The role of the artist in society is often a tragic one; the lives of the artists of the past generally revolved around living a life of poverty in order to showcase their ideas to society. Artists who openly expressed unpopular ideas were punished (could suffer negative reception) while the rest (some) succumbed to drugs or illness. In the scene following his fatal wounding by Tybalt, Mercutio’s statement “ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man,” depicts the vulnerability of artists at the time by using the homonym on grave to suggests his future of either being miserable or dead. In a previous scene, Mercutio’s poeticising of Queen Mab “Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier’s neck, And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,”
