[In the essay below, Porter states that in both criticism and in production, Mercutio's claims for the worth of friendship are not given adequate attention. Porter goes on to assess the historical context of the love versus friendship debate as it existed in Shakespeare's England, and notes the ways in which the subversive nature of Christopher Marlowe's homosexuality is addressed by Shakespeare through the character of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet.]

THE HISTORICAL MOMENT

Mercutio takes shape in Shakespeare's mind as a product of, and response to, a distinctive array of social forces determining the received entities of friendship and love. Some of Shakespeare's address to these matters is recognized in commentary on the scrutiny of social, particularly verbal, determinants on the emotion of love in Romeo and Juliet (see especially Kahn, “Age,” 1980, and Snow, “Language,” 1985). The subject is much larger, though, and furthermore our understanding of the historical moment changes, being itself historical. In particular, numerous commentators over the past two decades, from Michel Foucault to Lawrence Stone, have contributed to a revision of earlier essentialist views of psychological states and relations in favor of more thoroughly historicized notions of them.

Therefore a preliminary word about the affectional constitution of the moment seems in order (even though no more than a word is possible here), to situate the following treatment of Mercutio by making explicit some of the assumptions that underly it and sketching some of the historical topography. Neither of the terms in the title of this chapter is any more immediate for Shakespeare than for us, although there is reason to suppose that social changes underway in Shakespeare's moment create an effect of immediacy for both friendship and love. Sexuality, a third key term figuring in this chapter, is as complex and mediated as love and friendship. Unlike them it postdates Shakespeare; like them it serves here as an umbrella for a body of related phenomena.¹ Given the general subject of this study, the following pages primarily and almost exclusively concern the friendship of men with men, and the love of men for women. The sexuality in view is also male.

Ronald Sharp (Friendship, p. 7) writes, “Though I make no attempt to be exhaustive in my treatment of the literature [of friendship], I do deal with many of the major writers and works in this tradition: Aristotle, Cicero, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Johnson, Austin, Thoreau, … Auden, Hellman, and Rich.” While there is medieval friendship and commentary on it, some mentioned by Sharp (p. 162n20), still we find in the Middle Ages “almost no glorification of friendship as a boon and privilege on this earth” (Mills, Soul, p. 17) so that the long hiatus in Sharp's list between Cicero and Shakespeare feels immediately right. For in its broadest outlines the moment of Romeo and Juliet is the arrival in England of the renaissance of secularity, commerce, social mobility, and other social forces tending to foreground nonhereditary interpersonal bonds by giving them increasing consequentiality and putting them more at risk. The profile of the tradition of the literature of love is lower in classical times and much higher in the later Middle Ages, but here too Shakespeare's moment is a watershed, one marked fifty years ago as a division between “some five centuries of human experience, mostly painful” (Lewis, Allegory, p. 341) of courtly love, and the succeeding centuries of “that romantic conception of marriage which is the basis of all our love literature from Shakespeare to Meredith” (p. 360). And the same social forces that give friendship new prominence in the moment also figure in the new prominence of the love that is realized and sanctioned in marriage.

Among innumerable factors giving the Renaissance in England its distinctive national character, certain ones seem particularly to figure in the constitution of affection. The emergent mercantilism and incipient colonialism give a peculiar urgency to questions of love and friendship by raising into prominence the kinds of distinctions between gift exchange and commodity exchange treated recently by Hyde (The Gift, 1983) and by Sharp (Friendship) in his chapters on “Friendship as Gift Exchange” and “The Merchant of Venice.” The separation from the church of Rome, together with distinctive features of the English law of inheritance, colors English romantic love by making English marriage differ from its Continental analogue in ways currently most vigorously discussed in feminist treatments of Shakespeare such as Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (1975), and of literature of the period such as Woodbridge, Women (1984). And the gender and marital status of the English head of state figure pervasively if not always calculably as determinants in the constitution of English Renaissance affection.

Two additional factors in the general moment of the English Renaissance seem particularly worth noting for their bearing on the unruly eroticism that is more or less manifest in love and more or less latent in friendship. The first is the already noted comparative dearth of pictures in England. It means that the English eye has far less instruction than the Continental in the appreciation of human physical beauty, of face and of unclothed body, and it may also mean that verbal descriptions of physical beauty need therefore to accomplish more in English than in other European languages. A second key factor in English Renaissance eroticism is the theatricality of the Renaissance in England. Here it is a question not only of the uniquely English Renaissance prominence and popularity of the literary genre of drama but also of such phenomena as the famous theatricality of Elizabeth's practice of rule. The recent “Shakespearean Revolution,” to use Styan's phrase, in the direction of increased attention to questions of performance, has included valuable assessments, by Goldman and others, of the erotics of the theatrical situation of the actor's body performing for spectators. In the English Renaissance theater that erotics includes the deferrals and displacements imposed by prohibitions against female actors and against stage nudity.

If we narrow the focus to literary texts from 1595 and the few years immediately before, a number of other determinants on the affectional makeup of Romeo and Juliet stand forth. Some of these are familiar landmarks, such as the vogue of the erotic Ovidian epyllion, the traditions of Petrarchan love poetry, of the amatory sonnet sequence, and of the debate on the relative merits of love and friendship, and such specific texts as Shakespeare's own poems and plays, Sidney's The New Arcadia, Spenser's The Faerie Queene III, and his Amoretti and Epithalamion, both from 1595.

