[In the following essay, Browne evaluates Mercutio as an adolescent trickster figure and considers his thematic significance in Romeo and Juliet.]

Romeo leaps over the orchard wall on his way to Juliet, and Mercutio, the mock magician, “conjures” with a series of extravagantly bawdy jokes. But when he doesn't get an answer out of his friend, Mercutio gives up: “Romeo, good night. I'll to my truckle bed.”¹

This is one of those archetypal moments of adolescence: after going to the big dance in the highest hopes, the young men who failed to find their Juliets now gather on a street corner, resigned to going home alone, and they are envious of one of their group who may have been successful. Mercutio strikes what very well may be a rueful note, for, as far as we can tell, he has nothing to look forward to but his “truckle bed,” the bed of a child. Romeo's leaping over that garden wall is a rite of passage, an initiation, that Mercutio may envy. In spite of his elaborate joking about sex, nothing in the play indicates to us that Mercutio has any experience of the world. In fact, Romeo seems to be growing up faster than Mercutio.

But a long tradition of critical comment has regarded Mercutio as not at all the adolescent. One is struck in particular by how many major figures—Dryden, Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, Dowden, as well as many important critics of our century—have admired Mercutio for his sophistication. His charm is easy to see. But sophistication? Why have critics so often treated Mercutio as the older brother, the wise advisor of Romeo, when in fact it is Romeo who seems to be the one who is maturing, passing Mercutio and Benvolio by? Since Dryden described him as an example of the “refinement of wit” of the Elizabethan gentleman,² critics have found various kinds of perfection in him. Thus Dr. Johnson spoke admiringly of his “wit, gaiety and courage.”³ Coleridge described him as “the perfect gentleman;”⁴ H. B. Charlton speaks of his “worldly savoir-faire.” Norman Holland pictures him as “almost an older brother” to Romeo;⁵ Granville-Barker, who also sees him as older than Romeo, finds a “wholesome self-sufficiency” in him.⁶ John Hankins detects in Mercutio “a unique blend of critical acumen, delicate fancy and obscene levity.”⁷ Alfred Harbage finds “a hard vein of common sense.”⁸ But where is this “acumen” and “common sense”? Wasn't it Mercutio's insensitivity to what was happening around him, his lack of understanding, his willful need to fight Tybalt, that got him killed—and Romeo and Juliet, too, in the long run?

I think that, instead of seeing Mercutio as mature, it's more likely that Shakespeare saw in him something closer to childishness, or at least adolescence.⁹ He owes a large part of his character, I believe, to Shakespeare's conception of the youthful trickster figure, Mercury. It is true, of course, that Mercury was not only trickster, but messenger, god of eloquence, god of merchants, even god of wisdom in some of his manifestations. But the connection between Mercury and the trickster has been carefully established by several authorities, including Karl Jung, Karl Kerenyi, Paul Radin and Norman O. Brown.¹⁰ When we review the Elizabethan conceptions of Mercury as the trickster figure, we will find many suggestions that the youthfulness of Mercury especially struck the mythologists. He is a boy or an adolescent in many of his appearances on the stage as well as in many references to him in the mythological handbooks and in the lore of astrology and alchemy.

If it can be established that this trickster Mercury influenced Shakespeare in his treatment of Mercutio, then the next step is to ask whether the twentieth century's recognition that the trickster figure is a manifestation of the Jungian “shadow” is important in looking at Shakespeare's play. The connection between shadow and trickster figure has been established by Jung in several of his essays; for example, in “on the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure” he speaks of the trickster as “a sort of second personality, of a puerile and inferior character,” and adds, “I have, I think, found a suitable designation for this character-component when I call it the shadow.”¹¹ Paul Radin, author of the standard book on the trickster, says that each of us

In the career of Trickster sees his own instinctual and irrational self, unanchored, undirected, helpless, purposeless, knowing neither love, loyalty nor pity. Isolated, he cannot grow nor mature. He can do nothing with the two fundamental appetites, hunger and sex.¹²

What did the Elizabethan playgoers bring to the theater that would prepare them to see the Mercutio that I see, the “puerile” trickster figure as Romeo's shadow? Certainly the audience was more aware than we are of the traditional roles and characteristics of Mercury, or the Hermes of Greek mythology. They lived with his image, whereas we see only the winged messenger on the cover of the phone book. A variety of references to Mercury—in the plays of Shakespeare's day, in the mythologies, in the astrological treatises, and in the alchemical discussions—can suggest to us what Shakespeare and his audience thought of him.

