Eloquence and Liminality: Glossing Mercutio’s Speech Acts

As Mercutio crosses the threshold from Brooke into Shakespeare he acquires not only a brother, a friendship, and a death but also a distinctively eloquent and vividly characteristic voice. To the extent that he stands outside the main plot, neither affecting it nor being affected by it until his death, mere language has a particular prominence with him. As is well known, Mercutio is a landmark in Shakespeare’s early development of characterisation in distinctive speech, and much of the impressionistic admiration (as well as some of the disapproval) he has elicited has been for his speech. Harbage1 speaks of his ‘matchless exercise in verbal cameo-cutting and imaginative fooling’, Holland2 of his ‘puns, rhymes, jokes, set-speeches, and other masks’, and Snyder3 of the fact that ‘speech for him is a constant play on multiple possibilities: puns abound because two or three meanings are more fun than one’. With pragmatic, or speech-act, analysis we may uncover some more of the nature of what Mercutio does with words.4