Somewhat less familiar, at least until recently, but coherent, prominent, and, as I shall argue, addressed and processed in Romeo and Juliet, particularly in the character of Mercutio, is the wave of homoerotic poetry in the first half of the 1590s. Conspicuous examples are Richard Branfield's The Tears of an Affectionate Shepherd Sick of Love, or The Complaint of Daphnis for the Love of Ganymede (1594) and Cynthia. With Certain Sonnets (1595), “a cycle of twenty poems in which the older lover, Daphnis, woos his Ganymede in indubitably amorous terms” (Pequigney, Love, p. 65). The explicitness and exclusiveness of the homosexual orientation of Barnfield's poems apparently prompted objections in his time, and have doubtless caused some of the subsequent neglect of the poems, as claimed by Pequigney in his recent argument for an explicitly homosexual reading of Sonnets 1-126: “One might have thought that the other Elizabethan sequence that also treats of love for a youthful master-mistress would have received attention—even particular attention—in the vast output of the Shakespearean commentators. Instead, Barnfield is a dirty little skeleton to be kept in the closet, while insistent and exaggerated claims are advanced for the concept of ‘Renaissance friendship’” (Love, p. 65).² But in the early 1590s Barnfield can only have been mildly objectionable, and only because of his single-mindedness. For his poems appear in the context of far more insistent homoeroticism in Hero and Leander and even Venus and Adonis, and possibly the Sonnets in ways suggested by Pequigney.

And then there is the general case of Marlowe's own assertive homosexuality, flaunted in the remark about tobacco and boys and repeatedly in his writing. Those commentators discussed above who have recently helped to open hitherto unacknowledged depths in the subject of the relations between Shakespeare and Marlowe, notably Brooke treating Marlowe as a provocative agent in early Shakespeare and Cohen discussing Marlovian subversion and Shakespearean containment, have not addressed the subversiveness of Marlowe's homosexuality and Shakespeare's response to that subversion. Yet regardless of the persuasiveness of Pequigney's claim that the Sonnets record a physically consummated homosexual episode in Shakespeare's life, a claim that seems tenable if weakened by some of Pequigney's strained argument, we may apply Brooke's (“Agent,” p. 44) remark about Marlowe's political heterodoxy—“Marlowe seems to have been for Shakespeare … the inescapable creator of something initially alien which he could only assimilate with difficulty”—mutatis mutandis to Shakespeare's response to Marlowe's sexual heterodoxy. Mercutio's Mercurial phallicism thus serves in Shakespeare's negotiations with Marlowe's subversive sexuality, as I shall argue in the third part of this chapter. But first we turn to other conflicts in the affectional realm.

FRIENDSHIP VERSUS LOVE

Shakespeare's earlier Veronan-Brookean play makes his first major dramatic statement of the theme of rivalry between friendship and love. It is a major theme of the Sonnets, of course, and one Shakespeare returns to repeatedly in plays of all four genres in his career through The Winter's Tale (and which reappears in The Two Noble Kinsmen). Kahn (“Age,” p. 104) calls it “a conflict between male friendship and marriage which runs throughout his [Shakespeare's] work.” The second major dramatic statement of the theme, and a far clearer one than in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, is Romeo and Juliet, with the essential opposition being that between Romeo's friendship for Mercutio and his love for Juliet.

A number of recent commentators have noted the importance of this conflict in Romeo and Juliet. Janet Adelman, “Male Bonding in Shakespeare's Comedies,” pp. 82-83, writes that

when Shakespeare allows women to test the solidity of male bonds without Much Ado's comic protection from harm, that testing issues in Macbeth's murder of Duncan at Lady Macbeth's instigation, in Coriolanus's ambiguous betrayal of Aufidius at his mother's request, and above all in Hamlet's image of literal fratricide. … In fact Romeo and Juliet gives us a condensed but suggestive analogue for the turn of this fantasy material from comedy to tragedy. The play seems to begin securely in a comic realm. … The bantering love and competition between Romeo and Mercutio seems safely of this realm, even when it suggests the dissolution of friendship threatened by Romeo's … love of women. After one such wit combat, Mercutio claims Romeo as his own. … But Romeo is not Mercutio's; and the play turns … tragic at the moment that Romeo's new loyalty to women graphically destroys the old male bond. Mercutio's death signals the end of the comic realm.

I quote Adelman at some length here because her remarks seem fairly representative of current feminist and psychoanalytic thinking about the play, and because what she says seems true and useful as a starting point for a consideration of Mercutio's place in the conflict, but also because elsewhere in the same essay she indulges in a certain kind of psychosexual prescriptivism that is regrettably common in discussions such as hers, and that Shakespeare in fact seems to call into question by his creation of Mercutio.

That prescriptivism is of course the doctrine that heterosexual love ought to succeed homosexual bonding in the maturation of the individual and, more generally, that adult heterosexuality is superior to adult homosexuality. The doctrine, promulgated to Shakespeare most notably by the church, and to us most notably by the law and by the discourses deriving from Freud, results from the conversion of description into prescription by a hierarchical valuation of contingent facts, a canonization.³ In Adelman's article the doctrine appears in such phrases as “the necessary sorting out into male and female that enables marriage” (p. 90), and (of Winter's Tale) “the necessarily disrupted homosexual union of the parents” (p. 92). The doctrine implicit in Adelman's “necessary” and “necessarily” is recognized and stated with approval by Kahn (“Age,” pp. 104-5): “As Janet Adelman points out … same sex friendships in Shakespeare (as in the typical life cycle) are chronologically and psychologically prior to marriage.”

Certainly the doctrine appears in Shakespeare, most conspicuously in the festive comedies with their celebrations of the pattern described by Adelman and Kahn, but elsewhere as well, and in particular in Romeo and Juliet. But as with other received ideas, as we have come to see, so with this psychosexual doctrine in Shakespeare—it is subjected to various sorts of question and subversion. Leaving aside for the moment the question of homosexual sexuality, we may then consider how Mercutio figures in the testing of that doctrine.

None of this is intended to suggest that Adelman, Kahn, and other feminist and psychoanalytic commentators fail to see Shakespearean tensions between friendship and love. In the essay under discussion Adelman (p. 97n6) accepts the part of Fiedler's account of Shakespeare's personal mythology that makes “not marriage but male friendship the redeeming sentimental relationship” (Fiedler, Stranger, p. 127); Kahn quoted above and other recent accounts also acknowledge this conflict.⁴ The problem with these critics is rather the construction they put on the conflict. Because their vantage is more exclusively orthodox than is Shakespeare's, I maintain, they fail to take account of some of the kinds of weight Shakespeare grants the conflict, and they do less than justice to the kinds of claims Mercutio makes on Romeo and on us.

