SOURCE: Holmer, Joan Ozark. ‘“Myself Condemned and Myself Excus'd”: Tragic Effects in Romeo and Juliet.” Studies in Philology 88, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 345-62.

[In the following essay, Holmer analyzes the way in which Shakespeare utilized the character of Mercutio to make the play—and our reaction to its themes and characters—more complex and ironic than its sources.]

Romeo and Juliet, although a tragedy written early in Shakespeare's career, persists in being a problematic play while it continues to command our modern sympathies in spanning the socio-historical changes wrought over the passage of some four hundred years since the play first captured “two hours' traffic of our stage” (Prologue, 12).¹ This tragedy's captivating story and its compelling presentation of romance, beauty, and powerful passions for good and ill have made it one of Shakespeare's most familiar dramas. But familiarity should not be allowed to breed complacency. Romeo and Juliet involves us in dilemmas provoking complex intellectual and emotional responses not unlike in kind, albeit perhaps in degree, those for which we praise Shakespeare's major tragedies.

Critics no longer debate whether this play is a tragedy, but rather what kind of a tragedy it is and wherein excellent for its kind, debate often turning on Shakespeare's degree of success in integrating the tragic claims of fate and free will.² While some claim this tragedy is experimental, the degree to which Shakespeare reigns remarkably innovative might be underestimated. If not the first romantic tragedy for the English stage, Romeo and Juliet is at least the earliest and greatest example of this genre from the prolific period of Renaissance drama. Perhaps one measure of Shakespeare's dramatic skill in staging more than a great love story of legendary fame, even by the time he dramatized it, is how richly he complicates much of what is rather straight-forward action in his literary sources, thereby deepening one's sense of tragic irony and poignancy. These sources are often textually pallid cadavers compared to Shakespeare's transformation of them into the breathing corpus of his drama. Romeo and Juliet already reveals the hand of a master dramatist who knows how to craft deftly a dilemma that evokes various, even contradictory, responses in his audience as well as characters. The wonder is how we can be simultaneously attracted to and repelled by a character in a given situation (such as Mercutio or Romeo) and be left perhaps even perplexed about what choices we would make if the stage were our world at that moment.

The play bristles with possible examples, but the fatal opening of the third act is pivotal as it moves with deadly pace in the direction of tragedy what might have been comedy, for Jack hath Jill and all ends well by the conclusion of Act II. Although Shakespeare probably knew other literary sources of the Romeo and Juliet story, clearly his main source was Arthur Brooke's poem, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562). With the exception of one crucial oversight, Geoffrey Bullough concisely summarizes the chief differences between the play's centerpiece and that of its main source: “In Brooke Mercutio plays no part in the brawls; Romeo kills Tybalt in self-defence after trying to prevent a general mêlée. In Shakespeare Mercutio thinks to purge his friend's lost honour by fighting for him, and is killed (ironically) through Romeo's attempt to stop the fight. Thus the motif of the play, that even our good deeds confound us when Fortune is against us, is stressed in this new episode, which proves Romeo's ‘respective lenity’, given up only when his friend has been slain.”³ However, Bullough does not mention the provocative role Mercutio plays before Romeo enters the scene, or the significance of this role for our understanding of Mercutio, Romeo, and Tybalt as well as the human condition explored in terms of the play's themes and imagery. The character of Mercutio is almost wholly created by Shakespeare, for in Brooke Mercutio appears only briefly, described as a “courtier that … was coorteous of his speche, and pleasant of devise … a Lyon … bolde … emong bashfull maydes,” who nonetheless had very cold hands (254-64; 288-90). Although Shakespeare kept the boldness and the creative pleasantry of a great talker, he omitted the cold hands, changed the courteous speech to witty and often irreverent raillery, and otherwise fully enfleshed his own vibrant Mercutio whose own “mad blood” (3.1.4) contagiously spreads the feud's plague that will make “worms' meat” of him (3.1.109). Given Shakespeare's pervasive interest in “what's in a name” (2.2.43), along with the nuances of ingenuity and eloquence derived from Mercury for the name “Mercutio,”⁴ perhaps Shakespeare also took a hint for developing Mercutio's combativeness from his name as it appears in the Italian sources of Luigi da Porto and Matteo Bandello—“Marcuccio”—which Richard Hosley explains means approximately “cunning little Marco.”⁵ “Marco,” from “Marcus/ Mark,” has a martial meaning derived from Mars.⁶ As will be seen, repeatedly in this play Shakespeare shows his back above the elements of his sources when he transcends them by developing the significance of a name which is often more than just the sound for who a character is.

How does Shakespeare complicate our responses through his deliberate use of Mercutio? What aspect of his mercurial self does Mercutio present as this first scene of death opens? With a tragic ignorance that colors all the human relationships in the play wherein parents know not fully their children, advisors their advisees, enemies their enemies, and friends their friends, Romeo had earlier described his friend's character as “a gentleman … that loves to hear himself talk, and will speak more in a minute than he will stand to in a month” (2.4.143-46). The first half of Romeo's analysis proves comically true, but the latter proves tragically untrue. Similarly Romeo refutes Tybalt's slander: “villain am I none … I see thou knowest me not” (63-64). When the Prince puts the crucial questions, “Where are the vile beginners of this fray?”; “Benvolio, who began this bloody fray?” (143, 153), Benvolio singles out solely Tybalt: “Tybalt, here slain … Tybalt deaf to peace … tilts / With piercing steel at bold Mercutio's breast, / Who, all as hot, turns deadly point to point” (154-62).

