It also gives insight into Mercutio's antagonistic and cynical nature: His description of the lovers is brief compared with the bloodthirsty image of the soldier who dreams of "cutting foreign throats." The beauty of the ladies' lips is quickly followed by the image of Mab blistering their lips with plague sores because the women had eaten too many sweets. Mercutio is down-to-earth, whereas Romeo continues to indulge in idealistic, lovelorn daydreaming. Indeed, his dream speech contains all the elements that will conspire to bring down Romeo and Juliet's starry-eyed dream of love to the depths of the tomb.
Romeo's final speech anticipates his meeting with Juliet and creates an atmosphere of impending doom, which undercuts the festivities. Instead of a date with a pretty girl on a starlit night, he intuits that he goes to a date with destiny. The heavy tone of this premonition is far more serious than the shallow melancholy Romeo has so far expressed. The cosmic imagery of "some consequence hanging in the stars" echoes the prologue in which Romeo and Juliet are presented as "star-cross'd" lovers, whose destinies are tragically interlinked.