These critics recognize in Romeo and Juliet, as in The Merchant of Venice and elsewhere in Shakespeare, the “tug of war in which women and men compete—for the affections of men” (Kahn, “Age,” p. 110). And they are aware that friendship and love determine each other in Romeo and Juliet, so that not merely aesthetically or structurally in terms of the particular work of art but also, as deeply as we can go into the cultural constitution of the relevant affectional differences, who Romeo and Juliet are and what they do is a function of who Mercutio is and what he does (as well as vice versa). But at the same time these critics carry and promulgate (as do we all) inadvertent traces of acculturated prescriptivism. According to Novy (Argument, p. 106), “Romeo's exclusion of Mercutio from his confidence suggests that his love of Juliet is not only a challenge to the feud but also a challenge to associations of masculinity and sexuality with violence.” Half of Novy's last phrase is a throwaway: associations of masculinity with violence are probably specieswide, and in Shakespeare, including Romeo and Juliet, are smoked out and questioned in ways widely recognized and beyond the scope of the present study. But the other half of Novy's last phrase—“associations of … sexuality with violence”—demands more attention here, because while it masquerades grammatically as coordinate with the first, in fact the first subsumes it. That is, by “sexuality” Novy here means “male sexuality,” and she thus uses “sexuality” as a term subordinated to and included within “masculinity.”

We are not at an easy time. The foregoing notations of antifeminist residua in feminist critics mean only to flag sidetracks along the way to a feminist, humanist future. While Mercutio stands like an in trivio herm along our way to that future, his directions go unheeded and misinterpreted in production and in much criticism, including those works immediately in view here.

In those works a symptom of the failure to grant adequate moment to Mercutio's claims for the value of friendship is the consequent thinning and reduction of Mercutio himself. Reductive characterizations such as Dash (Wooing, p. 81), “Mercutio—the brash, imaginative male who, incidentally, denigrates women”—are familiar and hardly restricted to criticism of this century or to feminist criticism. In “Coming of Age in Verona” Kahn provides a more useful picture of the problems Mercutio presents to feminist and psychoanalytic study.

Kahn (“Age,” p. 176) acknowledges the character's attractiveness for us, who “want … the death of Mercutio, that spirit of vital gaiety, revenged,” and then proceeds to assign him a place in the following schema: “Among the young bloods serving as foils for Romeo, Benvolio represents the total sublimation of virile energy into peacemaking, agape instead of eros; Tybalt, such energy channeled directly and exclusively into aggression; and Mercutio, its attempted sublimation into fancy and wit.” Apart from the nineteenth-century ring of “virile energy”—an authentic and perhaps inadvertent echo of Freud's own metaphors for mental processes—several other features of the remark deserve note. Why, for instance, isn't Benvolio's virile energy “channeled” into peacemaking as “directly” as Tybalt's into aggression? When we come to Mercutio he begins to work some havoc with Kahn's schema, the tidy “total” and “exclusively” of Benvolio's and Tybalt's assignments giving way to the “attempted” of Mercutio's. And just who is making the attempt, and how and why does it fail, we may wonder. And then what about friendship? Among these four outlets for virile energy (the fourth being Romeo's love for Juliet) the only remotely amiable one is Benvolio's pacifist agape, which is indeed remote from Mercutio's full-blooded friendship for Romeo.

Kahn certainly is right that Mercutio “would rather talk than love” (p. 177), but her account of what he says obscures the character as much as does her account of his virile energy. Here the spanner in the works is not psychological but rather feminist doctrine of a particular sort. Kahn's terms are slippier than they might seem when she maintains that Mercutio “suggests” that feuding's psychological function is as a definition of manhood (p. 176). It seems doubtful that exactly this is what Kahn sees Mercutio as meaning to suggest to Romeo and Benvolio. She may rather mean that Mercutio through his wit expresses some approval of the feud to his friends, or at least acceptance, and links that attitude to his notion of manliness. Or she may mean that Shakespeare is making the suggestion to us through Mercutio. Or she may mean the impersonal “suggest,” as when we say, “The sky suggests rain,” in which case what she is really talking about is a suggestion of her own. Under any of these constructions (the list is not exhaustive) Kahn's point is tenable, although the exceptional sliding of signifiers hardly bodes well for our understanding of Mercutio. In fact, I suggest, the slipperiness is an index of the fact that Kahn is not so much attending to Mercutio as using him in support of dogma.

That situation is clearer, and the picture of Mercutio so clouded by dogma as to be untenable, in her “Love is only manly, he [Mercutio] hints, if it is aggressive and violent and consists of subjugating women, rather than being subjugated by them” (p. 176). The feminist stance is apparent, as are traces of a feminist dogma opposed to sexist patriarchy. The dogma in itself seems unexceptionable, and perhaps too the stance, but in the quoted sentence they clearly impede Kahn's understanding. Again we have the ambiguous attributive, “hints”—but is Mercutio one to hint? Kahn supports her claim with two examples of Mercutio's “hinting,” his advice to Romeo to “be rough with love” (l.4.27-28), and his remark to Benvolio that Romeo “is already dead, stabbed with a white wench's black eye, run through the ear with a love song, the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy's butt-shaft. And is he a man to encounter Tybalt?” (2.4.13-17). But in neither speech does Mercutio hint at the doctrine Kahn attributes to him. Neither there nor anywhere else does Mercutio hint at approval of “subjugating women.” Neither there nor elsewhere does he hint that a particular kind of love is “manly”—as Kahn herself observes, “Mercutio mocks … all love” (p. 177).

