On a moment in Romeo and Juliet

"Thou know'st the mask of night is on my face."  What does Juliet say in saying this to Romeo?  "Mask" may be a gently metadramatic word choice, as opposed to "dark," or "cover," or even "veil."  The actor playing Juliet acknowledges being in a play, and that "Thou" knows that this is a theatrical event.  Is "Thou" Romeo, or only Romeo?  Maybe it would only be if the plays events were actually happening, or at least if they were happening without an audience other then the one the two actors are for each other, say in a rehearsal space.  "Thou," watching the play, are aware that it is a play, that Juliet represents a performance, that there is no tragic risk in these actors speaking to each other.  But that knowing can get obscured, can get masked, in the plays emotional knowing, so the metadramatic "mask" offers a reminder, a relief.

And "the mask of night" is different from "the mask of dark," "the mask of shadows," and other words he could have used.  Night represents a natural event, a recurring, routine one--regularly recurring, predictably expected.  Juliet may be expressing that the greater and brighter fact of her love of Romeo has been covered up, even defaced by the overwhelming trappings of her civic and familial realities.  Hers--families, realities--are at war with his by virtue of birth, by the nature of the city's strict hierarchies, and by the vicious clannishness of their families.  The night of being young in Verona's humdrum or normal forms of war, its aristocratic drama that has been deadly not only for people but for the bonds between them, is marring her.

In this moment of awareness of multiple realities--that the actor is in a play, that the daughter is in a family drama, and that Juliet is in love with Romeo--the sounds of the line mimic or perhaps incarnate it.  Instead of an alliterative move as in Romeo's "I am fortunes fool," which might embody a bond, Shakespeare has a variety of sounds and the only repeating consonant start of a word, "n" in "know'st" and "night," complicated by the silent "k."  It gently disrupts, but only gently and with metric grounding--as if to say "know this is a play, and play anyway."