And "love-devouring death" accepts the challenge, but the agony of death does not "countervail the exchange of joy" that one short minute gives him in her presence. Here Shakespeare's treatment of the love-episode differs from that of Brooke's in his tolerance for the children's love, though it be carried out in defiance of the parents' wishes, and in his recognition that love, so long as it be strong as death, has an ennobling and not a debasing influence on character: we are made to feel that it is better for Romeo to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. For the hatred of the two houses Shakespeare shows no tolerance. Juliet's death is carried out with the greatest simplicity, and within a few moments of her awakening. There is neither time for reflection nor lamentation; the watch has been roused, and is heard approaching. She has hardly kissed the poison from her dead husband's lips before they enter the churchyard, and nothing but the darkness of the night screens from them the sight of the steel that Juliet plunges into her breast. It is the presence of the watch, almost within touch of her, that goads her to lift the knife, just as it is the vision of Tybalt's ghost pursuing Romeo that nerves her to drink the potion. The dramatist's intention is clearly indicated in the stage-directions of the two quartos and the folio, but the Irving-version retains in this last scene the modern stage-directions. Professor Dowden is of opinion "that it were presumptuous to say that had Shakespeare been acquainted with the earlier form of the story (in which Juliet wakes before Romeo dies), he would not have altered his ending." But an ending of this kind is inartistic. It is bringing the axe down twice instead of once. It is introducing a new complication and a new movement at a moment when none is wanted. The catastrophe should be and always is, by Shakespeare, carried out with simplicity and directness. After Juliet's death other watchmen enter with the Friar in custody, while from afar we hear for the third and last time the cries of the citizens: "Downe with the Capulets, downe with the Mountagues!" the only child of each of the two rival houses lying dead before the spectators. Nature had done her best to effect a reconciliation, but man thwarted her in her purpose. Then the Prince and the heads of the two houses enter and learn for the first time that "_Romeo_ there dead, was husband to that _Iuliet_, And she there dead, that's _Romeo's_ faithfull wife." Well may the Prince say-- "_Capulet, Montague_, See what a scourge is laide upon your hate That heauen finds means to kill your joyes with loue."