Again, while Mercutio is not averse to fighting, Kahn's claim that he “would rather fight than talk” (p. 177) seems obviously false. The wrongheadedness Mercutio elicits from Kahn also manifests itself in numerous ways in her discussion of the Queen Mab speech. Mercutio “would like to think that women's powers, and desires for women, are as bodiless and inconsequential as the dreams to which they give rise, and to make us also think so he concludes his whole speech with the mock-drama of a courtship between the winds. For him the perfect image of nothingness is unresponsive and inconstant love between two bodies of air” (p. 177). None of this is accurate. The Queen Mab speech is not concluded at all since Romeo breaks into it, “Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace” (1.5.95), and it is not until Mercutio's next speech, one about the Queen Mab speech, that he mentions the inconstant wind. But there he does not speak of winds, or of love between them. He speaks of one wind, who woos first the frozen bosom of the north and then the dew-dropping south.

Kahn's otherwise admirable and helpful essay traduces Mercutio in these and other ways because he stands outside the feminist reflex division of men into those who wish to dominate women and those who are able to love them in a way characterized by mutuality. The real and subversive Mercutio, standing outside that division, tests it and its underlying assumptions. Similarly he tests the psychological dogma prescribing the supplanting of homosexual by heterosexual bonding. Too often critics adhering to either dogma or, like Kahn, to both, attempt ploys like Kahn's, attempting to contain Mercutio's subversion by radically rewriting him. “Ploys,” though, is not meant to imply full consciousness on the critic's part. Kahn's self-contradiction about Mercutio and love, for instance, is too patent to be anything but guileless, and the fabricatedness of her Mercutio seems entirely unconscious.

Characteristically such critics are at pains to read Mercutio as a foil to Romeo, to make Mercutio into a case of arrested development that Romeo outgrows. And characteristically they devalue Mercutio, and devalue or ignore the claims of his friendship. While psychoanalytic and feminist critical stances increase the likelihood of such misreadings in ways described here, the play itself provides some grounds for the misreadings, as does what we know about Shakespeare's other plays. But audiences find Mercutio more attractive than Romeo not only because of Mercutio's own vitality but also because he uses it to elicit an answering vitality in Romeo, and because Mercutio is a better friend—more generous, more concerned with the other—than is Romeo. Prescriptivists find The Merchant of Venice and The Winter's Tale more amenable to citation without distortion, but even those plays keep something of an open mind about conflicting claims of friendship and love. The mind is most open of all in Romeo and Juliet, where Shakespeare's most significant and notable single alteration of the received version is his transformation of a canonical story of love into a story of rivalry between friendship and love.

“TO RAISE A SPIRIT”

The Mercurial phallicity that Shakespeare could have known from Cartari or any number of the other sources noted above is present in Romeo and Juliet from the opening interchange between Sampson and Gregory with their talk of standing, being felt when standing, thrusting maids to the wall, being a pretty piece of flesh, drawing a tool, and having a naked weapon out. This is in fact the most relentlessly phallic opening in all of Shakespeare's plays, and in only a few passages from anywhere in his work is the notion of the phallus more prominent. The opening establishes the phallus as much as the feud as a major theme, and sets up those equations between phallus and weapon, and between male heterosexuality and the violent subjugation of women, that Kahn and others transfer to Mercutio. Gohlke (“‘I wooed thee,’” p. 152) holds that “the way in which heterosexual relations are imagined” in these lines manifests a vision of intercourse as murder and, more generally, a “masculine ethic … which defines relations among men as intensely competitive, and relations with women as controlling and violent,” which ethic, she argues, turns the play's incipient comedy to tragedy and is also instrumental in later tragedies.⁵ Certainly such difficulties inform the opening interchanges, and in numerous ways the play that follows draws attention to costs exacted by the social institution of patriarchal sexism.

The play contains three additional notably phallic passages, in all of which the phallicity is still more concentrated and prominent than in the play's opening. All three are in Mercutio's speech: at his talk of sinking in love, pricks and pricking, and beating love down (1.4.23-28); at his long bawdy interchange with Benvolio about raising a spirit (2.1.23-32); and at his talk with Romeo and Benvolio, and then the Nurse, of love's bauble, of his own “tale,” and of the prick of noon (2.4.91-99, 111-12). Given that in each passage it is Mercutio who introduces the phallicism and primarily sustains it, and given the proportional prominence of such talk in Mercutio's total of lines, he is easily, in terms of what he talks about, Shakespeare's most phallic character. And several points should be made immediately about the insistent references to the phallus that mark his eloquence like priapic herms.

While Mercutio's phallicity is as aggressive as the Capulet servants', his is in a thoroughly different key by virtue of his speech acts, his range of reference, and his speech situation. Sampson in effect boasts to Gregory of the tool with which he thrusts maids to the wall, but with Mercutio we find neither boasting nor envisioned male aggression toward women. Indeed he begins his first phallic passage with

And, to sink in it, should you burden love—
Too great oppression for a tender thing

(1.4.23-24),

a mock counsel to Romeo against love on the grounds that heterosexual intercourse per se is overly aggressive against women. The roughness in the remainder of his counsel,

If love be rough with you, be rough with love;
Prick love for pricking and you beat love down

(ll. 27-28),

is directed not against women but against love, who has changed gender from female to male in Romeo's intervening speech. We do have a kind of Mercurially abrupt misogyny later in the scene in the Queen Mab speech, in the representations of the maid with lazy fingers and the ladies with tainted breaths, and the mention of foul sluttish hairs, and in the portrayal of Mab herself as a hag. None of this misogyny is phallic though, and the phallus is conspicuously absent in the final image of the speech, of Queen Mab's pressing the maids when they lie on their backs.