How accurate is this account? Lest we rely too heavily on friend Benvolio's somewhat biased rendition, let us examine what does happen. Benvolio's lines imply that Tybalt literally started this fray by drawing first to tilt at Mercutio's breast. But this is not true. Mercutio begins by baiting Tybalt, and it is he who draws first: “Will you [Tybalt] pluck your sword out of his pilcher by the ears? Make haste, lest mine be about your ears ere it be out” (79-81). Tybalt probably draws now in response, “I am for you” (82), but Romeo appeals first to the instigator, “Gentle Mercutio, put thy rapier up” (83). Benvolio's account is accurate only insofar as Tybalt indirectly begins this fray by issuing a personal challenge to Romeo in order to revenge Romeo's appearance at the Capulet ball. The maliciously premeditated nature of Tybalt's personal challenge is a far cry from Brooke's diffused situation of a spontaneous, general street brawl. Shakespeare's Romeo, however, seems not to know about this written challenge because Tybalt sent the letter to Lord Montague's house, but Romeo appears not to have gone home since last night's ball (2.4.1-7). Instead, Mercutio and Benvolio are aware of the letter, and Mercutio bets it is a challenge. In his account of the fray Benvolio rightly observes that Mercutio was “all as hot” as Tybalt, but his placement of that information suggests that Mercutio responds hotly to the “unruly spleen / Of Tybalt” (159). When and why was Mercutio “hot”?

The scene opens with Mercutio and Benvolio alone on stage discussing the excessively hot weather which prompts hotheadedness. Timing the play's action almost a fortnight before Juliet's fourteenth birthday on Lammas Eve (July 31) so that the July month, from which Juliet's name is derived, is paradoxically the month of both her birth and death,⁷ Shakespeare emphasizes the oppressive mid-July heat which is his stark change in his source's Christmas meeting of the lovers and its early spring setting for the duel (The Argument, 5; 155, 949). Given Shakespeare's “star-cross'd” (Prologue, 6) motif this change is most appropriate from a Renaissance perspective: “And this month [July] is most fervent: for in the middle of this month the sunne beginneth to be in Leone, & the Canicular daies begin. And therefore is great passing heate in that time, because of the hot signe, and also because of the most hot starre [i.e., Canicula or Sirius]. Also that time all hot passions & evills increase.”⁸ John Bullokar similarly defines “Dogdayes” as “certain dayes in Iuly and August, so called of the Starre Canis, the Dogge: which then rising with the Sun, doeth greatly increase the heate thereof,” and Edmund Spenser poetically describes “the hot Syrian Dog” as corrupting “th'ayre with his noysome breath, / And powr'd on the earth plague, pestilence, and death.”⁹ We should recall here that “the infectious pestilence” (5.2.10) is what fatally prevents Friar John's delivery of Friar Laurence's important letter to Romeo. An overlooked possibility is that Shakespeare's “star-cross'd” might also be related to his “hot days” of “mad blood” (4) and refer to the malign influence of the reigning “hot” star, Canicula or Sirius (a star of the first magnitude, the chief of the constellation Canis Major, and the brightest in the heavens), that would appropriately influence the play's tragic consequences viewed from the perspective of Shakespeare's telling seasonal change of his source.¹⁰

Perhaps as significant as the macrocosmic-microcosmic analogy between the world's weather and man's temperament is the degree to which Mercutio is “hot” before either Tybalt or Romeo enters. The entire preliminary conversation wittily rests on the exceptionally quarrelsome nature of Mercutio who would fight for the sake of fighting (32-34). Its puns on being “moved” to a passionate mood (12-14) recall those of Sampson's and Gregory's comic exchange where a man's “standing” depends on violence in both sexual prowess and pugnacious power (1.1.7-33). Focusing now on the latter, the witty repartee sets us up for another comic beginning to a non-lethal resolution of an incipient duel, an expectation that poignantly heightens our sense of tragedy when that expectation is truncated. Brooke, however, presents no specific opening brawl scene, only general references to “yre” and bloodshed (36-38), and consequently there is no thwarting of expectations. Indeed, critics remain surprisingly silent regarding Shakespeare's change in the description of the feud. In Brooke the cause of the feud is identified, and it is described as a recent development: “so great a new disorder in [the prince's] common weale” (42; italics mine) infects these two families “whose egall state bred envye pale of hew” (25-38). Shakespeare underscores tragic irony by having Paris reverse the equality issue so that it should, but does not because of the feud, operate to Romeo and Juliet's advantage in making a match between two families “both alike in dignity” (Prologue, 1): “Of honourable reckoning are you both, / And pity 'tis you lived at odds so long” (1.2.4-5). In Shakespeare, moreover, no cause is specified other than the general “airy word” (1.1.87), thereby emphasizing the irrationality of the feud, and he stresses its “ancient” quality (Prologue, 3; 1.1.102).¹¹

When Tybalt enters, he surprises us with his verbal courtesy to Romeo's friends: “Gentlemen, good e'en: a word with one of you” (38). Mercutio's immediate rejoinder shows he is itching for a fight before any mention is even made of Romeo: “And but one word with one of us? / Couple it with something, make it a word and a blow” (39-40); “Could you not take some occasion without giving?” (43). The incendiary weather is undoubtedly a factor, but it does not seem to affect the aptly named Benvolio, Romeo's other good friend, who advocates privacy, rationalization, or departure (49-52) in response to Mercutio's first reference to his sword: “Here's my fiddlestick, here's that shall make you dance” (47-48). Mercutio's baiting of Tybalt here anticipates Tybalt's more insulting baiting of Romeo once Romeo enters. Tybalt, however, does not rise to Mercutio's taunts to fight but turns aside from Mercutio—“Well, peace be with you, sir”—when “[his] man” Romeo (58) finally enters. Before Tybalt can insult Romeo, Mercutio quickly jabs Tybalt with another speech in defense of Romeo's manhood, punning on Romeo's social rank as a master not a servant (56-58) and thereby continuing to develop his offensive reaction to Tybalt's use of “consortest” (44). Mercutio defines manhood in terms of mastery and the fight, as did Sampson and Gregory earlier when quarreling with Abram and Balthasar (“Draw if you be men,” 1.1.59) over whose masters are “better” men (1.1.58) so that these two fight scenes are linked verbally and thematically. Likewise, Benvolio's appeal to rational manliness (51) echoes faintly the more strongly stated definition of manhood that opposes bellicosity given by Prince Escalus when he denounces the brawlers in the play's first scene: “You men, you beasts!” (81). The issue of mastery is explored both socially and philosophically throughout the play to resonate most painfully in the final scene when the stumbling Friar Laurence discovers the “masterless and gory swords” (5.3.142) of Romeo and Paris at the Capulet tomb.

