"True love is like ghosts,"claims François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, "Which everyone talks about but few have seen". What is true love? Is it idealistic love or physical love, mature love or paternal love. Well kiddies, it is all that are listed here for each has its own place in the Shakespearean play Romeo and Juliet.
Physical love, which Mercutio believes in, is well explained in his Queen
Mab story. Queen Mab, an English folk tale fairy was said to bring the dreams to men and her child is the midwife to men's fantasies. Mercutio wants just the physical part of love, that is, sex. This is evident in his queen mab story:
"O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you. She is a fairie's 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 Over men's noses as they lie asleep; Her waggon spokes made of long spinners legs, The cover of the wings of grasshoppers; Her traces of the smallest spiders web; Her collars of the moonshine's watery beams; Her whip of cricket's bone; the lash of film; Her waggoner 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 hazle-nut Made by the joiner squirrel, or old grub, Time out o' the fairies' coachmakers. And in this state she gallops night by night Through lovers brainsand then they dream of love; O'er the courtier's knees...."(ActI Scene iiii lines 62-73)
Mercutio tells this story because that is the way he feels about love; which is
All that he is in it for is the sex. It is not important to him to wait and let the relationship advance with age it is important that he gets what he wants fast. Physical love is defined as the act of sex or sexual intercourse. Romeo, on the other hand believes in