In several of the plays we can find Mercury in the role of childish trickster. In the learned Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels we find Mercury playing the role of a witty page—a “crack,” or young boy, as he's called.¹³ In one of Jonson's masques, Mercury Vindicated, Mercury is tiny, as we'll see in discussing the alchemists. In the old play of Locrine the clownish boy, Strumbo, is identified with Mercury.¹⁴ In Lyly's The Woman in the Moon, Mercury is the instructor of Pandora in trickery.¹⁵ Thomas Heywood's Love's Mistress, or the Queen's Masque presents the story of Cupid and Psyche with the “young Mercury” befriending Psyche and angering Venus as a result of his trickery.¹⁶ In Heywood's dialogue, “Mercury and Maia,” Mercury complains to his mother that he's tired of serving as Jupiter's servant, tired of having to get up early “to sweep the house / Where all the gods must banquet and carouse. …” But Maia warns him, “thou art young, … hazard not stripes of him that sways above.”¹⁷

The same view of Mercury is found in the many mythological handbooks of the day. Abraham Fraunce's Countess of Pembroke's Ivy Church is a typical example. Here Mercury is “Jove's pretty page, fine filcher Mercury,” and the “crafty and cunning master Mercury.” Fraunce's treatment emphasizes the shifting nature of Mercury as he “worketh divers influences in men's minds,” making them everything from thieves to advisors to princes.¹⁸ Barnaby Googe, translating Palingenius in The Zodiac of Life, describes Mercury as the “swiftly fleeting restless imp of Jove.”¹⁹ Both Fraunce and Googe suggest Mercury's youthfulness. But several handbooks are more specific in this respect. Natalis Comes, for instance, describes Mercury as a juvenem formosum, a handsome youth.²⁰ Richard Lynch's compendium, The Fountain of Ancient Fiction, tells us “The ancients depictured his forme in the likenesse and shape of a young man without beard.” Lynch tells us too that Apuleius pictures Mercury as “a verie youth, hardly attained to full virilitie.”²¹

Like the mythologers, the astrologers must have been an important influence on Shakespeare's conception of Mercury. The father of astrology, Ptolemy, assigns the years before sexual development to Mercury, whose influence is supplanted by that of Venus at puberty.²² And the Renaissance writer, Giraldi, charting the planets' changing influences through a lifetime, assigns the periods of the juvenis et adolescens to Mercury's influence.²³

Ben Jonson's Alchemist, providing a good transition from astrology to alchemy, shows us how the popular imagination conceived of Mercury as diminutive. When Face and Subtle, alchemists who will use astrology or anything else to bamboozle their clients, are trying to persuade Drugger that they can make him a successful businessman, they find evidence of his business acumen by pretending to read his hand. His little finger, the mercurial finger, dominates, and thus he will be a roaring success at business—Drugger, the least Mercurial of persons!²⁴

For the serious alchemist, it was the shape-shifting quicksilver that offered promise of wealth, wisdom, or whatever, if only Mercury could be transformed. But however the alchemists sought the trickster in the alembic, the boy Mercurius never came forth to turn quicksilver to gold. Only in Ben Jonson's masque, Mercurie Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court, do we see the child manifest himself, and then it is only to flee from the alchemists, who chase him about the stage fruitlessly, while he mocks them, in the best trickster fashion. He even calls out to the audience to help:

One tender-hearted creature, or other, save Mercury, and free him. Ne're an olde gentle-woman i' the house, that has a wrinkle about her, to hide me in? I could run into a serving-woman's pocket now; her glove, any little hole.²⁵

The bawdiness of Jonson's diminutive trickster would be right at home in Mercutio's Queen Mab speech!