Tybalt, who might expect Romeo to have received his letter, must be dumbfounded when Romeo repeatedly pleads he loves Tybalt (61-64, 66-71). Tybalt's first rejoinder, “Boy, this shall not excuse the injuries / That thou hast done me, therefore turn and draw” (65-66; italics mine), and the earlier allusions to his letter show how this “ancient grudge” (Prologue, 3) has been fanned into an intensely personal conflagration. Shakespeare, as he often does in adapting the general nature of situations in his sources, highly personalizes the situation so that the audience's empathy is more specifically channeled for the characters, and the situation becomes much more charged with dramatic energy. Before Tybalt can counter Romeo's second protestation of good will, Mercutio, who thinks one must fight to be a man, interprets what Escalus might see as courageous pacifism as the dishonorable weakness of “vile submission” (74).

Although “the fiery Tybalt,” first satirized by Benvolio (1.1.107-10), showed no self-restraint in the play's opening scene, he now, however, continues to resist Mercutio's insults, as Gibbons rightly notes: “What wouldst thou have with me?” (75). Tybalt ultimately responds to Mercutio's action of sword-drawing, but why might Mercutio's language that now directly satirizes Tybalt's name with feline puns (“ratcatcher,” “Good King of Cats”) be particularly galling to a “princox” (1.5.85) like Tybalt who takes what's in a word or name quite seriously (cf. 1.1.66-69)? Unlike Tybalt, the audience has been prepared for such name-calling (2.4.19-35). Moreover, Romeo's appeal to Tybalt stresses the importance of name: “And so, good Capulet, which name I tender / As dearly as my own, be satisfied” (70-71). Editors tend to overlook, however, the “bold” / “manly” denotative meaning of Tybalt's name. E. G. Withycombe suggests the name in its vernacular form, Tebald or Tibald, is a form of “Theobald” and is probably related to the Old German “Theudobald” meaning “bold people.”¹² Similarly, William Camden indicates the meaning of the name “Theobald, commonly Tibald, and Thibald” is “Powerfull or bolde over people,” and Randle Cotgrave offers another Renaissance definition, “Thibauld. Theobalde; a proper name for a man.”¹³

Shakespeare inherited Tybalt's name from his source, retaining and heightening its meaning while also creating through his feline puns another meaning not found in Brooke. Editors regularly observe that “Tibert” is the name of the cat in The History of Reynard the Fox, a medieval animal epic still popular in the sixteenth century.¹⁴ In his edition of William Caxton's English translation of The History of Reynard the Fox (1481) from a Middle Dutch version, Donald B. Sands explains that “Tibert” is “a Germanic name, originally Theodoberht and one which appears in Romeo and Juliet (2.4.18) in a pun on ‘Tibalt.’”¹⁵ But what is the point of Mercutio's allusion? For anyone in the audience familiar with Reynard the Fox Mercutio's sharp-tongued identification of Tybalt as the Prince of Cats undercuts Tybalt's arrogant pretensions because in Reynard Tibert, although reputed wise by the King of Beasts (the lion), is “not great” but “little and feeble” and is physically beaten, as well as made to look cowardly and foolish when “outfoxed” by Reynard.¹⁶ The same purpose of pricking false pride appears in Thomas Nashe's similar satire on titles and pretensions to being extraordinary in his reference to “Tibault” and the title “Prince of Cattes” in Have with You to Saffron-Walden.¹⁷ On the other hand, tibert or tybert can also refer commonly to any cat.¹⁸ Therefore, Mercutio's jest becomes doubly appropriate for the haughty duellist Tybalt whose cat-like agility in butchering a silk button (2.4.23) is matched by the cat's method of fighting, that is, scratching. That method is paralleled by the relatively new weapon of the rapier. As Mercutio gravely laments, the rapier can “scratch a man to death” (102; 94), unlike the older “long sword” (1.1.73) of Capulet's youth or the servants' weapons of “swords and bucklers” (1.1.S.D.) which depend on the cutting edge of the blade, and not its point, to deal death.

What then prompts Mercutio? What the audience knows is not what Romeo knows. Romeo, having entered the scene but lately, is not privy to Mercutio's own hot mood today. It appears that Mercutio is offering to duel Tybalt in an attempt to assuage his friend's loss of manly honor in not standing up to his enemy. And that indeed is a probable motive, but is it the only one? Alas, from Romeo's perspective it is. Given Mercutio's general cursing of both feuding houses after he is fatally wounded, Mercutio's accusation—“why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm” (104-5)—and Romeo's ignorance of what has already transpired between Mercutio and Tybalt, Romeo cannot help but wrenchingly conclude that his friend died for him and because of him.

