Are there any quotes from romeo and Juliet that describe their appearances?

Answer 1

Not really. Both lovers describe the other as good-looking, but this does not give us any detail. Juliet says in 3,2 that Romeo has a "flowering face". The Nurse in 2,5 also vaguely describes Romeo as attractive. Romeo, for his part, is full of superlatives at Juliet's good looks, as "I ne'er saw true beauty till this night" in 1,5.

There is nothing which says whether they are short or tall, heavy or light. Romeo does say that Juliet "shows a snowy dove trooping with crows" but this only reflects the standard of beauty of the time, where paleness was equated with beauty, and women wore makeup which was so white it made them look like clowns or corpses. Indeed, the dialogue avoids any characteristic detail of appearance, in order to maintain the idea that these two people embodied the ideal of beauty, for if one was described as short it would mean that he or she was shorter than a perfectly beautiful person would be. And it is perhaps just as well, for ideas about what is ideal beauty change over time, and in the four hundred years and more that this play has been performed, every actress and actor who has played one or other of those parts is intended to embody those changing ideals, no matter what he or she actually looked like.