There are some ideas that swirl around in your daydreams for years before you introduce them to the blank page. (I was just reading a post by Phenderson Djèlí Clark about the long origins of his novella Ring Shout, which is probably my favourite of his works, which is saying a lot, and one of my craft/approach touchstones for a novella I’m working on now.) He writes that the idea had been rattling around for years before he felt that it was time. I’m not sure we’re ever completely “ready” to write any story worth telling, in that the writing itself is the thing that teaches us how, but we can become ready to begin. And sometimes that requires a lot of living first, a lot of magpie gathering.

Mercutio was one of those long ideas for me. Back in 2016, I wrote a novella for a Shakespeare-themed anthology called Monstrous Little Voices. In a promotional interview, when I was asked whether I’d write more Shakespeare-inspired stories, I answered, “I’d love to write something about Mercutio sometime. I’ve been fascinated by him since I first saw John McEnery play him in the 1968 movie. I have some ideas about his past.” That was 10 full years ago now, and by that point, I’d already been thinking about it for who knows how many years.

I don’t even remember the first time I saw that 1968 Romeo and Juliet, which I know practically by heart. I was very young. It was, of course, the Queen Mab speech that got its hooks into my brain:

McEnery played it as if Mercutio had something like PTSD underlying his sadclown nature. Not every Mercutio plays it that way; I’ve heard recordings of Gielgud playing it light and comic to the end. But both McEnery and the other great film Mercutio, Harold Perrineau, go from comic to manic.

In the Perrineau rendition, I’d argue it’s the word “love” that marks the shift to barely concealed anger, but McEnery doesn’t get there until “Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck”, and that’s when his joke goes off the rails and he shows his companions something he didn’t intend to reveal about himself.

Because I imprinted on the McEnery performance, I always had some ideas about Mercutio. He was a friend of Romeo’s but a little older than him (as McEnery was seven years older than Leonard Whiting.) The speech led me to think he had perhaps been a soldier, and in my mind, a sailor too — the line “healths five fathoms deep” refers on one level to a big drink, but to me it also conjured images of bodies drifting down to the bottom of the sea. He was part of all worlds in Verona and none: a relative of the town bigwigs, invited to the Capulet feast, but a friend to the Montagues, and this separateness haunted him, set him apart at his death, when he called down a plague on both houses.

So that’s the Mercutio that lived in my head for years, and I wondered idly about what happened to him as a soldier and sailor, or perhaps to someone he cared about, and why it was the figure of Mab that made him start talking about something he shouldn’t have.

Then one day, in about 2017 or 2018, I was following a Wikipedia rabbit hole and I came upon a reference to the fact that the poet Dante Alighieri had been a soldier, and fought at the Battle of Campaldino in 1289, one of many conflicts between the Guelph and Ghibelline factions. I put this fact together with another stray fact I had picked up somewhere, which was that Dante’s Purgatorio is one of our oldest sources for the Montagues and Capulets:

Vieni a veder Montecchi e Cappelletti,
Monaldi e Filippeschi, uom sanza cura:
color già tristi, e questi con sospetti!

Wikipedia quotes this translation:

Come and see, you who are negligent,
Montagues and Capulets, Monaldi and Filippeschi
One lot already grieving, the other in fear

What if Mercutio had also been at that same battle where the young Dante fought?

The timeline fit. Either I already knew, or I started to learn at this point that the “Prince Escalus” of Shakespeare’s play was likely referring to Bartolomeo della Scala, who ruled Verona in the first few years of the 14th century. This puts Romeo & Juliet roughly around the time that Dante was exiled from Florence and spent some time in Verona, and around the time he (according to his own account in The Divine Comedy) found himself in a strange dark wood. Whatever Mercutio’s dark night of the soul was, it had happened around the same time and in roughly the same place as Dante’s.

I mean. By this point the die was cast: I was writing the book.

Over a few more years, I gathered more threads that wrapped together and started spinning themselves into a story. One of Shakespeare’s “ghost characters” led me through coincidence to Cesare Borgia, and Dante’s friend Guido Cavalcanti led me to Ernest Shackleton by way of T.S. Eliot, and then those two threads wound together, to take one example. Maybe I'll do an annotation once the book is out in case anyone curious about these connections (I’ve done annotations for some previous books on Goodreads and my website, and it was a lot of fun.)

Mercutio comes out in the UK May 7 (and the audiobook and ebook should be available outside the UK that same day.) One thing you can do for me and the book now, if you’re a user of Goodreads or Storygraph or a similar site, is to add the book to your “want to read” stacks to help let others know it’s coming soon. It’s certainly been a long time brewing!