to a few brief exchanges with other characters, the longest of which is a newly invented episode not found in Shakespeare’s play. Operagoers thus must rely largely on staging and the nurse’s nonverbal facial expressions and gestures to evaluate the importance of Gertrude’s role in relation to her nursling Juliet.
A comprehensive list of the hundred-plus operas that include a nurse character is found on my website under BOOKS > The Nurse in History and Opera > Book Extras.
To learn more about how the nurse is portrayed on the opera stage, see Judith Barger, The Nurse in History and Opera: From Servant to Sister (Lexington Books, 2024).
Notes
- Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Introduction to Romeo and Juliet, in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 274.
- Stanley Wells, “Juliet’s Nurse: The Uses of Inconsequentiality,” in Shakespeare’s Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir, ed. Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank, and G. K. Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 62, 63.
- Unless otherwise indicated, lines for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet are found in William Shakespeare, The Tragedies of William Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet (New York: Modern Library, 1994).
- E.A.M. [Ernest Adrian Mackenzie] Coleman, The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare (London: Longman, 1974), 70.
- Mitsuo Shikoda, “Juliet, the Nursling of the Nurse,” in Shakespeare Studies 25, ed. Yasunari Takahashi (Tokyo: The Shakespeare Society of Japan, 1989), 31.
- Brenda Bruce, “Nurse in Romeo and Juliet,” in Players of Shakespeare: Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Twelve Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company, ed. Philip Brockbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 97.
- Barbara Everett, “Romeo and Juliet: The Nurse’s Story,” Critical Quarterly (Summer 1992): 131; Shakespeare, Tragedies (Romeo and Juliet), 288.
- Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (London: Methuen, 1968), 92, 93.
- Everett, “Romeo and Juliet,” 131, 136, 138; Wells, “Juliet’s Nurse,” 54; Shakespeare, Tragedies (Romeo and Juliet), 289.
- Everett, “Romeo and Juliet,” 138; William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Rex Gibson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 206–207.
- Mitsuo Shikoda, “Juliet, the Nursling of the Nurse,” in Shakespeare Studies 25, ed. Yasunari Takahashi (Tokyo: The Shakespeare Society of Japan, 1989), 31.
- Martin Stevens, “Juliet’s Nurse: Love’s Herald,” Papers on Language and Literature 2 (1966): 199; Shikoda, “Juliet, the Nursling of the Nurse,” 31.
- Everett, “Romeo and Juliet,” 137; Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Rex Gibson, 206.
- Shikoda, “Juliet, the Nursling of the Nurse,” 27.
- Bruce, “Nurse in Romeo and Juliet,” 99–100.
- Stevens, “Juliet’s Nurse,” 195. The play also has two Prologues in which the Nurse plays no part.
- Gary Schmidgall believes that “the rather pious and stiff Gounod hadn’t a prayer … of capturing the dizzy volubility of the Nurse (unfortunately given the name Gertrude in the libretto)” in Roméo et Juliette. See Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and Opera (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 296. The closest the composer came to that volubility was in Gertrude’s brief exchange with Gregorio and the servants in the Capulet garden.
- “Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet,” Watson’s Art Journal 7 (16) (10 August 1867): 244.
