Mercutio is a very strong character and would have been exciting to watch on the stage. At the start of the scene he accused Benvolio of being hypocritical because he is worried about being out when the Capulets are. This is how Benvolio acted in Act 1 Scene 1, it was him who acted as the ‘peace-keeper’, he doesn’t like violence or the feud. You can tell from this teasing that Mercutio is a sarcastic mood and this, when the Capulets enter, helps cause the fight. Mercutio clearly wants a fight and this would have been exciting for the audience as they would have been anticipating one. Mercutio provokes Tybalt a lot by misunderstanding his words and insulting him, “Mercutio, thou consortest with Romeo”, this was originally meant to mean that Mercutio is ‘often in company of’ Romeo but Mercutio deliberately misinterprets it to be an insult, suggesting that Tybalt describes him as a musician, which he then goes on to broaden to ‘minstrels’. A minstrel is a paid musician and would not have been seen any better than a servant, so Mercutio cleverly twists Tybalt’s words into an insult. This also shows that Tybalt had no intentions of fighting Mercutio originally and that Mercutio’s provoking got its desired effect in the end. How Mercutio continued the joke would have been humorous for the audience as well :
Here’s my Fiddlestick!
Here’s that shall make you dance. Zounds, consort!
Mercutio describes his sword as a fiddlestick and then how his sword will make Tybalt dance. This is a good example of how Mercutio provokes Tybalt, it is threatening towards Tybalt because it creates an image of someone dancing due to a sword, or in other words, dodging attacks. It isn’t enough to force Tybalt into a fight but perhaps if Romeo hadn’t have entered and if Mercutio had continued to provoke him, it might have. Romeo entering would have made the audience anxious because they knew that Tybalt was looking for him, they would have felt worried for Romeo because they anticipated a fight. After Tybalt had ignored Mercutio’s attempts to provoke him, he takes his turn and tries to provoke Romeo. He does this by calling him a villain, “No better term than this: thou art a villain”, this is a direct insult which would usually lead to a duel but because Romeo was floating on a ‘love-cloud’ he just ignores it. The audience would find it interesting why Tybalt is looking for a fight with Romeo because he is angry with Romeo purely because he came to Capulet’s party when he wasn’t invited, however the audience knows about the wedding and Tybalt doesn’t. What Tybalt is angry about is pretty insignificant in the whole picture. Mercutio’s strong, confident character shows again here, after spending so long provoking Tybalt for a plate he wasn’t impressed when Romeo was turning down a fight that was being gifted to him. Mercutio steps in and continues his insults and end up fighting with Tybalt. This would have been exciting on the stage but compared to the modern filmed versions, such as Baz Luhrman’s film, where the fight was a action packed gun-fight, it wouldn’t have been quite as dramatic. In Shakespeare’s time they couldn’t use special effects or lighting to make the scene more exciting on the stage. Instead, to make the fight more of a spectacle they would have used pig bladders filled with animal’s blood, which they would burst at the climax of the fight for a dramatic effect, it would excite the audience because they would have probably gotten sprayed with blood. This technique would have been used on stage when Tybalt took a cheap shot at Mercutio which wounded him and eventually ended up killing him. Mercutio dying would have been upsetting for the audience and put a definitive end to the any comical potential the play had, it twisted the play towards the tragedy which the audience would have known about form the chorus. Mercutio’s death brought back another common theme, the oxymoron of love and hate. There are many examples of this in Act 3 Scene 3, they would have made the scene more interesting for the audience. The most obvious example in this scene is Romeo’s love for Tybalt at the start of the scene but how quickly that changed to hate when Tybalt returned after killing Mercutio :
Alive – in triumph! And Mercutio slain!
Away to heaven, respective lenity,
And fire-eyed fury be my conduct now!
