Mercutio is a notorious scene-stealer. His brilliant lines and the intensity, humor, and vigor of his personality give him numerous opportunities to upstage the romantic hero of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, with the result that he can often create a stronger dramatic impression whenever he and Romeo appear together.¹ Furthermore, Romeo never quite gains Mercutio's approval. The melancholy lover is the butt of the jests of the mocker of love, while Romeo's forbearance toward an insulting foe is an outrage to the quick-witted and high-spirited Mercutio. Only in the wit-combat of Act II, scene four, when Romeo has dropped his affected posture as the despairing lover of Rosaline, do the two young men appear as dramatic equals. Then Mercutio welcomes Romeo as a fit companion, significantly on his own terms:

Why, is not this better now than groaning for love? Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo: now art thou what thou art, by art as well as by nature.

(II.iv.86-88)²

Recognizing the implicit rivalry between these characters, Henry Hallam described the way he thought Shakespeare faced an evident dramatic problem: “It seems to have been necessary to keep down the other characters that they might not overpower the principal one; and though we can by no means agree with Dryden, that if Shakespeare had not killed Mercutio, Mercutio would have killed him, there might have been some danger of his killing Romeo. His brilliant vivacity shows the softness of the other a little to a disadvantage.”³

It has thus been tempting to understand Mercutio's death as a consequence of the exceptional vitality of his character rather than by reference to his actual function in the play. Dryden's well-known remarks, to which Hallam referred, have contributed much to this attitude. What Dryden actually wrote was: “Shakespeare showed the best of his skill in his Mercutio; and he said himself that he was forced to kill him in the third act, to prevent being killed by him. But, for my part, I cannot find he was so dangerous a person: I see nothing in him but what was so exceeding harmless that he might have lived to the end of the play, and died in his bed, without offence to any man.”⁴ Dryden's story of Shakespeare's alleged remark implies that Mercutio's death results from an arbitrary act of a desperate dramatist and is designed to keep Mercutio from running away with the play. It is apparent also that Dryden himself considered this means of dismissing Mercutio unnecessary and even undesirable. But the comment seeks to explain the dramatic fact by reference to the convenience of the dramatist rather than in terms of its function or justification within the play as a whole. It even tends to discourage inquiry into the latter kind of explanation, since it assumes the arbitrariness of the death of Mercutio.

It may well be this assumption which moved Dr. Johnson to give his spirited reply to Dryden, insisting that Mercutio's death is an appropriately treated and properly presented dramatic action. “Mercutio's wit, gaiety and courage, will always procure him friends that wish him a longer life; but his death is not precipitated, he has lived out the time allotted him in the construction of the play; nor do I doubt the ability of Shakespeare to have continued his existence, though some of his sallies are perhaps out of the reach of Dryden; whose genius was not very fertile of merriment, nor ductile to humour, but acute, argumentative, comprehensive, and sublime.”⁵ Dr. Johnson certainly credited Shakespeare with greater dramatic inventiveness than did Dryden, and he believed that in dramatizing Mercutio's death Shakespeare fulfilled a dramatic purpose related to the structure of the play. Yet even he contemplated a possible continuation of Mercutio's dramatic existence. His focus of attention is on Mercutio's role while alive, not on the reasons for his death or the effect his death has on the events or characters of the play.⁶ Dr. Johnson implied that once Mercutio's contribution to the play has been completed nothing prevents his being killed. He did not treat the possibility that the manner of his death may be an essential part of Mercutio's function. For him, Mercutio's death seemed simply the means by which Shakespeare managed to terminate the role and to dismiss a character no longer needed and for whom no more stage time could be spared. But a character rendered superfluous by the progress of the action need not be carried off the stage a corpse—he can be disposed of much more discreetly. Juliet's Nurse and Friar John drop silently out of this play when their dramatic functions have been completed, Casca loses his distinctive dramatic personality in Julius Caesar, and the Fool vanishes from King Lear. A dramatist who feared the rivalry of a secondary character toward his hero would hardly risk intensifying the rivalry by giving the former one of the most brilliant dying scenes at the very moment designed to remove him from the competition.

