Today we began with a look at a critical line from 1.3:

Students were to identify the speaker solely from the passage and its context clues. One clue is in the first line,  the inverted construction: “I’ll look to like, if looking liking move.” Students quickly saw that “move” here meant “inspire, provoke, cause” and that it’s inverted. The sentence then reads “If looking move liking,” which really means “if looking causes [me] to like [him].” The second context clue is in the final line: “your consent” suggests the speaker is addressing someone who can provide consent, and that narrows it down considerably. These two clues combine to make it clear that the speaker is Juliet and that she is talking about the proposed marriage to Paris.

For most of the class we went over one of the most famous monologues of the entire play, Mercutio’s Queen Mab passage:

O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Over men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon spokes made of long spinners’ legs,
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
Her traces, of the smallest spider web;
Her collars, of the moonshine’s wat’ry beams;
Her whip, of cricket’s bone; the lash, of film;
Her wagoner, a small grey-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazelnut,
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love;
O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on curtsies straight;
O’er lawyers’ fingers, who straight dream on fees;
O’er ladies’ lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are.
Sometimes she gallops o’er a courtier’s nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometimes comes she with a tithe-pig’s tail
Tickling a parson’s nose as ‘a lies asleep,
Then dreams he of another benefice.
Sometimes she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck,
And then dreams he 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. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled much misfortune bodes.
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage.
This is she!

It’s a long and confusing passage, in part because of the elliptical constructions that make up a good portion of the first lines:

Analysis led us to see that from this passage we can infer a few things about Mercutio:

• He’s skeptical about the usefulness of dreams.
• He’s got a very active imagination.
• He talks a lot.
• He gets carried away.
• He has some wild and fanciful notions.

These points will help students understand the text later when Mercutio comes onto the stage.