Now, Tybalt, take the ‘villain’ back again
This quote has several very significant points. The fact that Tybalt is still alive and is in triumph about killing Mercutio incenses Romeo. This is where the oxymoron of love and hate comes back; so far in the play Romeo has been filled with love, been gentle and generally not interested in the feud, but watching Mercutio die replaced his gentleness with ‘fire-eyed fury’. This is linked into the line before about throwing away heaven, it is bringing in the image of religion into the play which was strongly believed by Elizabethans and would have had a large impact on the audience to hear someone turning their back on heaven and basically accepting hell. This could be because Romeo knows he is going to sin by attempting to kill Tybalt so he has accepted it because he is so furious over Mercutio’s death. Letting ‘fire-eyed fury’ conduct him is linked back to hell, he has already disregarded heaven, so it could be understood to mean ‘let the devil control my actions’. The last line of the quote is referring to earlier on in the scene when Tybalt tries to provoke Romeo into a fight by calling him a villain although at the time Romeo ignored it and denied the challenge. However after the death of Mercutio, Romeo now suggests that Tybalt should take back his words, or in other words, Romeo accepts Tybalt’s challenge. This fight, as well as the previous fight, would have been exhilarating for the audience to watch. It would have been exciting for the audience to watch the play unfold because they are anticipating the tragedy from the chorus, they can understand how all the dramatic events are building up for the inevitable. Some people don’t like how the chorus tells you the main plot of the play before you have watched it but I think it helps you appreciate the events more because you can link them into the tragedy and you understand the play better because you know where it is going. I think the chorus is vital for when ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was being shown on the stage in Shakespeare’s time because he couldn’t use special effects to capture the attention of his audience so he had to use something else to get their attention, this could either be letting the audience unravel the play as it happens by telling them the plot in the chorus or he had to use complex language, often with more than one meaning, to capture their attentions and to make the play interesting.
Foreshadowing is a massive part to the play, because of the chorus the audience can understand and link all the foreshadowing to the final tragedy. Act 3 scene 1 is linked in with the first example of foreshadowing in the play, when in Act 1 Scene 1 the prince says:
If ever you disturb our streets again,
Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace!
This was used as a deterrent to try and prevent anymore fighting in the streets of Verona, however it was dramatically ironic that the next fight lead to two deaths but not because of punished but directly from the fight. Most of the foreshadowing in the play is linked to death in some way. Lady Capulet foreshadows Romeo’s death, “Romeo slew Tybalt, Romeo must not live.” Foreshadowing is an important technique used in Romeo and Juliet, it keeps the audience interested because they can link it to the tragedy, which they know will happen, and they can link actions to previous scenes to where it was foreshown. Both the first scenes in act 1 and 3 develop in the same way; both start with two Montagues on the stage and as more people enter, the tension rises and a fight starts.
The language Shakespeare uses plays a massive part in the development and depth of the scene. Mercutio continues the religious theme after he is wounded using lines such as:
No, ‘tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church
door – but ‘tis enough
Why the devil came you between
us?
This image of a church door suggests to me that Mercutio is referring to how a church door is often described to be wide enough to accept anyone into the church. I think that Mercutio uses this image to suggest that the church didn’t accept him and therefore didn’t help him, thus letting him die. Mercutio, like Romeo did earlier on, refers to the devil. Elizabethan society frowned upon the acceptance of hell more than today, so this would have had a large impact on the audience. The religious ideas in the scene would have emphasised characters’ feelings, for example Romeo would have only ‘thrown away heaven’ if he was outraged and probably not thinking straight, Shakespeare uses the ‘throwing away heaven’ to show the audience how strongly Romeo felt about Mercutio. As well as using language to bring a religious idea to the scene, Shakespeare also used language rather than physical actions to start the first fight. Mercutio cunningly twists Tybalts’ words to anger him. The most obvious example is the idea of a ‘consort’, this is quite ironic because usually music is linked to peacefulness, but instead it aggravated a violent feud and starting a fight. Mercutio twists another of Tybalt’s lines, “Well, peace be with you, sir. Here comes my man.” Mercutio takes this to mean that Tybalt is calling Romeo his ‘man’, this means servant, so Mercutio acted outraged that Tybalt described Romeo as a servant. It also shows us that at first Tybalt was not interested in a fight with Mercutio and it was only Mercutio’s provoking which made the fight happen. Another way in which Mercutio provokes Tybalt is how he described him as a ‘rat-catcher’, he then goes on to say, “Good King of Cats, nothing but one of your nine lives that I mean to be bold withal – and, as you shall use me hereafter, dry-beat the rest of eight.” This contains several ideas that would have outraged Tybalt. ‘Good King of Cats’ is describing Tybalt as an animal, like a tiger for example, this would have annoyed Tybalt, being described as something savage and blood-thirsty. Tybalt was also the ‘Prince of Cats’, which links into Mercutio’s description of his wound, a scratch. The second aggravating thing for Tybalt is how Mercutio says that he is definitely going to take one of Tybalt’s nine lives, this could be interpreted as meaning ‘injure’ but then Mercutio continues to say that depending on how he feels will determine whether he takes the rest of Tybalt’s lives. This suggests that Mercutio thinks he is in total control of the fight and Tybalt doesn’t really have a say in what happens. It is then ironic how it was Tybalt who ended up taking his enemy’s life and not Mercutio.
