Benvolio met Mercutio at the fountain a few hours later, alone.
"Where the devil should this Romeo be?" He inquired. "Came he not home tonight?" Benvolio shook his head, sighing.
"Not to his father’s." He answered, "I spoke with his man." Mercutio scowled.
"Why, that same pale hard-hearted wench, that Rosaline, torments him so, that he will sure run mad." Benvolio looked down at the ground, picking his nails.
"Tybalt, the kinsman to old Capulet, hath sent a letter to his father’s house."
"A challenge, on my life." Mercutio announced. Benvolio nodded, confirming Mercutio's words.
"Romeo will answer it." Mercutio sat down beside Benvolio.
"Any man that can write may answer a letter." He joked.
"Nay, he will answer the letter’s master, how he dares, being dared." He clarified. Mercutio clutched his chest as if wounded.
"Alas, poor Romeo! He is already dead, stabbed with a white wench’s black eye, shot through the ear with a love song, the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy’s butt shaft. And is he a man to encounter Tybalt?" Benvolio looked up.
"Why, what is Tybalt?" He inquired, now slightly alarmed for his cousin's safety.
"More than Prince of Cats." He stated, "Oh, he’s the courageous captain of compliments. He fights as you sing prick-song, keeps time, distance, and proportion. He rests his minim rests—one, two, and the third in your bosom. The very butcher of a silk button, a duelist, a duelist, a gentleman of the very first house of the first and second cause. Ah, the immortal passado, the punto reverso, the hai!" Benvolio furrowed his brow.
"The what?"
"The pox of such antic, lisping, affecting fantasmines, these new tuners of accents! 'By Jesu, a very good blade! A very tall man! A very good whore!' Why, is not this a lamentable thing, grandsire, that we should be thus afflicted with these strange flies, these fashion-mongers, these 'pardon me’s,' who stand so much on the new form, that they cannot sit at ease on the old bench? Oh, their bones, their bones!" Benvolio nodded, a bit ill at ease. Coming their way he noticed his cousin. He smiled, grabbing Mercutio's arm.
"Here comes Romeo, here comes Romeo!" He cheered. Mercutio smirked.
"Without his roe, like a dried herring. O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified! Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in. Laura to his lady was but a kitchen-wench— marry, she had a better love to berhyme her—Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a gypsy, Helen and Hero hildings and harlots, Thisbe a grey eye or so, but not to the purpose." He babbled.
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Benvolio and Mercutio (SLOW UPDATES)
RomanceEveryone knows the story of Romeo and Juliet, but what about the romance that happened behind the scenes between a certain lover's cousin and a kinsman to the Prince?