Nor do we find misogyny or particular aggressiveness toward women in Mercutio's other concentrations of phallic speech.⁶ Nor, it may be worth noting, is Mercutio's disapproval of Romeo's infatuation and heterosexuality at all sternly prescriptive. Rather it is genial and tolerant, and the increasingly sensual catalog of Rosaline's parts that introduces the second concentration of phallicism is appreciative throughout, if streaked with sexism in the anatomization and in the word “demesnes” (2.1.20) deriving from Latin dominus, lord, and meaning “property” (see OED, s.v.). Furthermore in an important respect Mercutio's phallic talk reverses Sampson's. While Sampson talks boastfully and exclusively about his own phallus, and induces the compliant though not entirely credulous Gregory to talk about it too, only a portion of Mercutio's bawdy, and that not boastful, is about his own “tale” (2.4.95-98). The other phalli that come up more or less explicitly in his speech are love's (1.4.28, 2.2.33, 2.4.91-93), noon's (2.4.111-12), a stranger's (2.1.23-26), and Romeo's (1.4.28, 2.1.29, 38). Mercutio, that is, very readily grants phallicity to others, notably including his friend Romeo.⁷

Mercutio's three references to his friend's phallus serve as an index of the sexual dynamics of the friendship. The quibbling figurativeness of

If love be rough with you, be rough with love;
Prick love for pricking and you beat love down

makes the sentence exceptionally resistant to close paraphrase. Still, clearly the exhortation is antivenereal, like most of what Mercutio says in the first part of the scene, and prophallic, so that (being rough with the sentence) we might paraphrase it as “Use your phallus against love.” A lightened and, as it were, genially resigned antivenerealism appears in the context of “in his mistress' name / I conjure only but to raise up him,” with its sensually appreciative but irreverent talk of Rosaline. The prophallicism, on the other hand, is stronger and more apparent.

Furthermore Mercutio here exhibits an attitude toward Romeo's phallus that is at once generous and interested. It is as if Mercutio has a personal investment, as we say, in his friend's erection. The nature of that investment might seem, on the basis of the line and a half quoted here, to involve the idea of Mercutio's taking Rosaline's place not only as conjurer but also as container of Romeo's phallus, and it is true that Rosaline has receded from active participation with the stranger, her circle around his spirit, to a mere deputizing name at Mercutio's raising of Romeo.⁸ But that fleeting, apparently subliminal trace of sexual desire on Mercutio's part for Romeo, which seems to reappear in Mercutio's image of biting Romeo by the ear (2.4.77; see Gibbons's note), is preceded by the genially explicit talk of Rosaline as sexually active and attractive, and is followed shortly by the third reference to Romeo's phallus, in Mercutio's mock wish that Romeo were a “poperin pear,” another image that (like “raise up him”) reduces the friend to his genitals, while naming the phallus precisely for its use in heterosexual intercourse.

These references of Mercutio's to Romeo's phallus add up to a highly Mercurial stance combining an opposition to love, an amiable erotic permissiveness, and a phallocentrism that admits traces of homoeroticism. The stance, given Mercutio's other Mercurial stances of herald and hierophant, and given his hortatory eloquence, amounts to a directive. Mercutio, that is, points like a roadside herm to a fraternally bonded realm, with its attendant latent misogyny and homosexuality, and with its gratifications including strong friendship and celebration of the phallus. It is a path his friend the romeo never seems much tempted by. Romeo's repartee with Mercutio never seems quite wholehearted, and when Mercutio shifts into the bawdy, while Benvolio plays along—“Thou wouldst else have made thy tale large” (2.4.96)—Romeo hangs back; and Romeo's love for Juliet is notably uncarnal and unphallic. Certainly the play authorizes Romeo's choice of a direction other than Mercutio's. The generally neglected point, though, is that through Mercutio the play gives Romeo's love an opposition other than and different in quality from the opposition of the feud. Where Brooke's Romeus has merely a choice between love and family honor, Mercutio gives Romeo a third choice. I want to conclude this chapter on love and friendship, then, and these three chapters looking at the Mercutio of 1595 from the vantage of the late 1980s, with some further specification of the Mercurial and Marlovian road not taken by Romeo.

Mercutio's service to Shakespeare—and this is to say, to Shakespeare's culture—as a means of processing the memory of Christopher Marlowe has of course its sexual dimension. We may describe Marlowe's sexual stance in increasing degrees of provocativeness or subversiveness as follows. He is intermittently misogynistic, as for instance when he preceded the interchange discussed above between Tamburlaine and Theridamas with the interchange

TECH.
What now!—in love?
TAMB.
Techelles, women must be flattered:
But this is she with whom I am in love

(Tamburlaine 1, 1.2.106-8).

Marlowe's intermittent misogyny affronts Shakespeare's proto-feminism, but the affront is of a kind the culture supplies from many quarters, and indeed of a kind we may find in Shakespeare himself. The abrupt intermittent misogyny that Mercutio exhibits has been discussed above. Marlowe's more insistent eroticism, the sensuality that seems pervasively incipient when not present, seems more idiosyncratic and more subversive than his misogyny. Much of Shakespeare's early career through Romeo and Juliet may be read in terms of strategies for processing Marlovian sensuality. In Mercutio some of that sensuality appears in some of his bawdy, especially his anatomy of Rosaline, and some appears as if sublimated in the minute particularities of the Queen Mab speech. Marlovian sensuality undergoes a further sublimation, and a displacement of sorts, in the amorous figurativeness of Romeo and Juliet. But Marlowe's flaunted homoeroticism is surely the most provocative and subversive feature of his sexuality.

As is well known, Marlowe flaunts his minority sexual preference in the vivid homoeroticism of Hero and Leander, in the love of Edward and Gaveston, at various other points in his work, such as the opening scene of Dido, and reportedly in the remark about tobacco and boys.⁹ The flaunting seems to serve Marlowe for several not entirely compatible ends, including self-promotion and self-destruction, and it is intended as, and is surely received as, a challenge. The challenge is general, to all of whatever individual sexual persuasion who condone heterosexual hegemony, but the challenge is also obviously weighted toward men, since not merely sexually but indeed quite generally Marlowe is very much more interested in men than in women.

