We also think that Mercutio might be scaring himself by the time Romeo interrupts him at the end of his speech.
The next scene that Mercutio appears in, is after Capulet’s grand party when he is mocking Romeo because he (Romeo) loves Rosaline. The set up is slightly bizarre because although we say that Mercutio is talking to Romeo he is not doing so directly. Romeo is hiding from Mercutio and Mercutio is trying to get Romeo to admit that he is hiding himself by making him angry so that he tries to object to what Mercutio is saying. Little did he know that Romeo is no longer in love with Rosaline but Juliet. This meant that he wouldn’t have objected anyway because he didn’t care about her. When he talks ‘to Romeo’ he is trying to make him angry by saying rude things about Rosaline.
“Rosaline’s bright eyes,
By her high forehead, and her scarlet lip,
By her fine foot, straight leg, and quivering thigh
And the demense that there adjacent lie”
He is again being quite sexually explicit. In this speech we feel like he is mocking heterosexual love. As usual Mercutio starts off saying something that is quite innocent and relatively normal but again gets carried away. Here he starts off just describing Rosaline’s features, but in the end he turns it around and it is not so innocent and rather sexual; Like in the lady Mab speech when he starts talking and gets carried away. While Mercutio is talking Benvolio is trying to stop him getting agitated because he doesn’t believe that Romeo is hiding there. It seems that becoming hysterical is quite a reoccurring feature of Mercutio’s personality, as he has done so in both of his speeches so far in the play.
During the speech Mercutio is trying to tease Romeo with things that he knows that Romeo will never get from Rosaline, which is not very helpful for his ‘friend’.
When Mercutio appears next it shows us in full light how cruel he is to women and his crude sense of humour. This is an example in the play of misogyny. In this scene he (Mercutio) is very excitable because he thinks that Romeo is no longer in love and is back to his normal self. Mercutio is exhilarated because he thinks that Romeo will not be so melancholy and will rejoin their gang’. Mercutio sees that Romeo has retorted to is punning so thinks that he is back to normal.
“thou wast never with me for anything when thou wast not their for the goose”
When the nurse enters with a servant named Peter, Mercutio sees the opportunity to mock her. Yet again we see that Mercutio is atrociously behaved to women. He teases her by saying that she is an old prostitute. He sings a song punning the whole way through.
“an old hare hoar,
And an old hare hoar,
Is very good meat in lent,
But a hare that is hoar,
Is too much for a score,
When it hoars ere it be spent”
Most of the words in this song have double meanings so that it can be interpreted in two very different ways. Mercutio doesn’t seem to mind that his actions hurt the nurse and it makes her quite flustered. He is not showing very gentlemanly behaviour. We think he is probably just showing off in front of his friends.
In Mercutio’s fourth and final scene he dies. It is a very indignant death; this is also a characteristic that reflects on his behaviour. We are not sure but we think that it must be quite frustrating for Mercutio at this point to be known as the joker, because it becomes fatal. It is quite an ironic death because he dies still laughing and joking about. We feel though that he joking is quite bitter. He is punning even in his last speech. “No ‘tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door…ask for me tomorrow and you will find me a grave man.” Here there is a double meaning of ‘grave’. Grave can mean sad so he is joking that tomorrow he will be sad which is funny because he is never shown as a character that is easily upset. Gave also implies burial in a grave. I think that is a point when a lot of his friends realise that something is wrong. His friends think that he is joking when he says that he is dying from Tybalt’s stab wound. This means that his servant doesn’t know whether he is being serious that he needs a surgeon or just joking around like he normally does. Although we cannot feel very sorry for him because he does play it up then to be stern, and it becomes more male honour to stay manly and pretend that his wound does not hurt then be stern.