Carl Jung's interest in the alchemist's world as a reflection of psychological truth is especially important here, since his seminal idea of the “shadow,” and the relation of shadow to trickster, is, I believe, one key to understanding Romeo and Juliet. Jung comments on the figure of Mercurius as the alchemists saw him: “a real trickster who drove the alchemists to despair” (XIII. 203). As Jung discusses the many-sided nature of Mercurius, whom he calls duplex and versipellis, he also points out the traditional role of Mercurius as a child or youth (XIII. 217). Several illustrations in Psychology and Alchemy show the young Mercury, including one in which he is sealed inside the “hermetic” vessel (XII. 238, 251, 324). The boy is dangerous: “fairytale and alchemy both show Mercurius in a predominantly unfavourable light,” Jung says, and speaks of his “dark and dubious quality” (XIII. 241). He is a creature of lower life: “The texts remind us again and again that Mercurius is found in the ‘dungheaps’” (XIII. 232). The trickster, Jung says, is “an absolutely undifferentiated psyche that has hardly left the animal level” (I. 260).

Although Jungian critics have not discussed Mercutio as an example of Jung's shadow/trickster, Falstaff has been seen as Prince Hal's shadow by Edith Kern, in a recent article in The Upstart Crow (1984), and Alex Aronson, in Psyche and Symbol in Shakespeare, says:

Falstaff, Shakespeare's most accomplished trickster figure, is … the “shadow” thrown by the Prince's persona, his unconscious projected outward and assuming the most obvious archetypal shape.²⁶

An even more obvious archetypal shape, I believe, can be found in Mercutio, since he adds the element of youthful irresponsibility to the pattern. The contrast between Romeo and Mercutio is not, I must admit, as thoroughly developed as that between Falstaff and the Prince. But when we look carefully at Romeo and Juliet, we can see evidence that the figure we are looking for in Mercutio, the trickster/shadow, is there.

As we meet the young men on the way to the ball in Act I, we might get a first impression from Mercutio's language that he and Romeo are, in fact, interchangeable, rather than contrasting figures. When Romeo bemoans the fact that his soul of lead “stakes me to the ground,” Mercutio pronounces,

You are a lover, borrow cupid's wings
And soar with them above a common bound.

(I. iv. 17-18)

He sounds for a moment as if he too could sentimentalize over Rosaline with extravagant phrases. But this is the end of the Petrarchan images for Mercutio, and next he engages in a series of typically bawdy remarks emphasizing erection and detumescence. As Norman Holland says, “Raising up seems to represent for Mercutio a child's ithyphallic notion of virility.”²⁷ Thus Mercutio jokes about sinking in love, of oppressing love, of weighing the woman down, of pricking love, beating it down all in a half-dozen lines. This is the substance of the “eloquence” that Mercutio has inherited from his patron saint, Mercury, who is, after all, at least as well remembered for his ithyphallic statues, or “herms,” as he is for his fostering of eloquence.

But after all this bold talk of sex, Mercutio asks for a visor to hide his face and his “deformities.” Is this just another joke, or is he in fact unsure of himself as he goes to the ball? Nothing in the play suggests to us that he is romantically, or sexually, involved with a woman. He “jests at scars who never felt a wound,” and not only has he never been wounded, but he perhaps has had no real experience of sex beyond talking about it with the boys.

Then Mercutio is prompted to his Queen Mab speech about the power of dreams. How right it is that the trickster Mercutio should show such affection for the trickster Queen Mab! Jung remarks that the trickster as shadow “frequently appears in the phenomenology of dreams as a well-defined figure” (I. 270). Mercutio's speech has prompted a great deal of discussion among critics who find it surprising, at the least, and perhaps “out of character.” But the dream is perfectly explicable in terms of Mercutio's character: what we see is a childish indecisiveness. Why, as the young men are on their way to the ball and the chance for sexual experience (not romance—Mercutio would pooh-pooh that, of course), does Mercutio choose to go into a long-winded recital that certainly strikes us as a set piece, not completely spontaneous, no matter how witty and extemporary Mercutio may be? Is he hanging back because he is, in fact, unsure of himself, this young man whom so many seem to think of as a lady-killer right out of Restoration comedy? The Queen Mab speech is not particularly bawdy, in spite of references to Mab's visiting lovers and pressing the maids. It is as if the Mercutio we've been introduced to, the bawdy expert on sex, is no longer before us. It's Benvolio who seems to understand what is going on as Mercutio is telling us that dreams are as inconstant as the wind:

This wind you talk of blows us from ourselves:
Supper is done, and we shall come too late.

