Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet included themes of medievalism, romance and tragedy that found popular appeal with mid-nineteenth-century audiences. This tableau shows the apparently dead Juliet, played by Princess Maud of Wales (1869–1938), who ‘looked so pretty lying there’ according to the queen. The grief stricken Romeo is played by the Groom-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria, Sir Fleetwood Edwards (1842–1910). In an effort to stop Romeo’s suicide, Queen Victoria’s German secretary Moritz Müther (d. 1912), who plays Friar Lawrence, reaches out, but in vain.