SARAH:  Mercutio says that Romeo is now so in love with Rosaline, that he’ll imitate the famous poet Petrarch.

RALPH: As he puts it, ““Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in.”

SARAH: Petrarch who spent much of his life composing love sonnets to a beautiful woman named Laura…

RALPH: And apparently Romeo would consider Laura a kitchen-worker compared to his Rosaline. 

SARAH: Laura to his lady was but a kitchen-wench.

RALPH:  Mercutio now rattles off a list of famous beauties from classical literature who, in Romeo’s eyes, would pale in comparison to Rosaline.

SARAH: Dido a dowdy; Cleopatra a gypsy; Helen and Hero hildings and harlots; Thisbe a grey eye or so; but not to the purpose.

RALPH:  Dido is a character from the Roman poet Virgil’s epic Aeneid. She’s the queen of Carthage in north Africa who falls in love with the Trojan warrior Aeneas. 

SARAH: When Aeneas sails away, abandoning her, she kills herself from despair.

RALPH:   Cleopatra was the last Pharaoh of Egypt who seduced Julius Caesar, and after he died, she then seduced Mark Anthony, a Roman general. 

SARAH: After their army is defeated by Augustus, she commits suicide by letting herself be bitten by a poisonous snake.

RALPH:  Helen of Troy was the beautiful Greek queen whose kidnapping set off the Trojan war, as told in Homer’s Iliad.

SARAH: Hero, according to Greek myth, was a priestess of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. 

RALPH:  Her lover, Leander, swam across a channel every night to be with her, until one evening he drowned in a storm. Distraught, Hero threw herself from her tower.

SARAH:  Thisbe is a character from a poem by the Roman poet Ovid. Thisbe and Pyramus are in love, but prohibited from seeing each other by their parent’s rivalry. 

RALPH: Hmm. That sounds familiar. 

SARAH:  Pyramus commits suicide, thinking that Thisbe is dead, but she isn’t.

RALPH: When Thisbe realizes he’s dead, she kills herself with his sword.

SARAH:   As an aside, Mercutio jokes that he personally thinks Thisbe had beautiful eyes, but that’s besides the point. 

RALPH:  Shakespeare’s audience would have seen the significance in the comparison to Thisbe, since the Thisbe/Pyramus legend was the source for the Romeo and Juliet story.

SARAH: But more generally, all these examples are tragic love stories where love ends in death - Shakespeare’s hinting at his own plot, and he’s also telling us that these teenagers are following a tradition of a certain kind of romantic love.