Sampson
Sampson is the play's first speaking character and the immediate cause of the opening brawl. He exists to show that the feud is not confined to the heads of two families but has infected every level of both households — servants will fight in the street over gestures, with no more reason than livery and habit.
Appears In
Biography
Sampson is a servant of the Capulet household — brawling, boastful, and crude. He opens the play itself, striding onto a Verona street with Gregory and filling the first scene with swagger about what he will do to the Montagues if he meets them. His threats are largely comic in their excess: he will push Capulet's men from the wall, he will be civil with the maids and cruel with their men, he will cut off their heads.
The provocation that starts the brawl is his: he bites his thumb at Abraham, a Montague servant — a gesture of calculated insult chosen precisely because it is technically legal and therefore deniable. When Abraham demands to know if the thumb was bitten at him, Sampson's hedging response is both cowardly and funny. The fight begins anyway.
Once the senior men arrive — Tybalt on one side, Benvolio on the other — Sampson disappears from the play entirely. His function is entirely concentrated in this opening scene: he is the first voice of the feud, the man who demonstrates that the hatred between Capulet and Montague has seeped so thoroughly into the household servants that it erupts in the street over nothing.
Motivation
Sampson is motivated by loyalty to the Capulet name and a servant's pride that expresses itself through aggression. His bravado is partly performance — he looks to Gregory for confirmation throughout — but his willingness to provoke a fight is entirely real.
Personality
Sampson is all swagger and very little follow-through — the kind of man who makes large claims and then checks whether anyone noticed. His crude wordplay with Gregory, his hedged provocation of Abraham, and his rapid disappearance once serious fighters arrive paint a portrait of a bully whose courage is contingent on the odds. He is also the play's first joke: the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet begins with two servants making lewd puns.