MERCUTIO: The characters who most perfectly fits the mold of the complex marginal figure both cynical and in his own way honorable is Mercutio, the sidekick whose role Shakespeare complicates with imagination and a sense of his own tragedy. His puns, his mockery of Romeo’s tragic-love mopiness, his hotheadedness, and his verbal ingenuity are all marks of the new archetype that Shakespeare was creating. Previous malcontents could not come within miles of his expressive power, because that would have taken the focus away from the hero, but Mercutio’s speech, as Benvolio puts it, “blows us from ourselves” (I.iv.111). When we first see him, he is urging Romeo to give up sighing over Rosaline; his tone is both coaxing and mocking when he declares, “You are a lover. Borrow Cupid’s wings/And soar with them above a common bound” (I.iv.17-8). He quickly displays his talent for barely-veiled bawdiness as well, in his counsel to “Prick love for pricking” (I.iv.28). He will continue these jokes throughout the first and second acts, and often without any veil at all, as with his laughing declaration, “O Romeo, that she were, O, that she were/An open-arse, thou a pop’rin pear” (II.ii.41-2). This vulgarity is contrasted with the chaste love of the balcony scene which immediately follows it, but Shakespeare does not moralize about which image of love is better. For Mercutio, the romantic, sighing love is a four-letter word, a “mire”; he is placed opposite Romeo from the beginning, making fun of the idealization of Love which drives Romeo and the play.

The audience does not hear his name until after the Queen Mab speech, which seems fitting since until that extraordinary speech we have no reason to pay more attention to him than to any of Romeo’s other companions. With his fireworks description of “the fairies’ midwife,” he presents a vivid and startling picture of the world which is entirely unlike any other in the play. It starts with his teasing Romeo over his lovelorn friend’s bad dreams, but at the mention of Queen Mab moves into a much stranger realm in which Mercutio seems to get drunk on his own creativity, his ability to create images and phrases which capture his two audiences’ full attention–the audience in the theater seats, and the audience in the Verona streets. His portraiture–“Her collars of the moonshine’s wat’ry beams,/Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film…” (I.iv.67-8)–then gives way to a depiction of an entire society of lovers, courtiers, lawyers, parsons. At first his society dreams of contentment, of money and kisses and ambitions fulfilled, but the foreboding in his words begins to grow. Its first hint comes in the mention of “the angry Mab” who “oft… with blisters plagues” ladies instead of showering them with kisses (I.iv.80); then, after a brief interlude of peace with the dreaming courtiers and parsons, Mercutio’s thoughts turn to the soldier who dreams of “cutting foreign throats,/Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades” (I.iv.88-9). Although the soldier also dreams of “healths five fathoms deep,” he wakes from his dream frightened enough to “swear[] a prayer or two” before he can fall asleep again (I.iv.90-2). Now the dream-giving queen has become a “hag,” who causes misfortune by tangling the horses’ manes, and causes women pain in childbirth. Romeo notices the sudden sharp melancholy of his thoughts, and cuts him off–“Thou talk’st of nothing” (I.iv.102). Mercutio returns to himself (giving proof to his name, derived from Mercury), agreeing that his words were “nothing but vain fantasy” (I.iv.105), but the audience remains unconvinced. Mercutio’s troubled vision of the world sets the scene not so much for the deaths of the lovers but for his own death, which has no great theme like love or familial honor to dilute its bitterness.

That death reinforces Mercutio’s role as tragic sidekick; his duel with Tybalt comes about due not only to his own rashness (from his first words in the scene he is itching for a fight) but also to his loyalty to Romeo, and, of course, to the quarrel between the two houses, which was never his quarrel in the first place. Mercutio provokes Tybalt carelessly, taking offense at every word, but Tybalt finally challenges Romeo instead of him. Mercutio responds to this in an offhand fashion, as if he were still jousting with Romeo, saying that he wants from Tybalt “nothing but one of your nine lives” (III.i.79), and he does not seem to have any sense that the duel could go awry. When he is stabbed, his turn from lighthearted to bitter is immediate and drastic, as if the bitterness had been waiting to appear. His death speech is as dramatic as any hero’s, but its content is decidedly un-heroic. His words are full of the acerbic humor in the pun on “a grave man,” the anger at the futility of his death in his repeated cries of “A plague o’ both your houses!”, and the understanding of the physical reality of death in his flat statement, “They have made worms’ meat of me.” When Romeo begins to speak, he gives Mercutio two and a half lines before moving on to his own “reputation stained/With Tybalt’s slander” (III.i.116-7). When he talks of the dead man later in the scene, he acts as if Mercutio’s hovering soul would want him to defend his honor and fight with Tybalt, when Mercutio’s last words suggested that such abstract notions of honor and feuds were what had killed him in the first place. The death speech points out the essential differences between Mercutio’s tragedy and Romeo’s–and shows why Mercutio’s, though arguably the more interesting, is not the one in the title. Mercutio’s bitterness in dying came from his understanding of his position as a sidekick; he knew that he was dying to support other people’s romantic notions of love and honor, other people’s stories rather than his own.