(I. iv. 97-98)

What happens to Mercutio at the ball we don't know; our attention is riveted on the perfection of Romeo and Juliet's beautiful meeting in the “good gentle pilgrim” sonnet. After the ball Romeo presumably goes to the Capulet home, and he is followed by Mercutio and Benvolio. When the two come onstage, it's Benvolio, not Mercutio, who is really searching for Romeo. Note that Mercutio has less enthusiasm for the chase:

BEN.
Romeo! My cousin Romeo! Romeo!
MER.
He is wise,
And on my life hath stol'n him home to bed.

(II. i. 1-3)

Mercutio is thinking of his own “truckle bed.” But Benvolio knows where Romeo has gone: “He ran this way and leapt this orchard wall.” Thus we see that Romeo is actively avoiding his friends, hiding from them; as Benvolio says a few lines later, “he hath hid himself among these trees / To be consorted with the humorous night. / Blind is his love, and best befits the dark.” They have no idea that Romeo is on the way to high adventure, the highest adventure in all of the literature of love. While Mercutio does his bawdy conjuring, Romeo bides his time, and then goes to Juliet's balcony. John Vivyan makes a perceptive comment about the opposition between Mercutio and Romeo, pointing to Mercutio's reference to the medlar-tree, with its connotations of the female genitalia:

Witty, smutty—and immeasurably wide of the mark. Romeo is not under a medlar-tree; but in a few moments he will be under Juliet's balcony. … Not even Shakespeare could have contrived antitheses more arresting than the medlar-tree and Juliet's balcony, the poperin pear and love's pilgrim, who has come to the shrine of his own heart's saint—a place so beautiful that we know it must be holy.²⁸

In Vivyan's allegoric interpretation, Mercutio is “the man of earth,” opposed to Romeo as “man of spirit,” and Romeo's growth is to a higher level of love on the Platonic scale as he transcends the values of Mercutio.

The next morning Mercutio and Benvolio are busy looking for Romeo. And they seem totally unaware of what has happened. Again Mercutio mocks the high-flown romantic love that he thinks is victimizing Romeo, tormented by the “pale-hearted wench, Rosaline” and the “blind bow-boy.” When Romeo comes along, Mercutio jokes about Romeo without his roe, “minus his manhood, … as if he were a depleted rake fresh from the bawdy house,” as the New Cambridge Shakespeare editor, G. Blakemore Evans, puts it (p. 107). Does Mercutio really think that Romeo is merely mooning after Rosaline, or does he suspect that his friend has found some real sexual involvement? At any rate, what follows is the wit-cracking, logic-chopping passage that is such a deadly bore—those single-soled jests, sorely short on substance. Where we might expect Romeo to tell Mercutio, and Benvolio, about Juliet, he is content to go along with Mercutio's tired jokes. Is it fair to speculate that perhaps Romeo doesn't tell Mercutio about Juliet because he fears Mercutio will mock her as he mocks Rosaline? But not all readers find the single-soled jests so disappointing. Granville-Barker says,

When their battle of wits is ended—a breathless bandying of words that is like a sharp set at tennis—suddenly, it would seem, [Mercutio] throws an affectionate arm round the younger man's shoulder.

Then Granville-Barker quotes with approval the passage in which this supposedly older Mercutio praises the Romeo who now is like himself: “Why, is not this better now than groaning for love? Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo, now art thou what thou art …” (II. iv. 72). For Granville-Barker, Mercutio's remark expresses “Mercutio's creed in a careless sentence! At all costs be the thing you are.”²⁹

This is the thing that Mercutio is, but is this truly Romeo? The real Romeo is the person who has gone beyond standing around in the street making elaborate jokes to kill time. And even here we find that when Mercutio tries out more bawdy jokes, talking of driveling love that “is like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole,” it is Benvolio who answers him with another bawdy wisecrack. Now Romeo is silent, except to close the byplay with “Here's goodly gear,” which may, it must be admitted, be part of the string of bawdy puns, if Evans is right in saying that Romeo's “gear” refers to sexual organs (p. 110). But it is more likely that Romeo is introducing us to the nurse, goodly gear indeed, as she appears onstage.

