Overview

In this impressive study, Joseph Porter traces the figure of Mercury from classical, medieval, and Renaissance literary and pictorial representations to his emergence as the character of Mercutio in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Porter grounds his analysis of Mercutio in a historical and cultural context and examines the transformation of Mercutio's character in criticism and performance from the Renaissance to the present. Exploring the playwright's goals and strategies in the development of this short-lived but important character, Porter reveals an abundance of information that helps us understand Shakespeare's creative processes in the context of Renaissance culture. He addresses a large body of critical commentary and examines a number of issues, including Mercutio's implications for the history of sexuality and gender, and the concept of the dramatic character itself in contemporary criticism. Porter also investigates such issues of interest in Shakespeare study as intertextuality, historicity, femininism, phallocentrism, literary proprietorship, and cultural containment and subversion. This work brings a unified manifold of contemporary critical instruments to bear on the character of Mercutio. In doing so, Porter introduces a new discipline -- a poststructuralist literary characterology -- for the twenty-first century.

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