Dr. Johnson did not define the place allotted to Mercutio in the construction of the play, but his suggestion that Mercutio's death be viewed in terms of the play's structure has considerable merit. As the first death represented in the play, it sharply divides the events.⁷ Mercutio's death affects the action critically and thoroughly alters the tone of the play. In the midst of the story of romantic love which has occupied the stage, and in spite of the general atmsophere of danger and the predictions of doom, this actual death comes as a shock. It introduces the crucial fact, irrevocable and damaging, that shifts the play into the tragic mode. Before this, despite the various tensions (including those established by the Prologues and the imagery), the events and the hopes of several characters are directed toward the reconciliation of the feuding households in love and toward the possible happiness of the lovers. After it, the play moves toward death and the final reconciliation, in grief, of the heirless families. Such happiness as the lovers enjoy after this event and its immediate consequences is but a private moment stolen from an increasingly hostile world. The hopes of recovering their situation and restoring their union are desperate and prove ultimately vain. The consequences attendant upon Mercutio's death directly dominate the third act and reverberate throughout the play. Mercutio's death leads directly to Tybalt's death at Romeo's hands, which in turn becomes the cause of Romeo's banishment, and this, through an intricate chain of contingencies, leads to the final catastrophe. Mercutio's death is thus a primary motivating force for major subsequent events. Furthermore, in the circumstances which lead to it and in the details of the way it is dramatized there appears a pattern which also governs the primary subject of the play, the tragedy of the lovers.

It seems certain that Shakespeare articulated the events of the fatal scene (III. i) in his own way, for the known sources treat the fight between Romeo and Tybalt without any reference to Mercutio. Indeed, in Arthur Brooke's poem, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), generally regarded as Shakespeare's principal source, Mercutio is not even named as present at the fatal scene, and though he may be supposed to belong to the group of Romeo's unnamed companions who arrive at the scene of the brawl, these take no explicit part in the action.⁸ In Brooke's poem, Romeus is walking with his friends in another part of the city when he is informed of a violent battle raging between numerous Capilets and Montagewes. At the scene, Romeus denounces the fighting and calls on his friends to help him part the combatants, but his pacific efforts are fruitless. Instead of bringing peace, he becomes the object of an unprovoked and treacherous attack by Tibalt, who attempts to run him through. Rather than draw his sword at this outrage, Romeus assures Tibalt of his own peaceful intentions and appeals to him to join in an attempt to restore peace. Tibalt replies with a challenge and a blow which would have killed Romeus had he not defended himself. Roused to action by this flagrant provocation, the now wrathful Romeus wounds Tibalt fatally. Romeus is sentenced to banishment as a result of the witnesses' testimony that “the fight begonne was by Tybalt” (l. 1044), a sentence predictably regarded as too lenient by the Capilets and as unjustly severe by the Montagewes.

The events as narrated by William Painter in “The goodly Hystory of the true and constante Love between Rhomeo and Julietta” (1567) are essentially the same as in Brooke's version of the story.⁹ Thibault attacks an unarmed Rhomeo (whose life is saved only by the mailed vest he is wearing), rejects his appeal for peace, and attacks a second time with such intensity that Rhomeo is forced to defend himself. The judgment of banishment is given at Rhomeo's trial on the grounds that he was acting in his own defense.

Shakespeare altered the story by bringing Mercutio into the conflict and by building up to the principal fight between Tybalt and Romeo in a quite different way, with effects that are far more dramatic than Brooke's or Painter's. He preserved Romeo's peaceful response to Tybalt's provocations, but he made this response the motive for Mercutio's intervention in the quarrel. Mercutio thus becomes the catalytic agent in the situation culminating in Romeo's killing of Tybalt. Shakespeare prepared for Mercutio's actions by characterizing him as aggressive and by revealing his preoccupations. Among the latter, quarreling and swordsmanship have a prominent place. In the Queen Mab speech (I. iv) Mercutio characterizes the soldier at greater length than he does any of the other figures in his catalogue of dreamers. Later, it is he who instantly apprehends the significance of the letter Tybalt has sent to Romeo's house; it is, he says, in particularly vigorous language, “a challenge, on my life” (II. iv. 8). Unlike Benvolio, however, he seems to doubt Romeo's ability to answer it to his satisfaction:

Alas, poor Romeo, he 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?