If it is the old Romeo in this scene, we see him only for a moment. With the nurse, his new life reasserts itself, though Mercutio is completely unaware of what is going on, showing here, as he does whenever he appears onstage, a remarkable lack of empathy with Romeo. Is there something that keeps him from responding to the real force of Romeo's new life? As Jung says, “It is practically impossible to get a man who is afraid of his own femininity to understand what is meant by the anima” (I. 271). Note that the only woman Mercutio talks to in the play is the Nurse, hardly an anima figure, and his treatment of her might strike us as very cruel, were she not so able to take care of herself when it comes to the bawdy side of life.

It is significant that, with all the indecent suggestions between the Nurse and Mercutio and, later, between the Nurse and Peter, Romeo avoids the bawdy completely. Perhaps it is the image of Juliet in his mind that keeps him apart from the wisecracking. It is true that another bawdy joke has been imagined in Romeo's comment to the Nurse that Mercutio loves to hear himself talk, “and will speak more in a minute than he will stand to in a month” (Evans, 112). If this is in fact a bawdy joke about Mercutio's lack of sexual prowess—his inability to stand to—it would indicate that this new Romeo feels superior to Mercutio, confident as he is of Juliet's love.

Of all his appearances, the duel scene, of course, shows us Mercutio most clearly, and here the conflict between him and Romeo is obvious. For it is Mercutio who is directly responsible for the tragedy, as many readers have noticed. Mercutio is spoiling for a fight. And even though Romeo must sense how wrong Mercutio has been to insist on the fight, he cannot free himself from the violent and childish side of himself that, like Mercutio, will seek out death rather than love.

Benvolio sees the truth. Playing the straight man for Mercutio's caricature of him as the wrathful man spoiling for a fight (obviously a projection of Mercutio's own character), Benvolio says, “And 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. 26). In other words, Benvolio sees that Mercutio, always irresponsible, is living on the edge; in fact, Benvolio is prophetic, for within “an hour and a quarter” Mercutio will be dead, never having experienced a life more complex than his adolescent aggressiveness and bawdiness.

This young man who is so loved by so many commentators has to be blamed for what happens. Harold Goddard exemplifies this view at its best when he says that the cause of the quarrel Shakespeare “places squarely in the temperament and character of Mercutio.”³⁰ Goddard points out that he is the one whose sword is out before Tybalt's: “Here's that shall make you dance,” he says to Tybalt, and either puts his hand to the hilt or actually draws the sword. In Zefferelli's film, Mercutio makes the sword stand before him like a phallus, the sword becoming Mercutio's toy, the trickster's toy so common among other tricksters, those fools whose swords are of lath. But Mercutio's is real enough, and he is ready to fight, when Romeo comes along, and Romeo amazes Mercutio by refusing to fight: “O calm, dishonorable, vile submission,” he says to Romeo. And he forces Tybalt to fight—not that Tybalt is hesitant.

But what is it that drives Mercutio here? Is it only that “vile submission” of his friend? How much “real concern” (Harbage's phrase)³¹ does Mercutio have for Romeo? Note that he says to Tybalt as he prepares to fight him, “Come, sir, your ‘passado’.” He thus refers back to the earlier conversation he had with Benvolio about Tybalt's newfangled style of fighting. Here he seems to want to test his weapon against Tybalt's new toy.

At any rate, he blames Romeo for his wound. He knows he is dying. We can't blame him completely for his failure to face facts. But at the same time there is something childish about his petulant cry, “why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm.” He has no real reason to complain about Romeo here, or about both houses. He has brought the plague on himself.

But Romeo cannot see this. He sees only that Juliet's “beauty hath made me effeminate, and in my temper softened valour's steel!” The sword, the dangerous toy, has been bent, detumescent, and his “reputation stained,” as he puts it. And so he kills Tybalt.

And then he blames fortune for what has happened: “O, I am fortune's fool.” Jung comments on how often we blame jinxes or “accidents” for what is really our own doing:

The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams.

(I. 267)

Romeo can't outgrow that part of himself which is so dangerous, that part which in fact has taken over the role of determining his life, so that he betrays Juliet when he kills Tybalt—and thus precipitates the play's tragic catharsis. Jung says that “the one standing closest behind the shadow is the anima” (I. 270). His explanation of the remark is puzzling, as Jung can be, but he points to the opposition between shadow and anima and their paradoxical closeness to one another: sexuality and spirit, child and adult, hate and love, Mercutio and Juliet, poised on either side of Romeo. And it is Mercutio who wins out.

