A Desire for Love

Wildly unpredictable and effervescent, Mercutio is more than the crude, quick-witted man he is made out to be in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. While Mercutio often serves a comical role in this play, an underlying desperation in his actions stems from his desire to be loved.

Mercutio's sharp wit adds a humorous element to the play, but by demeaning Romeo’s feelings of love at every turn, Mercutio reveals his wish of having someone to love. After the party, Mercutio derides Romeo and cries, “ Romeo! humours! madman! passion! lover! Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh, Speak but one rhyme, and I am satisfied” (2, 1, 7-9). In saying this, Mercutio mocks Romeo’s vision of love and sees the poetic devices Romeo uses as conventional and cliche. Mercutio claims not to be intrigued by the fluttering wings of romance, but rather by a “fine foot, straight leg, and quivering thigh” (2, 1, 19). Mercutio asserts that love is nothing but a physical pursuit, which contradicts Romeo’s unabashed passion for romance. At first glance, it appears that Mercutio thinks of Romeo as a naive child that doesn’t understand love, and there is truth to that; Romeo doesn’t yet know how to express his feelings. However, Mercutio’s belief of love indicates he doesn’t understand the nuance of the emotion, and this is because he has never found a true love of his own—the only love he knows is for Romeo as a dear friend. When Romeo experiences these feelings that Mercutio doesn’t understand, Mercutio mocks him to hide his own vulnerability. Later that night, Romeo laments that Mercutio “jests at scars that never felt a wound”(2, 2, 1). Romeo believes that Mercutio has never felt love or heartbreak, and he believes this is why it was so easy for Mercutio to mock him in such a detached fashion. However, Mercutio hasn’t felt a deep love before, so he mocks Romeo because he desperately yearns for love; he uses harsh words as a way to put up a barrier from the truth that he, too, wants to feel the way Romeo has felt.

Furthermore, Mercutio feels abandoned by his friend every time Romeo leaves to either bemoan or celebrate his love. When Romeo and Mercutio finally have the chance to spend time with each other, the Nurse barges in to seek a word with Romeo. Mercutio immediately taunts the Nurse, saying that she needs a fan “to hide her face, for her fan’s the fairer face” (2, 4, 97). He continues on in a seemingly lighthearted manner, but he does not cease to torment the Nurse until she leaves with Romeo. When Mercutio finally bades farewell to the “ancient lady”, he exits the scene abruptly (2, 4, 130). While Mercutio has fun with his words when talking to Romeo, someone that he cares for, he ridicules those who take what he wants most. When the nurse takes Romeo from Mercutio, a source of attention he desperately needs, he conceals his anger with well-worded quips—Mercutio’s words are a shield that protects how alone he feels. However, Mercutio doesn’t realize that his effervescence comes from his entire life of pretending.

Just as he can come up with fierce words of contempt, Mercutio’s wild imagination conjures up Queen Mab, the creator of dreams; however, in describing such a trivial subject, he becomes increasingly disturbed as he describes this fairy. Mercutio begins his speech with a physical description of Queen Mab, whose “wagon-spokes” were “made of long spinners’ legs”, and she was “not half so big as a round little worm” (1, 4, 62, 68). Mercutio appears mystified that such a small creature can conjure up such grand visions. His illustration of Queen Mab draws from the raw beauty of nature, but she can also be repulsive. Mercutio continues by describing the type of dreams Queen Mab gives—she “gallops night by night Through lover’s brains, and then they dream of love” (1, 4, 70-71). However, Mercutio becomes increasingly agitated as he moves into the more violent images he has seen, for sometimes “she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck, And then he dreams of cutting foreign throats” (1, 4, 82-83). Eventually, his distress reaches a breaking point and Romeo must calm him down. As soon as Romeo does this, Mercutio resignedly agrees that his dreams are nothing but “the children of an idle brain…. Which is as thin of substance as the air” (1, 4, 96,99). While he doesn’t realize it at first, Mercutio’s dreams reflect and foreshadow his own life. Mercutio’s death stems from his willingness to cut Tybalt’s “foreign throat” (1, 4, 83). Mercutio’s life has been full of vivacity from his friends and sworn enemies, but by his end, Mercutio realizes none of it was lasting. When describing his mortal wound, he says it is “not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door, but ‘tis enough, ‘twill serve” (3, 1, 92-93). Mercutio feels that his entire life was fruitless; the people he thought were his friends pay no mind to him, and his struggle with love is something nobody discovers. Just like dreams are too “thin of substance” to be remembered, Mercutio’s life has faded away with little more than a wound. Ultimately, Mercutio cracks jokes and mocks openly to fill his life with color he will never have. He deeply resents the love he can’t experience and the attention he never gets, which is why it’s only fitting that the end of life marks the abrupt switch of comedy to tragedy in Romeo and Juliet.

Mercutio is a multifaceted individual whose witty, lively surface gives way to a desire for love and attention that he struggles, and ultimately fails, to suppress. Upon his death, Mercutio feels only betrayal and frustration at the life that has been handed to him in Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.