PRINCE           I have an interest in your hearts’ proceeding:

                        My blood for your rude brawls doth lie a-bleeding;

                        But I’ll amerce you with so strong a fine

                        That you shall all repent the loss of mine.

                        I will be deaf to pleading and excuses,

                        Nor tears nor prayers shall purchase out abuses:

                        Therefore use none. Let Romeo hence in haste,

                        Else, when he is found, that hour is his last.

                        Bear hence this body, and attend our will:

                        Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.

                                                                                    Exeunt. (3.1.179-188)

The Prince has an interest, that is, he is implicated, is involved, in the various pleas being made by Montague and Lady Capulet; more generally, he is himself upset, angry, grieving, because Mercutio, his own blood, has been killed as a result of their wretched feud. (Calling it a rude brawl works nicely to undermine all those claims of honour and reputation that have been flying around earlier on.) There’s a significant textual variant here: Q1 has your hates’ proceeding, which makes good sense in the larger context of the play and especially the many echoes here of 1.1, for example Romeo’s here’s much to do with hate, but more with love … O brawling love, o loving hate. Whichever is chosen – heart, the love of family which is motivating Montague and Lady Capulet, or hate, the ongoing feud – we hear the other, I think, heart/hate, and register their oxymoronic closeness. Amerce, however, is nothing to do with mercy, although we might still hear it in its absence and think that this is no mercy at all for Romeo, but rather tough love;amerce is punish or penalise: I’ll punish you so that you cannot but be aware of how angry I am, and how I too am suffering; nothing you can say or do is going to make any difference, so, just stop it (addressed, one imagines, particularly to Lady C, and again finishing on the half line makes it even more emphatic). And then a reminder of what’s at stake here: Romeo is banished hence– destination unspecified, anywhere but here – and there’s no grace period; he’s in mortal peril from this moment on. (Where is he? where has he run to? where can he hide?) A reminder that all of this has been played out with Tybalt’s body in full view – it now has to be got off stage, a useful reminder of how many supernumeraries there might be in the scene (two or three Capulet servants in attendance, for instance?) and it’s therefore also going to take a while to clear the stage. (This matters for the following scene. More on that in due course.) It’s a scene that’s been characterised by tremendous formal fluidity, switching from blank verse to prose, back to blank verse, prose, blank verse (with the odd rhyming couplet thrown in), then more rhyming couplets, blank verse for Benvolio’s long speech, and then rhyming couplets to the end, with a final emphatic aphorism for the Prince: he will not be more merciful, because to pardon murderers only leads to more violence. (Editors point out that this is a Machiavellian moment, and that he is, of course, The Prince. But his tough pragmatism can be tempered, I think, by a very real grief for Mercutio, his blood, his kinsman; we could imagine cousin, nephew, like Tybalt, or even foster son). There are no winners here. The stage clears. We breathe.