Even when Mercutio is dying he still brings some comedy into the play using his language rather than actions:
Ask for me tomorrow
And you shall find me a grave man
This is interesting because it has two meanings; grave could mean serious or dead It is a simple yet effective joke, it is the final funny part to the play as Mercutio is the only ‘joker’ in the play and he dies, it is poignant and bitter. Mercutio needed to be ‘killed off’ to give Romeo and Juliet center stage because his character was so strong. Some critics say that his character played too strong a part in the play and took too much attention away from the main couple, he always tried to be different from all the other characters, one example of this is how he sometimes spoke in prose rather than poetry, he is the only character who did so in the scene. After act 1 scene 3 Benvolio’s role is also over, he is primarily a peacekeeper but after this scene the tragedy is unavoidable so he is no longer needed. He would just be another distraction, taking some attention away from the tragedy unfolding. I think that Tybalt dying was also necessary because he was always aggressive, looking for fights, he was at the center of all the brawls and was always looking for revenge, again the fights would have been distracting and not needed, they would have continued to fuel the feud but this wouldn’t help the outcome to happen. Although if it wasn’t for Tybalt the tragedy probably wouldn’t have happened when it did. Romeo so far in the play had avoided the brawl between families but he stupidly acted out of anger and didn’t think of the consequences of his actions or of what would happen to his relationship with Juliet. Romeo describes himself as ‘Fortune’s fool’, this would have made the audience feel uneasy because Elizabethans believed in fate, so suggesting that a tragedy of this magnitude was someone’s fate would have been nerve racking.
The audience would have been left with several thoughts and feelings after this scene. They would be filled with excitement, the scene was a massive turning point. Without the chorus as the start, the audience wouldn’t have known about the tragedy so far but this scene sets it in stone and brings all the examples of foreshadowing together to form the tragedy. After the deaths of Tybalt and Mercutio the audience would have been shocked at the violent nature in which they died in. The main part of the play is romantic, so having a violent fight scene would shock the crowd and keep them interested in the performance. The audience would also feel anxious and worried about what is to come, because the tragedy was now unavoidable the audience would be kept alert because they knew something would happen but they didn’t know what would happen and when. Some people perhaps would feel disappointed that Mercutio was dead, he was a likeable character because he was so comedic, if the audience preferred that genre of play they would be disappointed because there was no comedy left to come.
Act 3 Scene 1 is made very exciting and dramatically interesting mainly because of the oxymoron of love and hate between Romeo and Tybalt. It drives the scene forward because of Tybalt’s hate for Romeo two fights are started, which are exciting for the audience. This contrast is also shown between the act 3 scene 1 and the scenes either side of it. Both of them are filled with Juliet’s love, which contrasts all the hate and violence in III, I. This scene is a very important scene in the play and turns it around completely. The scene leaves the audience feeling shocked and changes their views on some of the characters. I think that the scene is well written and is effective in what it was written to achieve, to send the play into the tragedy.
Word Count – 3,263