If Romeo's conclusions were the only possible truths, why did Shakespeare bother to develop for Mercutio a quarrelsome nature as well as an attitude of personal animosity toward Tybalt? While Tybalt is nursing his personal hatred for Romeo, Mercutio reveals his for Tybalt. Mercutio's repeatedly contemptuous ridiculing of Tybalt suggests that Mercutio emphatically resents Tybalt and not just because he is a Capulet and the Montagues are Mercutio's companions. After all, Mercutio is invited to the Capulet ball (1.2.68). As with Tybalt's enmity toward Romeo, Mercutio's strikes a deeply personal chord. Prior to their encounter, Mercutio, who champions a plain style of fencing, parodied Tybalt as a duelist and mocked him as a man, objecting to Tybalt's textbook fencing and punctilious adherence to form and the latest fencing fashions as signs of Tybalt's villainous character (2.4.19-36). Could Mercutio be jealous of Tybalt's skill with the rapier? Or does Mercutio genuinely disdain the “Good King of Cats” (76)? There seems to be more than honor at the stake here. Whatever may be the case, Mercutio certainly laments he has not scored against Tybalt: “Is he gone, and hath nothing?” (92). His final denunciation rings with contempt: “A braggart, a rogue, a villain, that fights by the book of arithmetic” (102-3). But until this final denunciation Romeo appears ignorant of Mercutio's “rude will” (2.3.24) toward Tybalt.

Thus, Shakespeare propels the situation to its utmost by heightening the tragic irony and its consequently tragic dilemma for Romeo. While Mercutio may have been fighting Tybalt on Romeo's behalf, he was also fighting Tybalt for himself. With pungent irony Shakespeare has Mercutio insist on “alla stoccata” (73) as the fencing thrust for triumph. Criticism has overlooked the possible significance of this particular thrust. A stoccata is a thrust which reaches the enemy under the sword, hand, or dagger. At first blush Mercutio's choice seems apt because the Renaissance fencing master, Vincentio Saviolo, stresses the use of this particular thrust if one's enemy “bee cunning and skilfull,” which Tybalt certainly is.¹⁹ But it is Tybalt, not Mercutio, who seems to triumph with this thrust because Tybalt thrusts under Romeo's arm and perhaps even under his foe's weapon. Perhaps Mercutio's reference to the “passado” (84) is another taunt to egg on Tybalt because the passado was often a remove (step aside) to escape a hit while allowing for a counter-attack.²⁰ This implies that Mercutio will be the first to strike at Tybalt, forcing a temporary retreat. Through Mercutio's identification of Tybalt with fancy fencing Shakespeare ingeniously develops a hint in Brooke where Tybalt is several times lauded for his “skill in feates of armes” (1054, 964), a reputation that befits his name. As such Tybalt becomes a warrior type in the play—the fighter.

Romeo, however, has been consistently presented in the role of the lover, as well as friend, who rediscovers his “sociable” self (2.4.89) with Mercutio only after he betroths himself to Juliet. And as a lover Romeo might also be seen as the pilgrim, a stark foil to the fighter. As Brian Gibbons and other editors have noted, “romeo” in Italian means “roamer, wanderer, or palmer” (1.5.92-105, note), and the pilgrim was conventionally associated with the lover. I would suggest, unlike Gibbons, that verbal quibbling is abetted by visual impression because the masked Romeo probably does go to the ball costumed as a pilgrim, and hence the first loverly exchange between Romeo and Juliet in which Juliet greets Romeo as “good pilgrim” before she even knows his name rises naturally from his pilgrim's costume. Aside from her greeting there is no specific evidence in the play for this costume, but critics have overlooked evidence in Brooke for some costume in addition to the mask. In Brooke when Juliet seeks to know her beloved's identity, she asks: “And tell me who is he with vysor in his hand, / That yonder doth in masking weede besyde the window stand” (351-52; italics mine).²¹ The traditional pilgrim's garb usually included a cloak as well as a large hat, scallop shell, and staff.²²

If Shakespeare does innovatively develop the costume hint in his source as the specific pilgrim motif, then the visual impact of the pilgrim registers even more contrast with that of the revenger. As pilgrim-lover Romeo seems to be no man to fight Tybalt. Mercutio, ignorant about Juliet but anticipating a possible duel between Tybalt and Romeo, laments this, playfully deriding Romeo as “already dead” (2.4.13-17) from love's attack. Once Romeo shifts his allegiance from love to hate, from peace to war, he ironically transforms himself from the pilgrim-lover into the pilgrim-wanderer, the “runagate” (3.5.89) doomed to exile for killing Tybalt. Although Shakespeare took some nautical hints from Brooke's poem, “To the Reader,” with its “wery pilate” using “the lode starres … in storms to guide to haven the tossed barke” (12-14),²³ Shakespeare, however, through his imagery of voyaging creatively coalesces the nuances of Romeo's name when its bearer's earthly pilgrimage ends not in safe haven but in shipwreck. When Romeo is faced with banishment, his “dear saint” (1.5.102) becomes his “heaven” (3.3.29). When faced with what he believes to be death, Romeo keeps faith with Juliet in setting up his “everlasting rest” (5.3.110) with her, but wearied by an onslaught of woes, does Romeo also break faith with “[him] that hath the steerage of [his] course” (1.5.112) when he becomes his own “desperate pilot” of his “seasick weary bark” (5.3.117-18)?

