Mercutio's most memorable scene in any given production of
Romeo & Juliet is likely to be the showboating Queen Mab speech, but his most famous line is the "a plague o' both your houses" refrain of his dying speech. As I get older and look at Shakespeare plays in different ways, one of the things I find notable about the play is that this speech, largely directed at Romeo, isn't entirely fair: The historic feud between the Montagues and Capulets might be the root cause of Mercutio's death, but the immediate cause is his own recklessness. Romeo has actually defused a volatile situation before Mercutio riles the thuggish Tybalt again, leading to a duel and, eventually, both their deaths. Rachel Garnet's
Starcrossed, a reimagining of
Romeo & Juliet, works in part as a possible explanation of this plot hole around why a character unrelated to either side of the feud, who's been happy to play the class clown until then, suddenly stokes up the fire in one of its most dangerous participants.