(II.iv.13-17)

Mercutio is displaying his contempt for Romeo's lovelorn condition in language both humorous and savage. His terms, “dead,” “stabbed,” “run through,” and “cleft,” belong to the vocabulary of violence. Having ridiculed Romeo's love, Mercutio proceeds to satirize Tybalt, calling him “More than Prince of Cats,” and “the courageous captain of compliments,” thus mocking his affected language and his absurdly precise, fashionable, and “correct” deportment in fighting.¹⁰ But the change of spirit which Mercutio discovers in Romeo when the latter arrives on the scene greatly alters his expectations. At that point he even begins to look forward to seeing Romeo fight Tybalt, now that it appears the former has recovered from his absurd lovesickness.

In Shakespeare's version of the events there is no general brawl such as is found in the source narratives. Instead the scene opens quietly with a conversation between Benvolio and Mercutio. They are accompanied by their men, but the latter have no speaking roles. When Benvolio suggests that they withdraw from the public place, on the grounds—well justified as subsequent events show—that any meeting with the Capulets will result in a fight, Mercutio responds with an ironical accusation of Benvolio as a great quarreler. Mercutio expands this idea, much as he expanded the Queen Mab speech, by an amusing and satirical catalogue of instances, in this case occasions of Benvolio's supposed quarreling. Benvolio turns these remarks back at Mercutio, however, with the observation:

An I were so apt to quarrel as thou art, any man should buy the fee-simple of my life for an hour and a quarter.

(III.i.30-32)

Benvolio shows, beneath the surface of this banter, an awareness of the real danger in quarreling, just as he sensed the likelihood of a brawl. While Mercutio is rejecting the implied warning in his customary witty manner, Tybalt enters, accompanied by several companions.

The stage is now divided between two mutually antagonistic groups. Tybalt moves first, taking the initiative with the close support of his companions, and confronts Mercutio and Benvolio. Tybalt evidently wants information about Romeo, who has not replied to his letter of challenge. Although speaking to an enemy with whom he fought earlier (Benvolio) and to Mercutio, whose association with Romeo he obviously despises, Tybalt is at least formally polite. His words, “Gentlemen, good-den: a word with one of you” (III.i.37), are not necessarily hostile, though they may be somewhat peremptory. It is Mercutio who speaks insolently, introducing direct hostility into the verbal exchange: “And but one word with one of us? Couple it with something; make it a word and a blow” (III.i.39). In his response, Tybalt is formally precise, as was suggested earlier by Mercutio's satiric description of his fencing: “You shall find me apt enough to that, sir, and you will give me occasion” (III.i.40-41). Mercutio shows his contempt for such precision in his impulsive reply: “Could you not take some occasion without giving?” (III.i.43).

In the verbal sparring which follows, Mercutio continues to be more hostile than Tybalt. Mercutio is the one who actually makes a move toward his sword with the words, “Here's my fiddlestick; here's that shall make you dance. Zounds. …” (III.i.47-48). The relationship between the somewhat bantering words, the oblique tone, and the threatening gesture is complex and perhaps capable of different interpretations by actors and readers, but there can be no doubt of the essential point, that Mercutio is deliberately baiting Tybalt. Benvolio repeats his warning about being in the public haunt of men, but Mercutio again rejects it, this time defiantly:

Men's eyes were made to look, and let them gaze.
I will not budge for no man's pleasure, I.