Romeo's tragic ignorance of Mercutio and his possible motivations enmeshes Romeo in a painful dilemma of having to choose between his wife and his friend, between romance and friendship, if you will, not altogether unlike the dilemmas of choice for lovers and friends in other plays roughly contemporaneous with Romeo and Juliet, such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Much Ado About Nothing. Indeed, Shakespeare strikingly develops the motif of youthful male friendship that virtually disappears after the opening of Brooke's poem (101-48). Shakespeare also significantly changes Brooke's reasons for Romeo's attempt to prevent violence and foster peace. In Brooke Romeus knowingly runs to the fray attracted by its noise (994), whereas Romeo, either by chance or by fate, unluckily happens upon an apparently peaceful scene. Shakespeare develops tragic pathos here by using mischance and by telescoping time; in Brooke the fray occurs some three months after the marriage (The Argument, 5; 949), but in Shakespeare only one fragile hour has transpired since the wedding. When Brooke's Romeus arrives at the fray, he tries to reason with the combatants on very different grounds than does Shakespeare's Romeo: “helpe frendes to part the fray / … Gods farther wrath you styrre, beside the hurt you feele / And with this new uprore confounde all this our common wele” (1001-2). Except for Romeo's reminder of the Prince's edict (87-88), Shakespeare omits the political and theological concerns that govern Romeus's appeal and crystallizes Romeo's motivation in his love for Juliet. Brooke's Tybalt viciously attacks Romeus twice, Romeus being spared only by his coat of “mayle” and his “cunning ward” (1009, 1020). For Romeus's vague “other waighty cause my hasty hand doth stay” (1012), Shakespeare substitutes the explicit language of love as Romeo attempts to deflect Tybalt's slanderous insults. Given what we have seen of our pilgrim Romeo, we expect him to continue in pursuing loving pacifism. Indeed, Romeo seems remarkably resilient and would have been able to withstand Tybalt's provocation but for Mercutio's tragic intervention. Despite Tybalt's insults and Mercutio's condemnation, Romeo continues to argue for peace, even risking his own life by coming between the dangerous duelists to part them.

What then might Shakespeare gain dramatically by changing Romeo's duel from enraged self-defense to impassioned revenge for the loss of a dear friend?²⁴ Among other things he gains at least a much more complicated and ironic situation fraught with bittersweet poignancy and ethical dilemma as Romeo's love for Juliet is newly challenged by his love for his dear friend Mercutio and hate for Tybalt. To champion his dead friend he must kill his wife's cousin. For Romeo the moment is emotionally electrified with very little time to think, let alone “reason coldly” (51). However, Shakespeare clears the stage and gives Romeo some brief time to soliloquize, and upon this reflection to choose, totally unlike anything found in his source. In Brooke Tybalt's second attack so provokes Romeus that he rages savagely “as a forest bore … / Or as a Lyon wylde … of wrong receavde tavenge himselfe by fight” (1023-30). What a stark contrast we find in Shakespeare's account which bypasses the sensationalism and gore found in Brooke to focus more incisively on the tragic trap and characters' motives for choices. Thus far Tybalt has not physically attacked Romeo, but he has succeeded in wounding Romeo far more deeply by killing Mercutio. In light of this context the view represented by Gibbons emphasizing Romeo's being “forced” (p. 40) to avenge Mercutio seems a bit overstated. Just as Romeo had chosen not to obey the dictates of the honor code in revenging Tybalt's insults, so now he consciously reverses that decision. In contemplating what has just happened—Mercutio's “mortal hurt / In [his] behalf—[his] reputation stained with Tybalt's slander” (113-14)—Romeo begins to resolve in favor of revenge: “O sweet Juliet, / Thy beauty hath made me effeminate / And in my temper soft'ned valor's steel” (115-17). Benvolio's reentrance to announce Mercutio's death but fans the flame as Romeo ominously forewarns, “This day's black fate … but begins the woe others must end” (121-22).

Amazingly Tybalt now returns to the scene of the crime, still “furious” (123) and still seeking his original prey. How violent must one be to return to kill again, one's sword already bloodily “neighbourstained” (1.1.80)? Shakespeare's darker exploration of man's “rude will” contrasts sharply with Franco Zeffirelli's revision of this scene in his well-known film where Tybalt's fatal thrust appears accidental and Romeo furiously pursues a soberly retreating Tybalt. Given the traumatic complexity of his situation what should Romeo do? The question rankles. But Romeo now verbally clarifies his choice for revenge, “Away to heaven respective lenity, / And fire-ey'd fury be my conduct now!” (125-26), before he enacts it. He fights now both for himself—“Now, Tybalt, take the ‘villain’ back again / That late thou gav'st me”—and for Mercutio—“Mercutio slain … for Mercutio's soul” (124-28). As Benvolio notes in his report to the Prince, Romeo has but “newly entertain'd revenge” (173). Now “to't they go like lightning” (174), and the audience's ear may recall the last time they heard the word “lightning” in a far different context but one also tinged with danger as Juliet cautioned Romeo about the lightning nature of their love (2.2.119). Romeo is ready to kill or to die: “Either thou, or I, or both must go with [Mercutio]” (131). Romeo exits lamenting that he is now Fortune's fool, and although Fortune has played her part, it has been but a part.

Thus Shakespeare transcends his source by developing Romeo's stature as a tragic protagonist as Romeo chooses here to decry his love for Juliet as an effeminate force, rendering him a “weaker vessel” (1.1.14-15), and consequently he embraces the macho ethic of Tybalt's revenge code which lamentably fuels the feud as well as the warrior definition of manhood. Must one violently revenge wrongs to be a man? In an attempt to analyze the modern street violence in Washington, D.C., commonly called the murder capital of the United States, a front-page article in The Washington Post newspaper outlined “the deadly code of conduct” believed to be “at the roots of the violence”: “Never back down, even from what appears to be a trivial confrontation. Be willing to kill or die to defend your honor. Protect your reputation and manhood at all costs, lest you lose the respect of your friends.”²⁵ How far have we come?

Shakespeare's fascination with violence and its potentially tragic effects in this play is far more complex, and part of his mastery of tragic form involves his brilliant juxtaposition of scenes, our scene being no exception. While outside the compass of this essay, we might note in passing that violence in hate is matched by violence in love. His imagery deadly and explosively violent, Friar Laurence cautions Romeo and Juliet about how to love each other before he weds them: “These violent delights have violent ends / And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, / Which, as they kiss, consume” (2.6.9-11). Romeo describes Tybalt as “alive in triumph” (126) over Mercutio only to die himself. And in the two scenes subsequent to the duel both Juliet (3.2.132-37) and Romeo (3.3.106-7) threaten to take their lives but are prevented until finally interred in a “triumphant grave” (5.3.83).

