on a dream, a mere presentiment of evil, shows how little importance Romeo attaches to the feud.
... Queen Mab...
With Romeo and Benvolio is a friend, Mercutio, who is of neither faction and is friendly with both, for he has been invited to the feast. He is, it appears, a relative of Prince Escalus.
Mercutio is, in essence, Shakespeare's invention. Da Porto had a minor character named Marcuccio, but Shakespeare took that and touched it with his own special gold even down to the small change in the name. Mercutio suggests Mercury, the winged messenger of the gods, who flits through the air with superhuman speed. Mercutio is mercurial, with a flashing wit that never leaves him.
Mercutio does not seem to think of the feud as a deadly thing either. He makes no attempt to dissuade the Montagues from going, as he might well have done if there were real danger. Rather, he is intent on rallying Romeo out of his melancholy and is so anxious to have him come to the feast that he eagerly turns dream presentiments into nonsense by advancing his own theory on the origin of dreams as the product of a tricky elf. He says:
O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife, and she conies
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
- Act I, scene iv, lines 53-55
Queen Mab is out of Celtic mythology. The pagan Irish had a goddess named Meadhbh, who was the ruler of a group of the "little people." This may have contributed to the notion of Queen Mab.
Queen Mab need not be considered a fairy queen in the sense that Titania was in A Midsummer Night's Dream (see page I-26). She is the fairies' "midwife"; that is, she helps men and women give birth to dreams, and this is no task for a queen.
Here, in all likelihood, "Queen" is used in its original sense of "woman" and to speak of "Queen Mab" would be something like speaking of "Dame Mab" or "Mistress Mab." The word "queen" early split into two forms: one of them, "quean," degenerated to mean a degraded woman, a harlot; the other, "queen," rose to mean an elevated woman, the wife of a king. "Queen," in its ordinary original sense, neither depressed nor elevated, vanished altogether.
Mercutio's speech about Queen Mab presents the view that dreams are not messages of fate but the product of the routine thoughts of the day. Lovers dream of love, courtiers of curtsies, lawyers of fees; soldiers of war and drink, and so on. This is one of many examples of Shakespeare's modern-sounding rationalism.
Thus, when Romeo tries to stem the flow of Mercutio's brilliance and says:
Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!
Thou talk'st of nothing.
- Act I, scene iv, lines 95-96
Mercutio answers at once, with stabbing relevance:
True, I talk of dreams.
- Act I, scene iv, line 96
... a Montague, our foe
Within the mansion the feast is in full progress. The masked dancers are enjoying themselves and Romeo sees Juliet for the first time. He falls immediately and hopelessly in love and completely vindicates Benvolio's promise that Romeo had but to look at other women to forget Rosaline. Romeo says:
Did my heart love till now:
Forswear it, sight! For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.
- Act I, scene v, lines 54-55
But his voice is overheard and instantly recognized-and by Tybalt, the only person of consequence in either faction who takes the feud seriously. He flares into mad rage at once and is prepared to kill. He says:
This, by his voice, should be a Montague.
Fetch me my rapier, boy.
- Act I, scene v, lines 56-57
Capulet is at once aware that Tybalt is in a passion and demands the reason. Tybalt says:
Uncle, this is a Montague, our foe,
A villain.. .
- Act I, scene v, lines 63-64
Capulet is not moved in the slightest. He recognizes Romeo at once and says to Tybalt:
... let him alone.
'A bears him like a portly [respectable] gentleman,
And, to say truth, Verona brags of him
To be a virtuous and well-governed youth.
- Act I, scene v, lines 67-70
Surely the feud is as good as dead when the leader of one side can speak so of the son and heir of the leader of the other side. Capulet speaks so highly of Romeo, in fact, that one could almost imagine that a prospective match between Montague's son and Capulet's daughter would be a capital way of ending the feud.
Then, when Tybalt objects to Capulet's tame endurance of the presence of a Montague, the