Mercutio

At a glance

Mercutio is Romeo's friend and the Prince's kinsman, and Shakespeare uses him as the play's comic engine: he mocks love-talk and duelling, then dies of both.

• Role in the plot: he mocks Romeo's love, fights Tybalt when Romeo will not, and is stabbed under Romeo's arm, dying at the play's midpoint, so Romeo kills Tybalt (Act 3, Scene 1).
• Defining traits:
  • Bawdy: "Prick love for pricking" (Act 1, Scene 4).
  • Carried away by his own wit: Queen Mab breaks off at "This is she" (Act 1, Scene 4).
  • Defiant in public: "I will not budge for no man's pleasure, I" (Act 3, Scene 1).
• Themes he carries: love; gender and honour; conflict; fate; death and time.
• Relationships and foils: he belongs to neither house (Capulet's guest list names "Mercutio and his brother Valentine", Act 1, Scene 2). Romeo (bawdy realism against Petrarchan poses); Tybalt (improviser against rulebook); Benvolio (provocation against peace).

Their journey

1. The mocker of love (Act 1, Scene 4). He tells lovesick Romeo to "be rough with love", and his Queen Mab darkens into throat-cutting and sex until Romeo stops him: "Thou talk'st of nothing."
2. The conjuror (Act 2, Scene 1). He conjures Romeo "by Rosaline's bright eyes", on down past her "quivering thigh" to "the demesnes that there adjacent lie" (the lands next door): a bawdy blazon, a woman praised part by part. Romeo, hidden, hears it all: "He jests at scars that never felt a wound" (Act 2, Scene 2).
3. The wit (Act 2, Scene 4). In prose he mocks Tybalt as "More than prince of cats" (Tybalt's name recalls Tibert, the cat in the Reynard the Fox tales), then Romeo, until Romeo matches him pun for pun and Mercutio cheers: "Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo".
4. The quarrel (Act 3, Scene 1). He goads Tybalt: "Make it a word and a blow." When Romeo, an hour married, answers Tybalt's "villain" with love, Mercutio calls it "calm, dishonorable, vile submission!" and draws on Tybalt.
5. The death and the debt (Act 3, Scene 1). Romeo steps between them and Tybalt thrusts under his arm. Mercutio jokes, curses both houses four times, blames Romeo and is helped off to die. Romeo owns the death, "My very friend, hath got this mortal hurt / In my behalf", and kills Tybalt for "Mercutio's soul".

The man who laughed at every code dies for one, and the play's laughter dies with him.

Key quotations

• "If love be rough with you, be rough with love. / Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down." (Act 1, Scene 4). The pun on "prick" turns Romeo's thorn into sex, and the repeated "rough" throws his complaint back. It is a cure for self-pity, but "beat love down" also makes love a fight to win, and a fight will kill him.
• "True, I talk of dreams, / Which are the children of an idle brain" (Act 1, Scene 4). The metaphor gives dreams a lazy parent and no substance, "Begot of nothing". The sceptic laughs off omens; within lines Romeo fears "Some consequence yet hanging in the stars", and the play sides with Romeo: Mercutio dies first.
• "Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in." (Act 2, Scene 4). "Numbers" are verses: Petrarch's sonnets were every lovesick poet's model. Mercutio mocks the pose in prose, but the dramatic irony is on him: he still means Rosaline.
• "Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man." (Act 3, Scene 1). "Grave" means serious and buried. Read as courage, the pun will not let death be solemn; read as bitterness, it runs straight into the curse.
• "A plague o' both your houses!" (Act 3, Scene 1). The refrain lands on "both" families: he belongs to neither, so he blames the feud itself. "Plague" is any affliction, not the Black Death (the 1597 Quarto prints "poxe"), yet the curse comes true twice: a real plague quarantine keeps the Friar's letter from Romeo (Act 5, Scene 2), and both houses lose their children (Act 5, Scene 3).
• "Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm." (Act 3, Scene 1). It is an accusation, not a rhetorical question: Romeo answers, lamely, "I thought all for the best". In Act 2, Scene 4 he joked "Come between us, good Benvolio"; now someone has, and in Verona even peacemaking kills.

