But further, had Shakespeare known Italy as well as Mr. Browning, he would still have refrained from loading “Romeo and Juliet” with local color. His audience did not want it, could not understand it, would have been bewildered by it. The very youth of Juliet (“she is not fourteen”) proves, it is said, that the poet thought of her as an early-developed Italian girl. Now, the physiological observation here implied is in itself questionable, and, had it conflicted with their pre-conceptions as to the due period of first love in girls, would have been incomprehensible, if not repellent, to an Elizabethan audience. We, though taught to regard it as “local color,” are, by our social conventions, so accustomed to place the marriageable age later, that in our imagination we always add three or four years to Juliet’s fourteen; and on the stage the addition is generally made in so many words. But the social conventions of Shakespeare’s time tended in precisely the opposite direction. Anne, daughter of Sir Peter Warburton, was only twelve when, in 1539, she was married to Sir Edward Fitton. In Porter’s “Angrie Women of Abington,” published in 1599, some five years after the probable date of “Romeo and Juliet,” it is explicitly stated that fifteen was the ordinary age at which girls married. That was the age of Lady Jane Grey at her marriage: the wife of Sir Simon d’Ewes was even younger; and a little research could easily supply a hundred other cases. In Johnson’s “Crowne Garland of Goulden Roses” (1612) a girl who is single at twenty expresses her despair of ever being married. Thus we find that this renowned proof of Juliet’s Italian nature resolves itself into a familiar trait of English social habit in the sixteenth century. Had it been otherwise, it would have been a fault and not a merit in a play which addressed itself, not to an ethnological society, but to a popular audience. A touch which may possibly have conveyed to Shakespeare’s audience a peculiarly Italian impression, is Lady Capulet’s suggestion that Romeo should be poisoned. In the sixteenth century poisoning was commonly known in England as “the Italian crime,” and was probably connected with Italy in the popular mind as are macaroni and organ-grinders at the present day. But poison is part of the stock-in-trade of the tragic dramatist, and plays a prominent part in the two most distinctly northern of the poet’s works, “Hamlet” and “Lear,” Again, the Apothecary’s speech,— Such mortal drugs I have; but Mantua’s law Is death to any he that utters them, is held up as a peculiarly Italian touch, no such law appearing in the English statute-book of the time. The fact is that Shakespeare found the idea in Brooke’s “Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet,” and used it simply to heighten the terror of the situation.