(III.i.53-54)

Phrased as a reply to Benvolio's remark, these lines are even more an indication of belligerent and willful opposition to Tybalt. Mercutio seems bent on giving Tybalt the necessary “occasion” to fight.

Into this already strained situation Romeo enters. The established tensions shift upon his arrival. Tybalt ignores Mercutio's provocations in order to take up a quarrel that has prior claim on his attention. But as he turns from Mercutio his language is very surprising: “Well, peace be with you, sir; here comes my man” (III.i.55). This parting speech, from the man who earlier declared his abhorrence of the word “peace” (I.i.69-70), provides a remarkable contrast to the provocative language of Mercutio, and it separates Tybalt from any willful involvement in a quarrel with him. In response, Mercutio transfers to Romeo his own interest in fighting Tybalt. A vicarious satisfaction of his antagonism to Tybalt seems an acceptable substitute for a personal challenge. He puts strong and witty emphasis in his reply on what (he believes) Romeo will do, playing on Tybalt's expression, “Here comes my man.”

But I'll be hanged, sir, if he wears your livery.
Marry, go before to field, he'll be your follower!
Your worship in that sense may call him man.

(III.i.56-58)

Mercutio is anxious for Romeo to take up the challenge to Tybalt where he left it, and he is virtually promising that Romeo will fight him.

Tybalt's insults to Romeo are met with restraint and even an offer of love. Tybalt is nonplused; Mercutio is outraged. Shakespeare's technique was to polarize the conflicting social and ethical values in this situation as he exploited the tensions between the code of honor and the ethics of Christianity. As Curtis B. Watson describes the scene: “Romeo turns the other cheek like a Christian pacifist when Tybalt first insults him, both because the Prince has forbidden private feuds and because Tybalt is a kinsman of Juliet (III.i.69-75). Mercutio, on the other hand is the very embodiment of the Renaissance man of honor. He calls his friend's meek acceptance of Tybalt's slander a ‘calm, dishonorable, vile submission!’ (III.i.76).”¹¹ However, Watson apparently has given Mercutio's judgment the priority, rather than Romeo's actual words and actions, for Romeo does not offer “meek acceptance.” He denies that he is a villain, ignores the demeaning word “boy,” and denies having done Tybalt any injuries. Further, in response to Tybalt's ironical reference to the “love” (i.e., hatred)¹² he bears Romeo, the latter offers a genuine love, concluding with the statement that he values the Capulets' name as his own. His speeches are magnanimous in content and dignified in tone. His attitude is neither “vile submission,” as Mercutio calls it, nor “meek acceptance,” as Watson describes it.

Mercutio now acts betrayed, outraged, and bitter. He is not angry merely because Romeo has lost honor but because Tybalt goes unchallenged, since, as he puts it, “‘Alla stoccata’ carries it away” (III.i.73). To prevent this he intervenes with his own challenge: “Tybalt, you rat-catcher, will you walk?” (III.i.74). Mercutio is taking up Romeo's quarrel as he thinks it should be handled and is simultaneously resuming his own, with a vengeance. He cannot bear to see Tybalt go untouched.

Mercutio virtually forces Tybalt to fight. His insults are more stinging than any others uttered in the scene, and he draws his sword first for an attack. He even threatens an attack whether Tybalt draws or not: “Will you pluck your sword out of his pilcher by the ears? Make haste, lest mine be about your ears ere it be out” (III.i.79-81). This threat, even in its superficially jocose language, recalls the sources' description of Tybalt, who in those earlier narratives attacks Romeo with a potentially fatal blow while Romeo is unarmed and unprepared to fight. No more provocation than Mercutio's threat is now required by Tybalt; he draws, and the fight is on.

Mercutio intervened to start a quarrel; Romeo now intervenes to stop one, calling on Benvolio to help. The situation resembles that of the opening scene, where Benvolio drew his sword to part the brawling servants, crying: “Part fools! / Put up your swords; you know not what you do” (I.i.62-63). This measure failed then, as it fails even more seriously now. Tybalt, the man of precise forms and code of honor, treacherously stabs Mercutio under Romeo's arm, and Romeo becomes directly involved in Mercutio's death. Romeo is at first incredulous at the possibility of death as he supports Mercutio: “Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much” (III.i.94). It is objectively a valid possibility, but it is soon invalidated by the dramatic facts.

