I walked into Romeo and Juliet rehearsal trying to figure out a way to make the Queen Mab speech more interesting. The speech is problematic to me, because it doesn’t advance the story in any way, nor does it tell us much about Mercutio or anyone else in the play (except that Mercutio loves to hear himself speak). But while I’m going to be saying all of this stuff about fairies riding through lovers’ brains at night, there are going to be two other actors stranded onstage with me. My idea was to have a lot of physical interaction between us, sort of a stand-sit-lean kind of deal. I wasn’t sure it would work, but I really wanted to try to find a way to share that speech with the guys playing Benvolio and Romeo. But, that all took a turn.
The director of this production believes that the text indicates that there is homoerotic tension between Mercutio and Romeo, so he asked me to try that. It pretty much puts the kibosh on what I had in mind. If I’m playing that sort of intention, I’m mostly directing my attention at the object of my desire, which leaves poor Benvolio with not much to do but wait for me to shut up (which actually might be a good motivation for him, I suppose).
I struggled with this subtext. So far, I don’t feel it’s something that’s clearly there. It’s my opinion that this idea is a revisionist reading that imports a 20th century view of sexuality into an Elizabethan text. I explored the same type of arguments with respect to colonialism when I was working on The Tempest.
But then I stumbled on something that I think is much more interesting, and ultimately, gets me to the same place anyway. In The Shakespeare Wars, Ron Rosenbaum compares Mercutio to Marlowe. Rosenbaum observes that while it has been said that Shakespeare had to kill Mercutio, or Mercutio would kill Shakespeare, the same is also true of Marlowe. Harold Bloom notes in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human that, in writing Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare finally wrote himself out of Marlowe’s shadow, by putting words in Aaron the Moor’s mouth that were like a speech by Barabas from The Jew of Malta on steroids. What if, once Shakespeare no longer felt overshadowed by Marlowe, he felt free to include a little tribute to him in a play?
The similarities between Marlowe and Mercutio are obvious. Both are larger-than-life characters with quick wits who love to ramble (the Queen Mab speech is positively Marlovian, in my opinion). Both are ultimately self-destructive. Both die in a knife fight under dubious circumstances, and both die with a curse on their lips. There’s some textual basis to think that Mercutio may have been a nod to Marlowe, as well, although it’s all speculation. Mercutio compares Romeo’s love to Dido, to Helen, and to Hero – all characters Marlowe wrote about.
And of course, there’s the famous quote attributed to Marlowe: “All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools.” Now, the actual evidence supporting this statement may be dodgy, and it seems pretty clear that Marlowe loved to shock people, so it would have been in character for him to say such a thing even if he didn’t mean it. Still, it does raise an ambiguity. And that ambiguity is just enough, I think, to make me feel okay with what I view as importing something into the text that may not be there.
