Throughout the play Romeo and Juliet, Friar Lawrence offers useful insight into several of the plays underlying themes. At the beginning of act II, the Friar gives a soliloquy on how plants contain both “grace and rude will” or poisonous and medicinal qualities. The Friar reveals these powers in plants represent the vice and virtue in humans. Much like the friar’s plants, Mercutio holds and displays both his grace and his rude will, both frivolity and a deep anger, within the lines of the text. In acts one and two when Mercutio exhibits a lighthearted frivolity as a supreme jokester full of wit. The first picture of Mercutio is one of youth personified. He is lively and optimistic, trying to get Romeo to enjoy himself. From the lines “Nay, …show more content…
It is implied that Romeo and Mercutio often took part in the duels before Romeo’s current love-induced depression. Mercutio says, “Now thou art Romeo”, he does not believe that this lovesick buffoon could be his friend (76). Mercutio now seems to see love as something pulling his friend away. This conversation leads into the most open scene of Mercutio’s fun-loving character. When he, Benvolio, and their gang tease Juliet’s nurse. Mercutio plays rough, but more as a child who could not know that what he is doing could be harmful. Once Mercutio leaves, Romeo tells the nurse Mercutio will “speak more in a minute than he will stand to in a month.” (127). There is a brief moment in act one where Mercutio reveals a hint of a dark side, like an injured animal that bites whenever one comes to close to its wound. He says, “... I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy…” (I.iv.98-100). In these lines, Mercutio exhibits a certain wariness of love. He compares love to dreams, which are only brief depictions of false images. He talks as someone experienced in this analogy, hinting that he has had his heart broken and refuses to let his friend Romeo go down the same