Mercutio's dying words consist of bitter jests based on his mortality, alternating with outbursts of frustrated anger. In the latter he virtually calls Romeo to account:

MERCUTIO.
… Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague o' both your houses! Zounds! A dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death! A braggart, a rogue, a villain, that fights by the book of arithmetic! Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm.
ROMEO.
I thought all for the best.
MERCUTIO.
Help me into some house, Benvolio,
Or I shall faint. A plague o' both your houses!
They have made worms' meat of me. I have it,
And soundly too. Your houses!

(III.i.95-107)

Romeo, as well as Tybalt, is an object of Mercutio's angry outbursts, and both houses are involved as agents of Mercutio's death. A burden of responsibility settles on Romeo, who feels it keenly. He summarizes his situation immediately after Mercutio has been led off:

This gentleman, the prince's near ally,
My very friend, hath got this mortal hurt
In my behalf, my reputation stained
With Tybalt's slander. …

(III.i.108-11)

And the next news is that Mercutio is dead.

Mercutio's denunciation of the feud, “A plague o' both your houses,” strikes a note of impending doom. But it is questionable whether the feud is the proper object of Mercutio's resentment. The enmity of the houses is a condition of conflict that surrounds Mercutio and all the other citizens of Verona. It is a perpetual opportunity for disaster, but Mercutio is not personally involved in it. A kinsman of the Prince who is trying to establish social order impartially, Mercutio is so favored by the Capulets that he is invited by name to their feast (though he prefers to crash the party as a masker instead); on the other hand, he has chosen to be Romeo's friend. He hates Tybalt, but not because he is a Capulet. The family connection does not constitute any part of his denunciations, his animosity is much more personal. He opposes Tybalt's aggressiveness, his manners, his alien values, and his arrogance. The fatal quarrel was not forced on an unwilling Mercutio by the feud. Mercutio was the aggressor who deliberately quarreled with Tybalt and attacked him. A duel between them might have taken place even if Romeo had never appeared on the scene. And when Romeo confronts Tybalt, he seeks to mitigate, not exacerbate the feud. It would be far more logical, then, for Mercutio to blame his own rashness, or Tybalt, or Romeo's interference (as to some extent he does) rather than the feud. But he calls down a plague on both houses, with words like a curse or prophecy which is tragically fulfilled.

In denouncing the feud as he does, Mercutio is minimizing his own responsibility for his death and externalizing the cause of his own misfortune. But it is a complex interrelationship of forces that results in Mercutio's death—the personal antagonisms, the chance meeting, Mercutio's challenge, Tybalt's sword, Romeo's arm. Among these the feud is indeed present as a constant background of violent possibilities, but it remains a remote influence rather than an immediate cause of Mercutio's death.

Mercutio's death is important in the structure of the play for what it leads to; it is a key link in a chain. But it establishes a pattern repeated at other points in the action, and so becomes significant as the primary exhibition of an organizing principle of the play. This pattern comprises, first, a prevailing dramatic situation containing threats, anxieties, dangers, and risks. Shakespeare characteristically made explicit the threatening elements of the situation and placed the spectator in a position to perceive and appreciate the risks. The situation is open, the possibilities for escaping or incurring the risks are both made evident. The overriding condition in Verona is, of course, the opposition of the rival houses and the threat of violent and fatal conflict. At times the violence breaks out, as in the opening scene, but at most times it constitutes a tension that is controlled or at least suppressed. But it provides a constant threatening background against which the characters move. The play receives much of its distinctive character from the sense of threat emanating from this background and the sense that the threat might nevertheless be avoided or overcome. In Mercutio's case the real threat is tangential to the feud; it is personified in Tybalt himself. The risks are intensified by Mercutio's deep personal hostility to Tybalt and his inability to hold his tongue.