However, the fatal duel in which Romeo becomes a first-time murderer does not in itself make Romeo “death-mark'd” (Prologue, 9) because the point of Friar Laurence's subsequent philosophical debate with Romeo (3.3) depends on exile, not death, on Romeo's being spared to live. Indeed, Benvolio expected the death sentence, reminding us of that decree when he begs Romeo to flee: “The Prince will doom thee death / If thou art taken” (136-37). The fact that Escalus mitigates his original decree of the death penalty for future frays is in itself somewhat complicated business that usually receives scant attention. In Brooke there is no such specific edict to begin with, only general “jentyl … perswasion … [and] thondring threats” on the prince's part (43-48), and the prince's dilemma of judgment is marked by a significant pause to reflect on this particular fray before dooming exile (1045-46). Why does Shakespeare's Escalus change his mind? His reasons are never clearly articulated, but he questions Lady Capulet's assertion that justice exact Romeo's life for Tybalt's by emphasizing the triangle that evolves with Mercutio's death. Escalus's revision of the penalty from death to banishment probably reveals his recognition of Romeo's dilemma as well as Romeo's offense of murder because Romeo took the law into his own hands. Moreover, Shakespeare makes Mercutio “the prince's near ally” (3.1.112), thus giving Escalus a vested interest of personal loss in this feud: “My blood for your rude brawls doth lie a-bleeding” (191).

Interestingly, the next and last time we hear Mercutio's name mentioned in the play ominously occurs in Romeo's next and last duel, hence linking these two fatal duels, as opposed to the greater comic potential of the opening brawl with its bloody danger but no death. Just as Shakespeare made Mercutio kin to the Prince, so also he now reveals ever so poignantly through Romeo's complaint that Mercutio was also kin to Paris (5.3.75). Herein Romeo recognizes that he has slain both his wife's kin and his friend's kin, and Escalus later laments this loss of “a brace of kinsmen” (Mercutio and Paris), simultaneously acknowledging the influence of a higher power while significantly seeing himself as punished for his own blameworthy “winking at [the feudists'] discords” (5.3.292-94). Escalus's conclusion recalls Friar Laurence's bipolar position (5.3.153; 225-26). Although a detailed analysis of Escalus's role lies outside the scope of this essay, it should be observed here that Shakespeare may indict him for lax discipline of his town's rebellious patriarchs and their households, more than Brooke does whose Escalus loses no kinsmen nor comments that “all are punished” (5.3.294). In both Brooke and Shakespeare the feud causes bloodshed, but in Shakespeare three specific brawls occur before Escalus pronounces his edict (1.1.79-101).

In both Romeo's duels he intended to prevent violence, but succumbed to it in deed.²⁶ In the final duel, another of Shakespeare's additions to Brooke, the emphasis on mad blood as well as the “betossed soul” (76) resurfaces as Romeo, once again intending not to fight, pleads with Paris as he similarly had done with Tybalt, “I love thee better than myself” (64). But while his self-description as “a desperate man” (59) and “a mad man” (67) elicits our sympathy for his agony, we also hear Romeo rationally recognize his own plight: “Put not another sin upon my head / By urging me to fury” (62-63). The network of related deaths cripples Verona in a premature burial of some of its finest. The play's architecture might be thought of as resting on the tripod of these three fights created or transformed by Shakespeare to define structurally the opening, midpoint, and ending of this tragedy.

Shakespeare's powerful revision of his chief source for the fatal duel that orients the play in tragedy's direction raises compelling questions about the interplay of comic and tragic modes: What promotes life? What promotes death? Above all, how and why? As young Romeo exits he might do well to borrow some of his ghostly father's lines that partly capture the tragic tension in this sometimes underestimated drama: “And here I stand, both to impeach and purge / Myself condemned and myself excus'd” (5.3.225-26).

Notes

1. All references are to Romeo and Juliet, ed. Brian Gibbons (New Arden Shakespeare) (London: Methuen, 1980). I dedicate this essay to the late Professor O. B. Hardison, Jr. who encouraged me to write it.

2. For a useful list of critics representing the views of this play as a tragedy of fate or a tragedy of character, see Paul N. Siegel, “Christianity and the Religion of Love in Romeo and Juliet,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 12 (1961): 371.

3. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), I, 281. All references to Brooke's poem are documented parenthetically in my text and refer to Bullough, 284-363. Kenneth Muir also does not mention Mercutio's aggressive role in The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (London: Methuen, 1977), 38-46. However, G. Blakemore Evans does note this role in his edition of Romeo and Juliet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 3.1.168, note. Cf. also, Raymond V. Utterback, “The Death of Mercutio,” SQ 24 (1973): 105-16.

4. See O.E.D., [Oxford English Dictionary] “Mercurial,” a.3; “Mercurialist,” lb. Cf. Murray J. Levith, What's in Shakespeare's Names (Hamden, CT: Shoe String Press, 1978), 46-47. In describing “the qualities of the Planets” Claude Dariot notes that the influence of “Mercurie in all things is common and mutable, he is good with the good and euill with the euill … hote with the hote … infortunate with the misfortunes,” and perhaps this aspect of mutability also affects Shakespeare's presentation of Mercutio as one who can change from a “talker” to a “fighter.” See Dariot, A Briefe … Introduction to the Astrologicall Iudgement of the Starres, trans. Fabian Wither (London: Thomas Purfoot, 1598), sigs. C4^v-D1.

