Why does mercutio want to conjure rosaline

After all the laughs and energy, Mercutio simply gives up, accepting that any efforts to help Romeo are in vain. Glad to see this page is still up! Again excellent thorough analysis.

Dramatically, the contrast of the four young men is being rapidly built up. The Chorus has told us the lovers will die, then reminds us the families are foes. The four characters respond to risk-taking, danger, banter, etc. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account.

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Click the character infographic to download. Mercutio is Romeo's sword-fight loving BFF, and you probably won't be surprised to find out that his name sounds a lot like the word "mercurial," i. That turns out to be a mistake on his part: Tybalt kills him in Act 3, Scene 1. Mercutio is a showstopper.

He's dirty, funny, out of control, and—we'll say it—compared to him, Romeo and Juliet can seem whiny and repetitive. Mercutio is technically a minor character, but his personality has such a disproportionate impact that maybe he has to die or he would take over the play.

In fact, English poet John Dryden said that Shakespeare himself admitted that he had to kill Mercutio—or else, he said, Mercutio would have killed him.

Probably not. But it helps us get an idea of just how flashy Mercutio is. Having joked at Romeo's Petrarchan miseries earlier in the play, Mercutio now adds a more cutting edge to his barbs. He calls to Romeo using physical and sexual innuendo to describe the female allure. To Mercutio, love is a conquest, a physical endeavor. Mercutio jests that Romeo will think of Rosaline as a medlar fruit, which was supposed to look like the female genitalia, and himself as a poperin pear shaped like the male genitalia.

Romeo's leap over the Capulet wall is symbolic of his flight to a spiritual conceptualization of love. Romeo describes Juliet in light images — conspicuously nonphysical descriptions. When he first sees Juliet, he says, "she doth teach the torches to burn bright. Call, good Mercutio. Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh. The ape is dead, and I must conjure him. That were some spite. My invocation 30 Is fair and honest. Benvolio and Mercutio try to find him.