Second, a provocation occurs which can actualize threats evident in the dramatic situation. The provocation may be direct and intense, or subtle and implied, but it is a stimulus to the characters, and it triggers the subsequent action. Some provocations do not actually result in violent action, though they tend toward it. Tybalt's address to Mercutio excites the latter, but it does not result in a fight, though perhaps only because the encounter is cut short. Tybalt's insults to Romeo likewise fail to result in the intended clash. Yet the same insults prove an unbearable provocation to Mercutio, and so they result in a fight Tybalt did not intend. The provocations are thus capable of eliciting violence beyond the control and the intentions of those who originate them.

The third element of the pattern is the passionate response to the provocation. Usually there is a sudden and impulsive decision, closely followed by crucial actions. These decisions and actions are made without care or thought for the consequences—though sometimes in defiance of expected consequences—and without reflection or judgment. In the scene described above, Mercutio's sudden challenge to Tybalt as “rat-catcher” and the drawing of his sword represent virtually simultaneous decision and action. The tension of the scene is exploited in this rapid movement; one can observe Mercutio's mental and emotional determination, the verbal challenge, and then the physical action in almost the same instant.

Fourth, a tragic consequence follows the passionate action. Tybalt gives Mercutio a fatal wound and escapes unhurt. This result of his challenge elicits great bitterness from Mercutio, who evidently envisaged nothing but his own victory. A little later Romeo conceives of several possible outcomes of his challenge to Tybalt, all of them of tragic import: “Either thou or I, or both, must go with him [Mercutio]” (III.i.128). In this play it quite often seems that the tragic outcome could have been avoided, just as Romeo cannot at first believe that Mercutio's wound is so serious as to cause death. If the Friar's letter had been delivered, or if Romeo had arrived at the tomb only a few moments later, or if Tybalt had not returned to the place where he stabbed Mercutio, or if any of numerous other events had happened only a little differently, the tragic outcome might have been avoided. But the tragic consequences occur, and they speak for themselves.

Finally, the pattern concludes in a blurring of the sense of personal responsibility for the events by a shift of dramatic attention to the impersonal elements of the situation in which the tragic consequences occurred. There is an almost circular movement back to the first element of the pattern. The play moves from an ominous or threatening situation through the decisions of individuals to the limiting contexts in which their decisions and actions took place. This is sometimes dramatized in terms of an individual's blindness to his own role in bringing about disaster. Mercutio complains about the rival houses, but not his own rashness. And other characters in this play have a strong tendency to view the tragic results of a sequence of events and to ignore the process by which those results came about. It is a kind of selective attention operating to emphasize the general and external causes of the events and to minimize the individual and personal responsibilities of the characters.

The pattern of the events leading to Mercutio's death is repeated immediately in the same scene in the actions resulting in Tybalt's death. Romeo is acting against the background of family enmity and violent conflict, and in the shadow of Mercutio's death. Tybalt's killing of Mercutio constitutes an overwhelming provocation. Romeo makes a sudden and passionate decision, determining on revenge for Mercutio and thus finally allying himself with the code of honor. When Tybalt suddenly reappears Romeo has his opportunity to act immediately. The tragic result is Tybalt's death, with all of its implications for Romeo's relationship with Juliet and the Capulet family. Romeo seems almost stupified by this result, and only Benvolio's solicitude makes it possible for him to escape from the scene. In this state of anguish it is Romeo himself who refers the events to more remote causes than his own decisions and actions, diminishing the sense of personal responsibility for the events as he laments: “O, I am Fortune's fool” (III.i.135). One is confronted now by the tragic results, and the complexities of the human motivations, actions, and decisions which led to those results pale into a general impression in which Fortune receives the responsibility for all, at least if Romeo's point of view is allowed to dominate the dramatic moment.