5. See Hosley, ed., The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1854), 1.4.1 n., p. 134. It is not unlikely that Shakespeare knew the Romeo and Juliet story in an Italian version, especially Luigi da Porto's Giulietta e Romeo (c. 1530) and perhaps even Matteo Bandello's “Romeo e Giulietta” (1554) in his Le Novelle. Shakespeare also used Italian sources for The Merchant of Venice and Othello. Olin H. Moore argues the case for Shakespeare's knowledge of Luigi da Porto. See Moore, The Legend of Romeo and Juliet (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1950), 111-18, 129-31, 138. Cf. Muir, 38. Evans notes that the detail of Romeo's attending the Capulet feast in the hope of seeing Rosaline appears only in Da Porto, and not in Boaistuau, as had been formerly argued. See Evans, 7, n. 1. In addition to Shakespeare's possible awareness of Marcuccio's name, I would like to present here new support for Moore's thesis that Shakespeare probably had “access, directly or indirectly, to Italian originals” (p. 138). Only in the Italian sources do we find the Mercutio figure called “squint-eyed.” Da Porto introduces him as “Marcuccio Guercio,” and when Bandello refers to him as “Marcuccio il guercio,” he develops the character as “an indispensable leader in festivities,” a trait Shakespeare also ascribes to his Mercutio. See Moore, 44, 76-77 and n. 14. Marcuccio's physical deformity of being “squint-eyed,” which could be masked especially well by a visor with overhanging eyebrows, seems to shed light on Shakespeare's curious lines for Mercutio: “A visor for a visor. What care I / What curious eye doth quote deformities? / Here are the beetle brows shall blush for me” (1.4.30-32). There is nothing to prompt such a remark in the English versions of Brooke and Painter nor in Boaistuau's French translation of Bandello's Italian. Shakespeare's original portrayal of Romeo as a “torchbearer” (1.4.11-12, 35) to the ball, one who intends not to dance, may be influenced by Da Porto's and Bandello's emphasis on the “torchio” as the name of the last dance at the Capulet ball, a dance in which partners are exchanged, and as Bandello explains, the “torchio” is passed from the gentleman to the lady. See Moore, 44, 82. Brooke has one line that indicates this dance: “With torche in hand a comly knight did fetch her [Juliet] foorth to daunce” (246). Finally, only in Da Porto and Bandello does Romeo attempt suicide by stabbing himself but is prevented. See Moore, 47; Bullough, 273. If Shakespeare borrows this incident, he transfers it from the end of the Italian versions when Romeo receives the false news of Juliet's death to the middle of his play (3.3.106-7) when Romeo reacts to the news of his banishment. Shakespeare moves forward in his plot several elements in his sources, such as the match with Paris and Tybalt's entrance. However, using evidence from separate scenes, Moore overstates the case for Shakespeare's exclusive agreement with Da Porto and Groto in the mention of stabbing and poisoning at the heroine's death (see 106, 115, 138). The same double emphasis, at similar places in the narrative, may be found in Brooke, ll. 2023-24, 2028, 2179-80, 2753, 2772. A useful edition for comparing Moore's quotations from the Italian sources is Alessandro Torri, ed., Giulietta e Romeo … di Luigi Da Porto; Romeo e Giulietta … di Matteo Bandello; Giulia e Romeo … da Clizia (Pisa: Tipi dei Fratelli Nistri e cc., 1831).

6. See William Camden, Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine (London: G. E., 1605), sig I4: “Marke … according to Festus Pompeius it signifieth a Hammer or Mallet, given in hope the person should be martiall.” See Edward Lyford, The True Interpretation and Etymologie of Christian Names (London: T. W., 1655), sig. L5: “Mark, or Marcus” means “Martial, or Warlike (with Plutarch) from Mars … a name given in hope of future Valour.” Cf. E. G. Withycombe, The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 167.

7. “Juliet” is a diminutive of “Julia,” the feminine form of “Julius,” and the month of July takes its name from Julius Caesar. See O.E.D., “July”; Withycombe, 175-76; Levith, 45. Cf. Gibbons who suggests “these associations with early ripening [Lammas-tide] chime happily with Juliet's birth” (1.3.15 n., 101). But Shakespeare complicates the joyful ripening associated with the harvest festival of Lammas-tide because a harvest is also a time of death—cropping and uprooting—so that while Juliet “ripens,” she is also “cut down” before her time.

8. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Batman uppon Bartholome, his Book De Proprietatibus Rerum, tr. John Trevisa, rev. Stephen Batman (London: Thomas East, 1582), IX. 15, fol. 146^v.

9. See Bullokar, An English Expositor (London: John Legatt, 1616), sig. F5. See Spenser, Prosopopoia. Or Mother Hubberds Tale (1591), Spenser: Poetical Works, eds. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (1912; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 495, ll. 5-8. Cf. also, Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar (1579), “Iulye Aeglogue,” 444, ll. 21-26, and the “Glosse,” 447: “in Iuly the sonne is in Leo … [and] the Dogge starre, which is called Syrius or Canicula reigneth, with immoderate heate causing Pestilence, drougth, and many diseases.”

10. The term “star-cross'd” appears to originate with Shakespeare and is a hapax legomenon in his canon as well. This term is most often glossed in a plural sense (i.e., the malignity of the stars): see, e.g., the editions of the play by Thomas Marc Parrot, George Lyman Kittredge, William Allan Neilson and Charles Jarvis Hill, Oscar James Campbell, Louis B. Wright and Virginia A. LaMar, John E. Hankins, John Dover Wilson and George Ian Duthie, T. B. J. Spencer, and Frank Kermode (Riverside) as well as Alexander Schmidt's Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary. In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare always uses the word “star” in its plural form, but elsewhere he uses “star” in the singular sense of a natal star (Ado, 2.1.335), an unfavorable star (2H6, 3.1.206), or a favorable star (Tmp, 1.2.182). For the singular sense of “star-cross'd” to signify a current misfortune, see Thomas Dekker, Old Fortunatus (1599), The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953-61), Vol. 1, Act 2 (Chorus), 15-16, 136 and Act 4 (Chorus), 4-6, p. 168, where Dekker's first passage presents misfortune as “some unluckie starre” and parallels his use of “star-crost” in his second choric passage. Cf. also, O.E.D., “Star,” sb. 1, 20 (“star-cross, -crossed adjs., thwarted by a malign star”); Evans's note on “star-crossed,” p. 53.

