Mercutio
Mercutio functions as the play's great tonal counterweight — its wit, its scepticism, its refusal to take romantic convention at face value — right up until his death converts the play irreversibly from comedy toward tragedy. His curse on both households as he dies gives voice to the play's judgement on the feud itself.
Appears In
Biography
Mercutio is a kinsman of Prince Escalus and Romeo's closest friend, a young man of restless, brilliant wit who belongs to neither feuding house and yet is destroyed by their quarrel regardless. He is Verona's most vivid talker — capable of the Queen Mab speech's dazzling, spiralling invention one moment and the crudest sexual innuendo the next, often within the same breath.
Mercutio has no patience for Romeo's romanticism. He mocks the very idea of love-as-suffering throughout the play, most pointedly by refusing to take Romeo's infatuations — with Rosaline, and later, without knowing why, with Juliet — at all seriously. His scepticism is not coldness but a kind of self-protective wit, a refusal to be made a fool of by feeling the way Romeo so readily is.
That same refusal to be made a fool of is what kills him. When Tybalt challenges Romeo and Romeo, newly and secretly married to a Capulet, refuses to fight, Mercutio reads the refusal as cowardice he cannot let stand unanswered, and draws on Tybalt himself. His dying joke — 'ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man' — is the play's sharpest turn from comedy to catastrophe, delivered by the character who has embodied its comedy most fully.
Motivation
Mercutio is motivated by loyalty to Romeo and by a fierce, almost reflexive commitment to his own honour and wit. He fights Tybalt not out of any investment in the Capulet-Montague quarrel itself, but because he cannot tolerate what he sees as an insult to his friend going unanswered.
Personality
Mercutio is one of Shakespeare's most purely verbal creations — a character who thinks and feels through language at a speed and density that leaves everyone around him half a step behind. Beneath the wit is genuine volatility: Benvolio accuses him of a hidden hot temper, and it is this suppressed volatility, not his humour, that ultimately gets him killed. He is fiercely loyal to Romeo and entirely uninterested in the feud's supposed honour, which makes his death at its hands all the more senseless and enraging.