While there is substantial agreement now with respect to these facts about Marlowe, Shakespeare's case seems less clear. Certainly he is far more interested in women generally than is Marlowe. Indeed as recent feminist studies have helped us to see, a good deal of fairly subversive proto-feminism animates Shakespeare's works. It also seems safe to read heterosexual desire in the biography, the Sonnets, and the plays, although no clear consensus is apparent about the degree and nature of that desire. There is still less consensus about the presence or absence of homosexual desire in Shakespeare. Here the key text is of course the Sonnets, the subject of Pequigney's Such is My Love, which provides a useful if tendentious survey of responses to the challenge of possible autobiographical homosexual content in the sonnets, and argues “(1) that the friendship treated in Sonnets 1-126 is decidedly amorous … the interaction between the friends being sexual in both orientation and practice; (2) that verbal data are clear and copious in detailing physical intimacies between them; (3) that the psychological dynamics … comply in large measure with … Freud's … discussions of homosexuality; and (4) that Shakespeare produced not only extraordinary amatory verse but the grand masterpiece of homoerotic poetry” (p. 1). Pequigney's often suggestive though less than entirely persuasive support for these claims would not be the last word on the subject even if it were much more persuasive, in part because the stakes are still high.¹⁰

The present study takes no stand about the Sonnets, nor does it assume or support any grander claim about Shakespeare's own sexual orientation than that he seems generally heterosexual, though far less prescriptively and possibly less exclusively so than commentators generally, and feminist and psychoanalytic commentators in particular, make him out to be. Mercutio as a processing of Marlowe exemplifies such a Shakespeare, because while Marlowe's sexual orientation is obviously not paraded, neither is it cancelled, denied, or ignored. Rather Shakespeare proceeds in ways Greenblatt and others have taught us to see him as a master of, admitting and incorporating the subversive element, to some extent containing it, and to some extent rendering it still more subversive.

Marlovian homosexuality resonates not only in the general prominence of phallic talk, and the warmth and urgency of Mercutio's friendship for Romeo, but also in several specific things he says: his mock threat to bite Romeo by the ear and his “conjure only but to raise up him” discussed above, and also at least two other of his bawdy remarks.

As noted, in the interchange between Mercutio and Romeo at 1.4.23-28, “love,” referred to with only the genderless pronoun “it,” effectively changes gender from female in Mercutio's

And, to sink in it, should you burden love—
Too great oppression for a tender thing

to male in Romeo's answering

Is love a tender thing? It is too rough,
Too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.

Thus when Mercutio replies

If love be rough with you, be rough with love;
Prick love for pricking and you beat love down,

the action he advises is homosexual, whatever its nature.¹¹

And then there is Mercutio's direct explicit reference to sodomy in

                              O that she were
An open-arse and thou a poperin pear!

(2.1.37-38),

the only such, I believe, in the canon (though Pequigney, Colman, and others find what they take to be numerous indirect, inexplicit, and more entirely metaphorical ones).¹² Of course the sodomy is heterosexual, but its uniqueness in Shakespeare suggests that the image rises out of the system of substitutions and representations Mercutio partakes of. It is as if here Shakespeare has Mercutio wish for his friend heterosexual intercourse as it might easily have been imagined, in passing, by Marlowe.

The bibliographical and critical history of “open-arse” is a good yardstick for measuring Mercutio's changing phallic subversiveness and the changing containment it elicits, and so previewing the subject of the next chapter. Suggested by Farmer and Henley, Slang and its Analogues (1903; noted by Gibbons, s.v.), as the meaning of Quarto 2's “open, or,” the word does not appear in printed texts of the play before Hosley's 1954 adoption of the reading.¹³ Partridge in 1948, s.v. “et cetera,” gives the then accepted lines received from Quarto 1 and Quarto 4,

O, that she were
An open et-caetera, and thou a poperin pear!

and glosses “et cetera” as pudend, so that he is spared acknowledging mention of even heterosexual sodomy, although he does note at the same entry that the medlar (“Now will he sit under a medlar tree,” 2.1.34) is “slangily an open arse.” Since Hosley, editors generally, including Wilson and Duthie, Williams, Spencer, Gibbons, and Evans—though not Hankins—accept “open-arse,” but pass in silence over the extraordinariness of the implied act.

Colman, whose view of Mercutio in The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare (1974) is less doctrinaire than most of the feminist and psychoanalytic ones discussed above but still reductive,¹⁴ quotes the lines with “open-arse,” holding that Mercutio's mockery in them is “so gross as to be self-defeating,” and then announces that “It is unlikely that Mercutios of Shakespeare's own day spoke the term ‘open-arse’ here, as both the Bad and Good quartos of Romeo and Juliet suppress it, and some such action as Benvolio's clapping his hand over Mercutio's mouth seems called for” (p. 69). Colman allows that Shakespeare's audience would divine the suppressed word, but he has no more to say about the image of sodomy than the rather prim observation, “Clearly, all that Romeo needs to do about so broad a sally is to keep out of the way and flatly disregard it.” But the grounds presented for this ingenious rearguard censorship performed by an authority on Shakespearean bawdy writing well after “open-arse” proved the accepted reading, are in fact not quite the grounds Colman makes them out to be. While Quarto 1's “open Et cetera” suggests suppression, the Quarto 2 reading “open, or” is not, as Hosley and subsequent editors recognize, a suppression but rather a compositor's misreading or misunderstanding. The er-ar equation we have seen variously attending Mercutio plays a part again here, for it seems possible that what the compositor misread was “openers” or “open ers.”

As with Mercutio's references to homosexual and heterosexual sodomy, so generally with his phallicity and even his physicality: in all these respects Shakespeare appears to be processing some of what is most disturbing in Marlowe. The processing is far from a sanitizing, even of poetic imagery, as witness the potentially grotesquely sodomic image of Mercutio's offer to Romeo:

                    we'll draw thee from the mire
Of—save your reverence—love, wherein thou stickest
Up to the ears.

