Should I Read This: Yes, even if you do not like either Shakespeare or Dante
Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Mercutio a book by Kate Heartfield - Bookshop.org UK
Author’s Website: Kate Heartfield
As much as enjoy Shakespeare, I do not like Romeo and Juliet.
I know, I know. But it has never read to me as a tale of romance and star crossed lovers. Even in high school, it read more as a tale of idiots allowing their selfishness and pettiness and lust do harm to the people they loved. They broke the world for a moment’s infatuation and it annoyed me then that the world could be bent to the will of such careless, self-absorbed creatures. It annoys me even more now that we seem to ruled by such creatures. I may, however, have to read the play again now that I have read Mercutio by Kate Heartfield.
Mercutio is a prologue of sorts to Romeo and Juliet, tracing the life of Mercutio before he meets the two ill-fated stars. In this telling, Mercutio, actually born under a cursed star and with a prophecy that his desperate and disgraced parents cling to like drowning men cling to floating wood, lives through both the history of northern Italy and haunting and destructive encounters with the faerie. The book follows him from battlefields, to the politics of Florence, to the Atlantic ocean to the realm of the faerie. Mercutio befriends Dante of the The Divine Comedy and his life is forever altered, setting him on a collision course with Shakespeare’s play.
The book is a discussion of who we love, how our situations determine who we can love and how, and how love can be applied to friends, to family, and to the family we build around ourselves as we make our way, successfully or not, through the world. As he grows from the scorned youth of a forbidden marriage to a central player in the politics of Verona, Mercutio transforms from someone focused only on his family to building, or attempting to build, loving relationships with many different kinds of people. Whether it is his deep friendship with Dante, or his comradeship with his adventuring partners, or the family he is welcomed into in Florence, or the self-sacrificing love he finds for his parents, Mercutio’s story is one about how the right kinds of love and transform us, and the wrong kinds, or the kinds expressed in compulsion rather than mutual respect, can warp us. His story is as much an adventure of romance as it is an adventure across the world.
And it is an adventure. The themes of the book are wrapped in a series of exciting and moving adventures. We see many kinds of battlefields, spend time with the learned of the day, and try to survive the attention of various faeries and their enemies. Murder, mayhem, and destruction lie around every corner. It is a lovely, thoughtful book, taking plenty of time to explore the Italy of Mercutio’s day. We see both how much its inhabitants were like us, and how far apart from them we could be.
It is also a lovely, hauntingly written book. The prose is beautiful, both considered and sharp, languid when it needs to be, cutting when the time calls for us to be cut. Several times the book slipped into what I assumed were tributes to the poetry of Dante and Shakespeare. I am not expert, but Heartfield is a scholar of both writers, and I am confident that her scholarship is reflected in her prose, to great effect.
The fact that Mercutio is a prologue to Romeo and Juliet is not a mere gimmick, either. Deepening the character of Mercutio, better explaining the world the play lives in, and contrasting his deep and sincere love with the shallow counterpart in the play sharpens the impression of the play, give it more weight and thoughtfulness. This book is in deep conversation with Shakespeare’s play, and I think both are the better for the dialogue. I suspect much is true of Dante’s works as well, though I am not nearly well read enough in that area to be certain.
Mercutio is lovely written adventure that will change how you see one of the canonical texts of the English language. I heartily recommend pre-ordering it now.