Some would blame the stars for the deaths of the lovers. My emphasis on the role of Mercutio in the play and what he symbolizes in Romeo add weight, I believe, to the argument that, in spite of all the perfunctory references to stars and fortune, it is finally a tragedy of character. The play puts its weight on the inner struggle of Romeo who tries to walk—so unsuccessfully—on the balance line between opposing forces. Though he fails, he fails nobly, having tried valiantly to live by the rule of love in a world that holds violence more important. The young lovers at the end have a kind of dignity in their deaths that we may not recognize because it is easy for us to feel superior to youthful error. It is true that after Tybalt's death and the news of his banishment, Romeo strikes every reader as childish, “blubbering and weeping” at the Friar's cell. But we should remember the resolution in his words when he learns of Juliet's supposed death, “Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee tonight,” and the nobleness as well as the pathos of his words in the tomb, “My love, my wife.” In the Friar's cell, “blubbering and weeping,” he attempts suicide, and we find it melodramatic. At the end, when he kills himself, we find it tragic.³²

One of Jung's comments suggests clearly the source of tragedy in that what life requires of us is so difficult to achieve: how do we reconcile that puerile trickster within us, that Mercurial shadow, with our higher self, our Juliet? How do we reach that integration?

The unity of our psychic nature lies in the middle, just as the living unity of the waterfall appears in the dynamic connection between above and below.

(I. 269)

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Subsequent quotations from Romeo and Juliet are from this edition.

2. A useful summary of criticism on Mercutio is found in Herbert MacArthur, “Romeo's Loquacious Friend,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 10 (1959), 35-44.

3. MacArthur, p. 35.

4. MacArthur, p. 38.

5. MacArthur, p. 43.

6. The Shakespearian Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), p. 82.

7. Prefaces to Shakespeare, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 336.

8. Complete Pelican Shakespeare (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), p. 856.

9. Marjorie Kolb Cox, in the Psychoanalytic Review, analyzes “Adolescent Processes in Romeo and Juliet,” pointing out that “when Romeo finds the true object of his love, he must leave Mercutio along with his primary loyalty to the preadolescent male peer group” (63 [1976], pp. 379-92). The feminist critic, Coppelia Kahn, also sees the limitations in Mercutio, who embodies a part of the masculine world that “promotes masculinity at the price of life.” (“Coming of Age in Verona,” in The Woman's Part, ed. Lenz, Greene and Neely [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980]).

10. See Edith Kern, The Absolute Comic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), chapter four, “The Absolute Comic and the Trickster Figure.”

11. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (New York: Bollingen Foundation, [1959-63] I, p. 262. Subsequent references to Jung's work will be from the Bollingen edition.

12. The World of Primitive Man (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1953), p. 339.

13. Works, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-53), IV, II. i. 4-9.

14. Ed. Jane Gooch (New York: Garland English Text Series, 1981), IV. iii.

15. Complete Works ed. R. W. Bond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902), IV, IV. i. 4-11.

16. Dramatic Works (London: John Pearson, 1874), IV, pp. 216-18.

17. Dramatic Works I, p. 98.

18. Ed. Gerald Snare (Northridge: California State University, 1975), pp. 96-97.

19. Ed. R. Tuve (New York: Scholars Facsimiles, 1947), p. 186.

20. Mythologiae, (Venice [1567], Garland Reprint, New York, 1967), p. 134.

21. (London [1599] Garland Reprint, New York, 1976), Qii.

22. Tetrabiblos, trans. W. G. Waddell (Harvard: Loeb Classical Library, 1940), p. 443.

23. De Deis Gentium (Basel [1548] Garland Reprint, New York, 1976).

24. Works V, I. iii. 49.

25. Works VII, 11. 30-34.

26. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), p. 55.

27. “Mercutio, Mine Own Son, the Dentist,” in Essays on Shakespeare, ed. G. Ross Smith (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), p. 11.

28. Shakespeare and the Rose of Love (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960), pp. 157-58.

29. Prefaces to Shakespeare, p. 336.

30. The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), I, p. 125.

31. William Shakespeare: a Reader's Guide, p. 151.

32. For a recent statement of this view of Act V see G. Blakemore Evans' introductory essay to the New Cambridge Romeo and Juliet, cited above. The essay by John Vivyan in Shakespeare and the Rose of Love is also helpful on this point.