(1.4.41-43)

Nor is the processing quite like any of the other sorts we can see in progress around 1595, condemnation, apology, outspoken praise, or dismissal.¹⁵ Rather with Mercutio Shakespeare performs some containment, some incorporation, and some transmission of Marlovian corporeality, itself a notable instance of renascent classical physicality problematized by centuries of Christian transcendent doctrine. Although the scandalous phallus reappearing (and re-disappearing, as we have seen) in pictorial representations may not be presented directly to the theater audience's gaze, it like all other parts of the male body is always actually present, and not merely represented, on the Elizabethan stage. Mercutio's phallicity then resonates not merely with Marlovian corporeality but also with the scandalous, dangerous, and, in 1595, male corporeality of the theater. In directions marked out both by “phallogocentrism” and by “materialism,” that corporeality is potentially subversive in Mercutio, as it was in Marlowe—and as it is elsewhere in Shakespeare, though in other ways and perhaps nowhere so much as in Mercutio. For, as we know, Marlowe provides Shakespeare with directions he is unable to follow. But Shakespeare keeps and uses those directions, especially in Mercutio, where he conjures the god Mercury and also the raised spirit of Marlowe.

Notes

1. The treatment of love and friendship in this chapter is especially indebted to Foucault (Use), Mills, Rougemont, Sharp, and Whigam, and to recent psychoanalytic and feminist studies of Shakespeare including Adelman, Bamber, Dash, Kahn, and Novy.

2. Pequigney, Love, p. 231n26, stands out among Shakespeareans in his attention to Barnfield, whose defense—Some there were, that did interpret The affectionate Shepheard, otherwise then (in truth) I meant, touching the subject thereof, to wit, the loue of a Shepheard to a boy; a fault, the which I will not excuse, because I neuer made (Cynthia, sig. A3)—is surely “curious and perfunctory.”

3. See Smith, “Value,” 1983, for a wide-ranging treatment of such canonization; and see Porter, “Marlowe,” 1989, for an elaboration of the particular claim made here about Mercutio and the canonization of heterosexuality.

4. Since in Fiedler's view the primary force opposing marriage in Shakespeare is the father's love for the daughter, he slights fraternal bonding somewhat and speaks flippantly of Mercutio, who “manages to spare himself the pain of someone else's happy ending by dying before his beloved friend is quite Juliet's” (Stranger, p. 90). Additional feminist and psychoanalytic recognitions of the tension between friendship and love include Neely (Nuptials, p. 64) “Male resistance to marriage is more pervasive and persistent [than female resistance],” Novy (Argument, p. 63) on the “rivalry” between Antonio and Portia for Bassanio, and MacCary throughout Friends, 1985. All are more or less prescriptivist. Scarcely has MacCary (p. 3) seemed to take an admirably open-minded position, saying that Shakespeare “seems to say that every man's appetites and aversions are a law unto that man, i.e., that desire is a purely individual determination and that there can never be universal agreement on its objects” when he plunges (p. 5) into the standard heterosexual prescriptivist hierarchicalization of desire—“He [Shakespeare] carefully takes his young men through four stages of object-choice: first, they love themselves … then, … mirror images of themselves in twins or friends; after that, … those same images in transvestized young women; finally they learn to love young women. … [A lover's] identity must be a function of the objects he chooses—first parents, then friends, then lovers”—that continues through the study and, in particular, results in a peculiarly unpleasant approval of the marginalization of Antonio in The Merchant of Venice.

5. The elliptical quotation makes Gohlke say what she seems to mean to say. What she actually says is that the feud defines relations with women as controlling and violent. Her view of “relations among men as intensely competitive” is the standard psychological-feminist one that refuses to acknowledge friendship in the play. In her brief remarks about the play Gohlke does not mention Mercutio, but she finds that both Romeo and Juliet at moments express something of the intercourse-murder equation. Snow, in his Jungian-feminist “Language and Sexual Difference in Romeo and Juliet,” p. 182, agrees with Kahn and others in (mistakenly, I maintain) transferring the play's opening equations whole-cloth to Mercutio, when he says that the Nurse's and Juliet's world of “vast interconnectedness” stands opposite to “the partially repressed realm of phallic violence that haunts the soldier's dream and Mercutio's reverie.” But a kind of collapse of figuration happens if we turn all swords into Sampson's naked weapon. Any phallicism in the soldier's dream of cutting foreign throats seems more than partially repressed. In the speech's one explicit image of sexual intercourse the phallus is notably absent, or under erasure, as it is Queen Mab who presses maids when they lie on their backs.

6. “Not so fast,” says the feminist concerned to put Mercutio in his place. “You're glossing over the aggressiveness of his ‘hit the mark’ at 2.2.33, and the reductiveness of that and of his ‘a hole’ at 2.4.93.” As for “hit,” while there may be some sexist aggressiveness in it, two further things should be said. First, a certain amount of aggressiveness, which is not necessarily sexist, is inherent in phallic sexuality. This truism needs saying here only because in feminist readings of Romeo, as of other texts, one senses in the margins of the discourse a myth of male heterosexuality that is nonphallic and nonintrusive. And second, in Mercutio's most elaborated talk of heterosexual intercourse, 2.1.24-29, while he talks bawdily of Romeo, Rosaline, and a male stranger, the only one he has taking action is Rosaline, who lays and conjures down the phallus of the stranger, who appears only in the phrase “Of some strange nature” identifying the phallus as not Romeo's, so that he becomes a mere site for a phallus that, rising in rather than into Rosaline's circle, seems so unintrusive as to be unrealistic. As for Romeo, he is not even present as a site for his phallus; he is the phallus in “I conjure only but to raise up him.” As for Mercutio's “a hole,” it, like the momentary reduction of Romeo to his phallus, certainly is a reductionist and therefore potentially sexist way to speak of the female party in the intercourse conjured up at 2.4.91-92. But reduction is arguably the lesser evil when the male party is “drivelling … like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble.” The speech, that is, seems far more antivenereal than sexist. Much the same seems generally true of Mercutio's rather parallel, though less energetic and picturesque, image of blind love's inability to hit the mark. In particular, given the mark-Mercutio correspondence at work in the play, the passage carries the subtextual message of Mercutio's invulnerability to love, and perhaps also it creates a fleeting suggestion of Mercutio's playing a “passive” role in homosexual intercourse.