How Shakespeare builds them

• Verse and prose at will. He mocks love poetry in its own verse (Queen Mab, the blazon) and banters in prose (Act 2, Scene 4). In Act 3, Scene 1 he jokes in prose, defies in verse ("I will not budge for no man's pleasure, I") and speaks his last lines in verse as the jokes give out. The Prince's six rhymed couplets close the scene: the law answers his restless switching with closed rhyme.
• Fencing jargon and cats. He borrows the duellist's Italian to sneer at Romeo's peace ("Alla stoccato carries it away": the thrust wins), and the "prince of cats" he mocked (Act 2, Scene 4) gives him "a scratch, a scratch" (Act 3, Scene 1): the joke comes true.
• Apart from the lovers. He never speaks at the feast (Act 1, Scene 5) or to Juliet, and nobody tells him of the marriage, so he dies misreading his friend's "submission".
• Staging. The 1597 Quarto prints the blow: "Tibalt under Romeos arme thrusts Mercutio, in and flyes." He dies offstage, reported by Benvolio, while Tybalt dies in front of us.

Context

• Built from a cold hand. In Arthur Brooke's poem (1562), Shakespeare's source, Mercutio appears once, at the feast: a courtier "courteous of his speech and pleasant of device" (witty), bold as "a lion" among "the bashful maids", whose "icy hand" grips Juliet's. Shakespeare grows that hint into the bawdy wit: Queen Mab, the teasing of Romeo and the Nurse, and the death that turns the play (Act 3, Scene 1) are all Shakespeare's.
• A foreign rulebook. Rocco Bonetti taught the Italian rapier to "the noblemen & gentlemen of the court" (George Silver, 1599), and Vincentio Saviolo's manual (1595) gave its second book to "Honor and honorable quarrels". Mercutio mocks Tybalt's "first and second cause" (the numbered causes for a lawful challenge) and "immortal passado" (Act 2, Scene 4), then invites one, "Come, sir, your passado" (Act 3, Scene 1), and dies of the art he mocked.

Interpretations

• The death of comedy. For Susan Snyder, Shakespeare "makes the birth of a tragedy coincide exactly with the symbolic death of comedy". Samuel Johnson saw design: "he has lived out the time allotted him in the construction of the play".
• The cynic the lovers rise above. Heard just before "But soft", his bawdy speaks for a coarse world, against what Marianne Novy calls the lovers' "role-transcending private world of mutuality in love". Yet his mockery exposes Romeo's borrowed verse for Rosaline.
• Victim of the code and of a friend's good intentions. The code calls Romeo's peace "vile submission", and Romeo's peacemaking arm gives Tybalt his opening. Raymond Utterback sees the death begin a pattern of "a blurring of the sense of personal responsibility". The text bears that out: Mercutio picked the fight, yet curses "both your houses".

How to write about them

Three arguments a grade 9 answer could build:

1. The sceptic who dies of what he mocks: a fencer "by the book of arithmetic" kills him under the arm of a lover making peace.
2. His death is the hinge: a pun on "grave" in prose, then rhymed judgement; comedy hands over to tragedy.
3. His curse spreads the blame: "both your houses" turns it from the man who asked "will you walk?", and Romeo copies him: "O, I am Fortune's fool!"

Moments to reach for:

• Aggressive male behaviour (June 2017) and the effects of the conflict (November 2020): "Make it a word and a blow", "calm, dishonorable, vile submission!", the curse (Act 3, Scene 1). The 2020 report praised widening to "Tybalt, Mercutio and Romeo".
• Attitudes towards love (Specimen 2, 2015, whose mark scheme names "Mercutio's playful ribaldry"): "Prick love for pricking" (Act 1, Scene 4), the Rosaline blazon (Act 2, Scene 1), "numbers that Petrarch flowed in" (Act 2, Scene 4).