Mercutio describes Queen Mab, the fairy who brings dreams to sleepers. His elaborate, whimsical speech mocks Romeo's romantic dreams while revealing Mercutio's own quicksilver imagination and cynicism about love.
Act 1 Scene 4, a street in Verona at night. Romeo, Mercutio, Benvolio, and several other masked young men are on their way to the Capulets' ball, uninvited and disguised. Romeo is in his Rosaline mood — heavy, paradoxical, speaking in love-melancholy abstractions — and has just declared that he had a dream which makes him reluctant to attend. Mercutio, who has been baiting Romeo throughout the scene, seizes on the word "dream" and launches into the Queen Mab speech: a virtuoso, escalating fantasia on the fairy midwife who rides through sleepers' brains delivering the dreams they secretly want. The speech begins as a comic riff to mock Romeo's dreamy mood, accelerates through a gallery of sleepers — lovers, courtiers, lawyers, parsons, soldiers — and ends in a strange darkening that Romeo finally has to stop. Then the boys go to the party where Romeo will meet Juliet and Mercutio will set in motion the events that kill him.
Mercutio is the play's wit, its restless imagination, and its only fully secular voice. What he wants from Romeo, at the speech's outset, is to puncture Romeo's self-indulgent melancholy with a superior performance of fancy — to out-dream the dreamer and shame him out of it. Underneath the comedy is something less stable: Mercutio's imagination runs away with him and the speech turns. By the time he reaches the soldier dreaming of cut throats and the maids being pressed in their sleep, the joke has soured and Mercutio is somewhere darker than he intended to go. The psychological state moves from showmanship to something close to vision, and Romeo's "Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace, thou talk'st of nothing" is a friend pulling him back from a cliff. The actor's job is to find the moment the speech stops being for Romeo and starts being for Mercutio himself.
The danger is treating the speech as a recital. It is improvised, in the fiction; Mercutio is making it up as he rides it. Find the launch — Queen Mab appears as a small joke and grows because Mercutio cannot leave her alone. The agate-stone, the spider's-web, the moonshine's wat'ry beams: these are specific, visible miniatures, and the speech is funny because the detail is absurd. Make each image. The catalogue of sleepers is structural — lover, courtier, lawyer, parson, soldier — and each gets a different colour; do not let them blur. Mark the tonal shift at the soldier; the speech changes weather. The final ten lines about maids and carriages and plats and bakes the elf-locks should arrive at speed and with a slight loss of control. Tempo: bright, conversational, accelerating, then catching. The trap is poetry-voice; speak it as quickly as you would speak any extended joke, and trust the verse to organise itself. Watch your scansion on the trickier lines (the "she gallops night by night" passage) and respect the feminine endings. Physically: Mercutio is moving, gesturing, drawing Mab in the air. Do not stand still.
A classical-audition staple for young men, and one of the better Shakespeare comedies to bring because it demonstrates language facility, imagination, comic instinct, and tonal range in a single speech. Strong for Shakespeare companies, MFA classical tracks, and any audition where the brief is "show us verse with life." Useful as a counter-piece to a heavier soliloquy. Over-used but less punishingly than Antony or Henry V; panels are more willing to listen because the speech is genuinely fun. Bring it only if you can speak it quickly and specifically; slow Queen Mab is unwatchable. Less suited to screen-naturalism rooms or comedy callbacks for contemporary material. Demonstrates that you can sustain a single extended thought, find structure inside apparent improvisation, and pivot tone. If you are auditioning for Mercutio himself, panels often prefer to see the "plague o' both your houses" death speech, which shows different gears.
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 fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider's web,
The collars of the moonshine's watery beams,
Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
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 court'sies 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:
Sometime she gallops o'er a courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a parson's nose as a' lies asleep,
Then dreams he of another benefice:
Sometime 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.