SHAKESPEARE'S MERCUTIO AND OURS
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irony in Mercutio's being killed "under"
Romeo's arm. Mercutio's style is to push
other things down, himself up. As he tells
Romeo:
If love be rough with you, be rough with love.
Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.
Mercutio works on the principle that the
best defense is a good offense-he is constantly on the attack against emotions that
might attack him. As Romeo says, "He jests
at scars that never felt a wound." But we
can with a more sophisticated psychology
paraphrase him: He jests at scars that fears
to feel a wound-a certain kind of wound,
the kind that comes from real love that
would lay him low, make him undergo a
submission like Romeo's.
To be a man in Mercutio's terms, you
have to put something of your own up, and
to do that, as he sees it, you must pull someone else's something down. His jokes thus
satisfy both sexual and aggressive impulses,
and at the same time they serve as a defense
against emotions. Mercutio's bawdry lets
him put up his own verbal smokescreen; it
lets him pull down to earth (or earthiness)
the emotions that others put up as ideal or
important.
Not for Mercutio is that entrance into the
womb or tomb or maw which is Romeo's
dark, sexual fate-Mercutio is the perpetual
outsider, except for one crucial moment that
has greatly puzzled critics: the moment
when he chooses to intervene in the quarrel
between Tybalt and Romeo. Why does he
do it? We have seen that Mercutio's lifestyle involves asserting himself in two ways:
by pulling down to earth the formalisms of
others; by setting up his own formalisms:
jokes, riddles, rhymes, or fantasies of Queen
Mab. Tybalt is another formalist: one who
fights by the book of arithmetic. He makes a
formal attack on Romeo, but Romeo has
just married Juliet. Instead of asserting himself, he accepts Tybalt's formal insult and
even the name Capulet, "which name," he
says, "I tender as dearly as mine own."
One can scarcely imagine anything more
threatening for Mercutio to witness. Were
Tybalt to succeed in setting up his formal
challenge, his pretensions, forcing Romeo
down with them, he would be calling into
question Mercutio's whole life-style, which
is built on doing that kind of thing himself,
not in having others do it to him. Thus,
Mercutio has to fight off the threat-otherwise, as he says, "Alla stoccata carries it
away," Tybalt's formalism would win the
day. Mercutio has to intervene, and when he
does so, he intervenes in a specifically Mercutian way: he pushes aside both Tybalt's
formal challenge and Romeo's formal submission, and he asserts his own verbalistic
challenge, joking on Tybalt's nine lives.
To pull down the formalism of others and
put up his own-this pattern is the very essence of Mercutio's character, and he defends it with his life. Notice, by using psychoanalysis to talk about motivation and
character, we can out-Bradley Bradley. And
so the psychoanalytic critics have done, they
being virtually the only people today who
treat Shakespeare's characters as real. It can
be done-we can arrive at a realistic account of Mercutio. But should we? Somehow, it is all not very convincing.
For one thing, we are violating the basic
procedures of modem criticism-we have
gone beyond the sacrosanct words-on-thepage to infer in the discredited manner of
Morgann all kinds of things about Mercutio,
even his non-existent childhood. And we
have gained nothing in return. We are no
wiser than we were before as to why we
identify ourselves with Mercutio.
Let us turn and look in another direction,
namely, toward Smith College where in
1944 two psychologists performed a quite
remarkable experiment.' To a group of undergraduates, they showed an animated cartoon detailing the adventures of a large
black triangle, a small black triangle, and a
circle, the three of them moving in various
ways in and out of a rectangle. After the
short came the main feature: the psychologists asked for comments, and the Smith
girls "with great uniformity" described the
big triangle as "aggressive," "pugnacious,"
"mean," "temperamental," "irritable,"
Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel, "An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior," American Journal of Psychology, LVII (1944), 243-259.