He shows in this scene that he and Romeo are good friends but he feels betrayed by Romeo. Essentially it was Romeos fault that he is stabbed. “Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm”. We think that this effectively makes Romeo feel guilty. They have a sense of comradeship together but now Romeo has let down the side. At the end of his life we think that Mercutio might be angry. His words can be portrayed in a number of different ways and different directors interpret them in different ways. This means that it is hard to find out what the mood of the scene really is. We can imagine Mercutio in any of these different moods at this time because he is a very changeable character who changes a lot. Therefore the mood is very changeable. I was quite surprised in the Zephirelli production of the feeling shown by Tybalt when he finds out that he has killed Mercutio in their ‘play fight’. He seems slightly tense and to some extent angry but not upset or scared. I think that he might be slightly stunned because he came out to kill Romeo but at the end of the scene Romeo is the only main character not dead. In the actual text Tybalt is suppose to return by his own will, which does not happen in the Zephirelli production. I think that by doing this Zephirelli misleads the audience and that it changes a lot of the feelings and the plot. Tybalt comes back we think, not to see what has happened to Mercutio, but to finish what he intended to do – kill Romeo. When he comes back to see Mercutio dead we imagine he is quite smug by the way he speaks. At this point Romeo is in shock but he want very much to be angry. “And fire-eyed fury be my conduct now”. He wants to get revenge from Mercutio. He knows that Tybalt is a very strong character and that he has very little chance fighting against him. Earlier on in the text we are told that Tybalt is an amazing fighter. Romeo knows that he is not as good at fighting as Tybalt but he wants revenge very badly and in the end he does win his fight against Tybalt.
Romeo tells us about how unlucky he feels during this scene. “O I am fortune’s fool!” He has only been married to Juliet a few hours and now he has killed her cousin, also one of his best friends, Mercutio, is dead. He feels like he has let down Juliet and that loving Juliet has made him a worse man.
Mercutio grasps the ides of human fragility when he is dying. He doesn’t seem to realise this at all, when he does it is too late. When he is describing this it doesn’t fit his image in the rest of the play.”‘ Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death”. Here he is telling us that life is so fragile that even a scratch from any of these animals could kill a human. After he dies everybody exclaims about how brave he is. At this point all of his friends seem in complete shock, as I think are the audience because it is something we do not expect.
In the last part of this scene the two families demand justice from the prince. The prince has a very hard decision to make. The rule was a life for a life. So in theory because Tybalt killed Mercutio so he deserved to die, but then what was to happen to Romeo? The prince has to be fair to both sides even though Mercutio is a relative of his. The prince is also aware of the influence of the vendetta on this situation. Benvolio tell the prince what happened and he does so quite truthfully. What he fails to express well is the fact that Mercutio was leading Tybalt on and provoking him. Benvolio makes out that Tybalt provokes Mercutio a lot more then he did. “Tybalt deaf to peace…with piercing steel at bold Mercutio’s breast”. At this point Lady Capulet pleads for the death of Romeo. Tybalt is her cousin, and is a blood relation; here she is a very brutal. At Lord Capulet’s party she is the one who calms Tybalt down so that he does not start a fight with Romeo. Although we know that Capulet is a strong character she persuades him to do things because she is strategic. Sometimes the fight is portrayed as being immediately serious but other times it starts off as only a friendly fight. In the end the prince knows that if he makes a decision with accuracy that the vendetta will only continue. “Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.”
I think that even through all of Mercutio’s faults he is a good man. This does not mean that I think that he is a good friend to Romeo. I don’t think that he is a good friend to Romeo this is because when Romeo is upset about Rosaline he gives him little support. Benvolio is the only friend that we hear about going to talk to Romeo when he is unhappy. Not only does he not confront Romeo about being upset he also doesn’t talk to him sensitively about being unhappy. He is slightly like the nurse because he likes being sexual about subjects. Mercutio teases Romeo about being in love as well and mocks all heterosexual relationships. This is not what Romeo needs to hear then. He also is not very nice to the nurse when Romeo wants to speak to her. I think that he fits my interpretation of him well. I pictured him more as he is played in the Zephirelli production as oppose to the Baz Lehreman. I think that at the production at the globe reflected how I pictured Mercutio.
