The Epilogue — the Prince's closing speech together with the fathers' pledges — functions as the play's coda, a compressed reflection on everything that has happened. Like the Prologue's sonnet, it frames the private tragedy as a public event, drawing the audience back from the intimacy of the tomb to the civic world that failed to prevent the catastrophe. The Prince's opening image — "A glooming peace this morning with it brings; / The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head" — is one of Shakespeare's most powerful uses of the light and dark motif. Throughout the play, the lovers claimed the night as their domain; now even the morning sun refuses to appear. Peace has come, but it is a "glooming" peace — shadowed, diminished, drained of joy. The word choice is precise: this is not resolution but exhaustion. The feud ends not because the families have learned something but because they have run out of children to lose. The promise of golden statues is the play's most ambivalent symbol. On one hand, it represents genuine reconciliation — the fathers honoring each other's children, publicly acknowledging the love that transcended their hatred. On the other hand, gold is the same...