7. Mercutio's “prick of noon” exhibits a Mercurial identification of phallus and graphic mark, since the dial's pricks are engraved marks.

8. Partridge, s.v. “lay it,” suggests an auditory allusion to the Latin cunnus and its English derivative (which he elsewhere rightly takes OED to task for excluding) in the “conjur'd” Mercutio gives to Rosaline at 2.1.26. The same allusion would presumably then also be present in Mercutio's “I conjure only but to raise up him [Romeo]” (l. 29), and here could have resonances with the postulated subliminal image of Mercutio containing Romeo's phallus. Partridge, of course, ignores the possible bawdiness of this “conjure,” just as he provides an obfuscatory account of “raise up” (s.v.) in the line, because open recognition of the line's bawdiness could serve to compromise his claim that Shakespeare's bawdy is almost exclusively heterosexual. Pequigney recently, and generally rightly, takes Partridge and Colman to task for screening homosexual bawdy out of their accounts, although (as mentioned) he has screened all sexuality out of the friendship between Mercutio and Romeo. Syntactically the line plays a trick with ambiguous modification. Officially Mercutio means “I conjure to raise up only but him” (i.e., Romeo and no one else). At the same time Mercutio's word order may suggest an unofficial subliminal meaning of “I only conjure but to raise up him”; that is, the only reason I'm talking (here and elsewhere) is to raise him up.

9. For the claim “That all they that love not Tobacco & Boies were fooles,” attributed to Marlowe by Richard Baines in his list of charges against Marlowe sent to the queen three days after Marlowe's death, see Goldberg, “Sodomy.” As Goldberg here points out, Bray (Homosexuality) lays bare some of the social mechanisms of Renaissance England in the context of which we can best understand the nature and force of Baines's charge.

10. Pequigney (p. 1) traces the ongoing attempt to protect Shakespeare and the Sonnets from “the embarrassment and scandal of homosexuality” from Benson's 1640 altered words and misleading titles through Auden's 1964 chiding of the homosexual reader determined to ally Shakespeare with “the Homintern” and the noncommitalism of Ingram and Redpath and of Booth, as well as in a smaller group of commentators who in the past twenty-five years have been willing to grant the persona of the Sonnets some erotic feelings for the young man. While Pequigney sometimes strains credibility, and has less than perfect command of the commentary—Giroux, The Book Known as Q, might have been included in the smaller group just mentioned—still he is often suggestive and sometimes persuasive in his all-out glosses of homosexual meaning in the Sonnets. See Sedgwick, Between Men, for a subtle and powerful treatment of relations among “homosocial” desire, gender, and power in the Sonnets.

11. “Prick love for pricking” suggests Romeo's penetration of love, perhaps preceded by love's of him. And then “you beat love down” strongly suggests masturbation, perhaps Romeo's of love. Conceivably there is another trace of sodomy in the last word of Mercutio's “Alas poor Romeo … the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy's butt-shaft” (2.4.13-16). Partridge glosses “butt” in Troilus 5.1 as “buttocks.”

12. “When the plays glance at sodomy it is with reticence and distaste. … Generally, … allusions to buggery are few in number and ambiguous in tenor … So far as one can judge … Shakespeare seems to have shared in the conventional disapproval of sodomy. … the subject was one that he seems to have preferred to avoid” (Colman, Bawdy, p. 7). I am in accord with all this. In his brief summary discussion of homosexuality and sodomy Colman (pp. 6-8) restates the conventional assurances about Elizabethan friendship, but admits here and in his chapter on the Sonnets the possibility of homosexual eroticism there. He finds Thersites's “preposterous” (Tro. 5.1.22) the “one fully explicit reference” to sodomy. Part of the problem here is terminological; for Colman sodomy entails homosexuality, and when the act is heterosexual he calls it “anal intercourse,” to which he also finds very few references in Shakespeare (p. 100).

13. The acceptance of “open-arse” in the Wilson and Duthie edition a mere year after Hosley (whose priority, along with that of Kökeritz, they acknowledge in their note on the line) suggests that they arrived at the emendation independently, and the wording of the last sentence of their note—about “‘or’ as the seat of the [textual] corruption”—may acknowledge sodomy as the act Mercutio has in mind.

14. Colman (Bawdy) in his own way sacrifices Mercutio on the altar of young love—“Matters are so arranged that every time Mercutio tries to undercut Romeo's emotion, he fails” (p. 69)—but he is also sympathetic to Mercutio's “weird, fast-flowing current of indecent humour and extravagant fancy” (p. 70), and suggests that “Romeo and Juliet demands a good deal of critical reorientation if … Zeffirelli's … presentation of Mercutio is justified by the text” (p. 171). The remark seems prophetic of the present study, and might be generalized—the crux of course not being Zeffirelli (discussed below)—to the thesis that the play demands reorientation if any presentation of Mercutio is to be “justified by the text.”

15. In the years intervening between 1595 and the present Marlowe elicits these and other kinds of mostly detrimental processing, including “explanation.” Recent studies including those discussed in the preceding chapter undo some of that detrimental processing, and provide a climate in which we may find increasingly less tenable the line of claims running from Johnson's (Preface, p. 82) that Shakespeare “had no example of such fame as might force him upon imitation” to Bloom's that the anxiety of influence failed to touch Shakespeare.