The pattern is repeated in subsequent crucial actions of the play. Juliet opposes herself against all the tensions and risks implicit in her unauthorized marriage to Romeo. Separated from her husband by the sentence of banishment, she faces a pathetic and terrible dilemma, even hearing threats of a Capulet intrigue to assassinate Romeo (III.v.87-92). But it is the threatened forced marriage to Paris that becomes the inescapable provocation to desperate action. While Juliet acts less precipitously than Mercutio or Romeo, she likewise fixes her course in a moment of passionate resolution, and displays consistently the determination to live up to it:

I'll to the friar to know his remedy.
If all else fail, myself have power to die.

(III.v.241-42)

The intervening scenes are filled with the attempt to work out a “remedy” and its subsequent failure. In the tomb, Juliet's discovery of Romeo's death reinforces her former provocation, and, the friar's remedy now useless, she does take her life in very rapid decision and action:

Yea, noise? Then I'll be brief. O happy dagger,
This is thy sheath [stabs herself]; there rest, and let me die.

(V.iii.169-70)

After this tragic issue of Juliet's decisions and actions, the ascription of the events to more remote causes must be made by others. It is the Prince who makes such a pronouncement after hearing how the deaths of the lovers came about:

See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love!

(V.iii.292-93)

The many stages of the action and the decisions of individuals are seen here only as “means” to the tragic end. Shakespeare is directing attention away from the sequence of actions and coincidences to the tragic end itself, ascribed to the operation of a vast, external power, and the sense of personal responsibility fades out against this background.

The pattern occurs again in Romeo's actions leading to his own death. Unaware of Friar Lawrence's desperate plan, Romeo hears the news of Juliet's death which provokes his sudden and grim decision to die with her. It is a personal and desperate decision, made in defiance of the stars (V.i.24) though ironically in fulfillment of the star-crossed destiny the prologue to Act I describes. His too precipitate death follows this passionate decision quite rapidly. The pattern is completed when, after his discovery of Romeo's death, Friar Lawrence relates the tragic event to vast and general forces in telling Juliet:

A greater power than we can contradict
Hath thwarted our intents.

(V.iii.153-54)

Once more the dramatist made the personal responsibility of an individual fade into the background of powerful and impersonal forces.

The actions of Friar Lawrence are also closely related to this pattern. He is acutely aware of the risks in the situation in Verona and in his plan to reconcile the houses through Romeo and Juliet's marriage. Those risks take definite form in the subsequent arrangements for the marriage of Juliet to Paris. But it is Juliet's threat to kill herself (IV.i.52-65; V.iii.234-42) which becomes the provocation that forces Friar Lawrence into devising his extreme plan involving her counterfeit death. The failure of the plan brings about the tragic deaths of both lovers, and Friar Lawrence is left to face these consequences. Unlike the other characters, however, he exhibits a sense of personal responsibility for what has happened; yet in his narration of the events which led to the catastrophe he refers to Romeo's death as “this work of heaven” (V.iii.261) and points out that Juliet killed herself after he had been frightened from the tomb. And he expresses his sense of responsibility only in the conditional mode, submitting himself to others' judgments:

                                                                                                    if aught in this
Miscarried by my fault, let my old life
Be sacrificed, some hour before his time,
Unto the rigour of severest law.

(V.iii.266-69)

To this the Prince immediately replies, “We still have known thee for a holy man” (V.iii.270). Thus even Friar Lawrence's feeling of personal responsibility is left unresolved against the tragic events themselves and the background of fatalistic powers that have brought about the tragic catastrophe.

