Mercutio's 'Queen Mab' Speech

A detailed Summary of Mercutio's 'Queen Mab' Speech

At the time Mercutio makes his famous "Queen Mab" speech in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, he and Romeo, together with a group of their friends and kinsmen, are on the way to a party given by their family's arch-enemy, Lord Capulet. Their plan is to crash the party so that Romeo may have the opportunity to see his current love, Rosaline, whom they know has been invited to the Capulet's masque that evening.

Romeo, whom his friends seem to consider generally very witty and fun, originally thought the party-crashing would be a wonderful idea, but suddenly is overcome by a sense of great foreboding; although they "mean well in going to this mask . . . 'tis no wit to go" (I, iv, 48-49). This annoys Mercutio, who does not recognize Romeo's reluctance as a genuine premonition, but feels it is simply another example of Romeo's lovesick whims. Romeo tries to explain to Mercutio that it is based upon a very disturbing dream, and Mercutio passes that off as silly, telling him that "Dreamers often lie." Here he is not saying that Romeo himself is a liar, but that people should put no faith in dreams. But Romeo is insistent; dreamers lie "in bed asleep, they do dream things true" (I, iv, 52).

There is a very good reason for putting this speech toward the end of Act I. It is our introduction to Mercutio, and it presents him as a charming, likeable character, which makes it all the more heartbreaking when he is killed by the brutal Tybalt later on. Also, at this moment Romeo is about to meet Juliet, but as yet has not; that "consequence yet hanging in the stars" has not shown its lovely and yet deadly face. And, in a very real sense, the feeling we had when Mercutio began his speech-that it resembled the loosing of a giant boulder, plunging downhill out of anyone's control-is replicated in the structure of the play itself. Here at the end of scene iv in the first act, in this last moment before Romeo and Juliet fatefully meet, is the last moment when the stone is still poised at the mountaintop. In the next scene it will be let go, and then there is nothing anyone on earth can do to stop it.

He leaps off the topic of Mab's carriage, however, to describe its route. Mab's function is apparently to drive over the sleeping forms of human beings, and cause them to dream of things appropriate to their station in life. For example, she causes lawyers to dream of fees, ladies of love, and soldiers of warfare. Here, again, this sounds fanciful enough; yet he somehow veers off into a deluge of images that are at complete odds with the sweet, almost childlike story it seemed he was going to tell. It is not enough that soldiers dream of war: they must dream of "cutting foreign throats, / Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades, / Of healths five fathom deep; and then anon, / Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes, / And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two / And sleeps again" (I, iv, 83-87). In other words, Mercutio began his speech with a reverie and ended with nightmares. Mab does not seem like such a cute little creature now.