11. Regarding the reference to an “ancient grudge,” see Bullough, 276 and Evans, Chorus, 3, note, p. 53. Evans errs, however, when he claims that Brooke “only allows the feud to erupt in violence after Romeus and Juliet's marriage” (p. 8). See Brooke, ll. 36-38: “So of a kyndled sparke of grudge, in flames flashe out theyr yre, / And then theyr deadly foode, first hatchd of trifling stryfe / Did bathe in bloud of smarting woundes, it re[a]ved breth and lyfe.”

12. Withycombe, 263-64. In the Italian sources of the Romeo and Juliet story, Tybalt's name is “Tebaldo.” See Moore, 46, 68, 76, et passim.

13. Camden, sig. K4. Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London: Adam Islip, 1611), “Thibauld,” sig. Ggggvi^v.

14. See, e.g., H. H. Furness, ed., Romeo and Juliet (Variorum Shakespeare) (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1899), 119; Gibbons, 142; Evans, 105.

15. See Sands, ed., The History of Reynard the Fox, trans. William Caxton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 201.

16. Tibert first appears briefly in chapter three of Reynard, but chapter ten begins his story, a very funny but uncomplimentary allusion for Tybalt. See Sands, esp. 64-69; cf. also, 72, 78-82, 85, 95, 97, 105, 148, 183.

17. For the interrelation of Nashe's and Shakespeare's use of the title, “Prince of Cats,” and the view that Shakespeare is probably borrowing from Nashe, see Evans, 3-4, 105. Although the title, “Prince of Cats,” does not appear in Reynard, Tibert is introduced in chapter 10 as “Sir Tibert.” See Sands, 64.

18. See Robert Nares, A Glossary (London: Robert Triphook, 1822), “Tibert, or Tybert,” 518. Cf. O.E.D., “Tibert.” Cf. Ben Jonson's figurative use of “tiberts” for “men” in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52), Vol. 8, Epigrammes (cxxxiii. “The Voyage Itself”), 88, 149-55: “Cats there lay … / But ’mongst these Tiberts, who do’ you thinke there was?”

19. Saviolo, His Practice (1595), in Three Elizabethan Fencing Manuals, ed. James Jackson (Delmar, New York: Scolars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1972), sig. H1^v; sig. E. For the stoccata, cf. also, Egerton Castle, Schools and Masters of Fence, rev. ed. (1885; London: G. Bell & Sons, 1910), 121; Horace S. Craig, “Dueling Scenes and Terms in Shakespeare's Plays,” University of California Publications in English 9 (1940), 25-26; Adolph L. Soens, “Tybalt's Spanish Fencing in Romeo and Juliet,” SQ 20 (1969): 122, n. 10.

20. See Saviolo, sig. H3, sig. K2; Castle, 122; Craig, 12, 25.

21. Cf. Shakespeare's other English source, William Painter, trans., The Palace of Pleasure, ed. Joseph Jacobs (1980; rpt. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966), “Rhomeo and Iulietta,” III, 87: “Then she asked hir againe, what young gentleman that was which holdeth the visarde in his hand, wyth the damaske cloke about him” (italics mine). Although Brooke's “masking weede” for Romeo is a sufficient hint for Shakespeare to develop his own specific pilgrim costume, he might have taken another hint for the idea of a specific costume from Da Porto's version. Only in this version, where the party is a masquerade ball, is Romeo given a specific costume; he is disguised as a nymph. See Moore, 43.

22. For Inigo Jones's sketch of a “romeo” or pilgrim costume, see James Robinson Planché, A Cyclopaedia of Costume or Dictionary of Dress (London: Chatto & Windus, 1876), 2, 398-99. Cf. Furness, Halliwell's note on 1.5.95, pp. 80-81. For another pilgrim-lover association in Shakespeare, cf. Hamlet, 4.5.25-26.

23. See also Brooke's other nautical references, ll. 211-12, 225, 799-808, 1365-82, 1519-26. Cf. also, Romeus's complaint, ll. 1335-36, redressed by the Friar's wise counsel, ll. 1361-81, 1431-36.

24. The motif of avenging others, rather than just oneself, also appears only in Luigi da Porto's version, but revenge here is more generalized with Romeo's seeking revenge for the wounds of many friends. See Moore, 114.

25. Leon Dash, “At the Roots of Violence: A Deadly Code of Conduct,” The Washington Post, April 3, 1989, A1. Cf. Marvin E. Wolfgang and Neil Alan Weiner, eds., Criminal Violence (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 1982), 303-4, for an appraisal of peer environment for group violence.

26. Youth, at least to some extent, is its own excuse. Shakespeare emphasizes throughout his play the youthfulness of Romeo, his peers, and Juliet (e.g., as is often noted, Brooke's Juliet is 16 years old (1860), but Shakespeare's is 13). Cf. here Worcester's explanation to Vernon why they as responsible adults will not be excused for their rebellion against the king, but Hotspur's offense will be excused because of his youth and splenetic temperament: “My nephew's trespass may well be forgot, / It hath the excuse of youth and heat of blood.” See The First Part of Henry the Fourth, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 5.2.16-23.