No.
No, no, no.
You've got it all wrong.
What is the name of Mercutio's brother? What is the name?
There are multiple tenses in English--present, past, future, and so on. But the only one that matters to literary critics--and count yourself among them, even if reluctantly--is the Literary Present.
Literature is eternal. It lives on in our hearts, our minds, our souls. It lives forever because a massive literary industry cranks out English teachers like Peeps. English teachers stacked neatly in boxes, gaudy, motley. Chewed up and digested each Easter by sugar-starved tykes: or, vicious the more, microwaved by bored college students. English teacher marshmallow Peeps.
Where was I?
Eternal.
Because literature is eternal, it can never die. That, my friends, is logic. And since literature never dies, we must never speak of it as if it has died.
And to speak of the dead is to use the past tense.
Therefore we use the Literary Present.
What is, is, is the name of Mercutio's brother?
He doesn't have a brother.
Geez.
[sixty-seventh in a series]
2 comments:
Bastard! Trick question. And you never said it would be on the test.
Mercutio has a brother named Valentine. on the list that Romeo was reading in act one scene two it says Mercutio and his brother Valentine.
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