This structural pattern in Romeo and Juliet manifests the unique quality of the play, for the tragedy contains a powerful emphasis upon external destiny operating in the lives of the characters and an equally powerful depiction of characters making realistic and crucial decisions that are morally significant and responsible. Each emphasis seems essential: the first, if found alone, would make the characters seem merely puppets, while an exclusive emphasis on the second would lead to a heavily moral and judicial conclusion. Shakespeare balanced one motif against the other in attempting the creation of drama that is both vital and tragic. In some respects it is an uneasy and unstable combination, one Shakespeare did not use in his other tragedies, for it is a pattern more of dramatic organization and attention than an exploration of cause and effect in human affairs leading to tragedy. This problem of causation is implicit in such elements of the drama as Mercutio's dying curse on the two houses, since careful examination of his actions reveals that he is much more to blame for his death than is the feud. Nevertheless, the impression of the dramatic moment is that Mercutio is the unfortunate victim of forces outside his control. This is typical of the play—though the characters are seen acting passionately and often wrongly, they are not held up by the dramatist for censure. The final impression of the tragedy is that those who have suffered death have been the victims of vast and powerful forces which have operated for their destruction as well as for peace in Verona.

The basic pattern is strongly established in this play, with its elements of threatening situation, provocation, passionate decision and action, tragic consequences, and ascription of the tragedy to impersonal forces of destiny. The death of Mercutio constitutes the first dramatic statement of the pattern which is subsequently repeated and developed as a major element of the tragedy. Mercutio's death is more than “Exit Mercutio” writ large; it introduces the forces and the pattern of dramatic action that lead to the tragedy of the lovers.

Notes

1. The appeal of Mercutio's part shows itself in arrangements to alternate the parts of Romeo and Mercutio between actors and sometimes in the appropriation of some of Mercutio's lines by Romeo. Margaret Webster, after describing the strong appeal of the part of Juliet to actresses, maintains that Romeo's part is less attractive: “An actor does not feel the same yearning for Romeo; he usually spends days of troubled debate as to whether Mercutio is not the showier part, filled as it is with wit and poetry, with the zest of life and the tragic, wasteful irony of death” (Shakespeare Without Tears, rev. ed. [Cleveland and New York, 1955], p. 149).

2. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, The New Cambridge Shakespeare, ed. John Dover Wilson and George Ian Duthie (Cambridge, Eng., 1969), p. 44. All references to the play are to this edition, unless otherwise noted.

3. Henry Hallam, Introduction to the Literature of Europe, 5th ed., 1855; cited in Romeo and Juliet, New Variorum Edition, ed. Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia, 1878), p. 159n.

4. “Defence of the Epilogue [to the Second Part of Granada]: Or an Essay on the Dramatic Poetry of the Last Age,” Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson (London, 1962), I, 180.

5. The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson (New York, 1968; repr. of 1765 ed.), VIII, 125.

6. This emphasis is understandably characteristic of most studies of Mercutio; the brilliance of his life has tended to obscure the significance of his death. Cf. Herbert McArthur, “Romeo's Loquacious Friend,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], X (1959), 35-44; Norman N. Holland, “Shakespeare's Mercutio and Ours,” Michigan Quarterly Review, V (1966), 115-23. Richard Hosley, however, has succinctly observed that Mercutio's death “is the keystone of the plot's structure” (Romeo and Juliet, The Yale Shakespeare, rev., ed. Richard Hosley [New Haven, 1954], p. 171); cf. Romeo and Juliet, New Penguin Shakespeare, ed. T. J. B. Spencer (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1967), pp. 29-30, and Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare's Early Tragedies (London, 1968), pp. 82-83, for treatment of the crucial effect of Mercutio's death.

7. The effect of this will be missed if, as sometimes happens in productions, actual deaths are represented in the opening Fight Scene. Mercutio's is the first actual death represented in the text.

8. See Arthur Brooke, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London and New York, 1957), I, 269-363.

9. William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, Novel 24, ed. Joseph Jacobs (New York, 1966; repr. of 1890 ed.), III, 80-124.

10. For possible contemporary reasons for Mercutio's attitudes see Adolph L. Soens, “Tybalt's Spanish Fencing in Romeo and Juliet,” SQ, XX (1969), 121-27.

11. Curtis Brown Watson, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honor (Princeton, 1960), p. 356.

12. Q2 reads “loue”; Q1 reads “hate.”