Near Capulet's garden — Romeo refuses to leave

A lane near the Capulet wall, late at night, after the feast. Mercutio and Benvolio are looking for Romeo, who has slipped away from them in the dark. They call. Mercutio, who has not yet learned that Rosaline is no longer the relevant name, conjures Romeo with mock-solemn invocations: "I conjure thee by Rosaline's bright eyes, / by her high forehead and her scarlet lip." Romeo does not answer. Mercutio escalates into bawdier invocations — Rosaline's quivering thigh, the demesnes adjacent — that Benvolio tries to cool. They guess Romeo has hidden among the trees out of love-pique.

Benvolio, finally, gives up: "come, he hath hid himself among these trees, / to be consorted with the humorous night. / Blind is his love, and best befits the dark." Mercutio agrees with a parting joke and they go home. The scene is short — fewer than thirty lines — and serves a single purpose. It tells the audience that Romeo has voluntarily separated himself from his oldest friend and his cousin, in the dark, on the wrong side of a wall belonging to the family that has just sworn his death. It also makes clear that Mercutio still thinks all of this is a joke about Rosaline.

What Mercutio and Benvolio cannot see, on the other side of the wall, is what the next scene will show: Romeo is already in the Capulet orchard, watching for a light in a window. The plot is moving on without his oldest friend. It is the first time in the play, but not the last, that Mercutio is laughing about something Romeo has already moved past — and the gap between them, opening here as a comic misunderstanding, will widen, six scenes later, into the duel where Mercutio dies for it.