ROMEO           Here’s goodly gear! EnterNURSE and her man[PETER] A sail, a sail! MERCUTIO     Two, two: a shirt and a smock. NURSE            Peter! PETER                        Anon. NURSE            My fan, Peter. MERCUTIO     Good Peter, to hide her face, for her fan’s the fairer face. NURSE            God ye good morrow, gentlemen. MERCUTIO     God ye good den, fair gentlewoman. NURSE            […]

MERCUTIO     O here’s a wit of cheverel, that stretches from an inch narrow to an ell broad! ROMEO           I stretch it out for that word ‘broad’, which, added to the goose, proves thee far and wide a broad goose. MERCUTIO     Why, is not this better now than groaning for love? Now art thou sociable, now […]

MERCUTIO     Nay, if our wits run the wild-goose chase, I am done; for thou hast more of the wild goose in one of thy wits than, I am sure, I have in my whole five. Was I with you there for the goose? ROMEO           Thou wast never with me for any thing when thou wast […]

MERCUTIO     Come between us, good Benvolio, my wits faints. ROMEO           Swits and spurs, swits and spurs, or I’ll cry a match. (2.4.57-8) I’m taking this very short exchange not because it’s particularly complicated, but because it’s reasonably self-contained, and the bit that follows is not. Mercutio is protesting as if he and Romeo are duelling, […]

ROMEO           Pardon, good Mercutio, my business was great, and in such a case as mine a man may strain courtesy. MERCUTIO     That’s as much as to say, such as case as yours constrains a man to bow in the hams. ROMEO           Meaning to cur’sy. MERCUTIO     Thou hast most kindly hit it. ROMEO           A most courteous […]

Enter ROMEO. BENVOLIO      Here comes Romeo, here comes Romeo. MERCUTIO     Without his roe, like a dried herring: O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified! Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in. Laura to his lady was a kitchen wench (marry, she had a better love to berhyme her), Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a […]

MERCUTIO     The pox of such antic, lisping, affecting phantasimes, these new tuners of accent! ‘By Jesu, a very good blade! a very tall man! a very good whore!’ Why, is not this a lamentable thing, grandsire, that we should be thus afflicted with these strange flies, these fashion-mongers, these pardon-me’s, who stand so much on […]

MERCUTIO     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? BENVOLIO      Why, what is Tybalt? MERCUTIO     More than Prince of Cats. O, he’s […]

[2.4] Enter BENVOLIO and MERCUTIO MERCUTIO     Where the dev’l should this Romeo be?                         Came he not home tonight? BENVOLIO      Not to his father’s, I spoke with his man. MERCUTIO     Why, that same pale hard-hearted wretch, that Rosaline,                         Torments him so, that he will sure run mad. BENVOLIO      Tybalt, the kinsman to old Capulet,                         Hath […]

ROMEO           Thou chid’st me oft for loving Rosaline. FRIAR              For doting, not for loving, pupil mine. ROMEO           And bad’st me bury love. FRIAR                                                              Not in a grave,                         To lay one in, another out to have. ROMEO           I pray thee chide me not. Her I love now                         Doth grace for grace and love for […]