#that awkward moment when you’re that much of a mercutio stan you think your headcanon is canon

[cto10121]

Was Shakespeare Forced To Kill Off Mercutio?

So during my Shakespeare biography sleuthing I’ve encountered this piece of R&J mythos time and time again on why Shakespeare killed off Mercutio. Here it is in Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: A Life:

[John] Dryden, in “Defence of the Epilogue” to The Conquest of Granada (1670), says that “Shakespeare showed the best of his skill in Mercutio, and he said himself that he was forced to kill him in the third Act, to prevent being killed by him.”

Dryden was born in 1633, decades after Shakespeare died, so he obviously picked this up from late 17th century fanon hearsay. It is one of the few, if not the only anecdote, which features a claim about Shakespeare’s own authorial intent with character from his plays from Shakespeare’s own mouth.

Here’s why I don’t believe this.

For starters, since Shakespeare adapted the play largely from Arthur Brooke’s narrative poem, which had Mercutio as a courtier with a romantic interest in Juliet at the ball (his cold hand!!!!), Shakespeare obviously had plans for the character beyond just “Mercutio is now Romeo’s friend.” There is the possibility that Shakespeare’s original plan was simply to have him disappear from the play entirely and have Tybalt and Romeo face-off as in the original Brooke poem. But it’s not likely—the original duel scene is a plaza-wide fight, which Shakespeare moved to the beginning to great effect. Romeo’s refusal to fight Tybalt is the most natural reaction, re: his love for Juliet; this automatically forces one of his friends to defend his honor, and it certainly wouldn’t be Benvolio, already established as a peace keeper, whose very name is Goody mcGoody. There is a ghost friend in one of the quartos called Horatio (oh, Shakespeare) that appears in the Queen Mab scene, but from what I could tell he largely dispenses advice similar to Benvolio’s and uses what came to be Benvolio’s lines. That leaves the one with the Mercury/Mercurial name and personality.

So already we have strong reasons for why Mercutio’s death would have always been planned from the start. It’s a pivotal death, after all, the trigger and rationale to the tragedy; something had to happen for Romeo to be banished, but not executed by the Prince. The original poem offered no satisfying explanation as to why Romeo was let off so easily, except perhaps that Tybalt was the first aggressor or something and it was self-defense. Tybalt had to kill someone, had to break the peace first. Perhaps Benvolio could have been the casualty, and his death really would have been infuriating, but that would have presupposed Benvolio would have challenged Tybalt in the first place, which no. Also, Tybalt is not the kind of character who would fight anyone defenseless. Mercutio’s scornful character portrait of him, if we even take that seriously, is that of a duelist who does everything by the rules of honor (literally, “the book of arithmetic”); that implies a commitment to honor.

Also…this is Shakespeare we’re talking about. Guy gave zero fucks about killing off his characters. It’s a tragedy, after all. Falstaff, yes, I could see him thinking, “Oh, zounds, this is getting out of hand, I really must kill him,” especially since he had promised that he would show up in Henry V (he must have got a lot of flack from the Falstaff fans at that time). Not Mercutio. Mercutio was a red shirt slated to die from page one.