Mercutio acts in contrast to the lovestruck Romeo and the peaceful Benvolio — he is a witty and quick-tempered skeptic. Mercutio teases Romeo for his love melancholy by sarcastically using conventional images of Petrarchan infatuation to underscore Romeo's naive view of love. For example, when Romeo refuses to dance at the feast because his soul is overburdened with unrequited love, Mercutio mocks: "You are a lover, borrow Cupid's wings / And soar with them above a common bound." Mercutio is an anti-romantic; for him, love is a physical pursuit, which he emphasizes through his bawdy wordplay: "If love be rough with you, be rough with love / Prick love for pricking and you beat love down." Mercutio's repeated references to the sexual aspect of love casts Romeo's transcendent love for Juliet in a more spiritual light.
Mercutio treats the subject of dreams, like the subject of love, with witty skepticism, as he describes them both as "fantasy." Unlike Romeo, Mercutio does not believe that dreams can foretell future events. Instead, painting vivid pictures of the dreamscape people inhabit as they sleep, Mercutio suggests that the fairy Queen Mab brings dreams to humans as a result of men's worldly desires and anxieties. To him, lawyers dream of collecting fees and lovers dream of lusty encounters; the fairies merely grant carnal wishes as they gallop by. In juxtaposing lawyers and lovers, soldiers and the fairy entourage, his eloquent speech touches on a number of the play's opposing themes such as love and hate, fantasy and reality, idealism and cynicism.
