What Happened to the Mouse?/Theatre

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Romeo and Juliet: Where the hell does Benvolio go after Mercutio dies?!
    • It has been speculated by a commentary on the book that Benvolio's line "That is the truth or let Benvolio die" is significant, given that he lied and said Tybalt started the fight with Mercutio (when it was the other way around). It is unlikely, however, that he was actually killed, so his disappearance remains a mystery.
      • At least one revision done long after Shakespeare died had one of the nobles at the end of the play announce that Benvolio was also dead. They still fail to mention how.
    • Another common interpretation is related to Benvolio's Meaningful Name. "Benvolio" means goodwill in Latin. He's around for all of the more comedy-like parts—perhaps Benvolio is only a metaphor after all.
  • In the epilogue to Angels in America, we see Prior, Belize, Louis, and Joe's mother are all pretty chummy with each other five years after the events of the play, but Joe seems to be pretty much forgotten. Maybe he went to Washington?
  • Macbeth. The witches disappear about halfway through the story and never get their comeuppance. Then there's the matter of what happened to Fleance, although audiences at the time would have understood he was to eventually become king.
      • Witches, in Shakespeare's time, were agents of Hell. There was no need for any kind of comeuppance...they served their purpose. Fleance may or may not have become king (given Malcom's age and the importance placed on primogeniture, it was unlikely), but Shakespeare didn't consider that important; what mattered was that Banquo's bloodline survived and would eventually produce King James I.
      • Exactly. The whole point of their intro scene is to say "This is what is going to happen, it's mysterious, you won't understand it until it's too late, and when you do, it will only increase your suffering to finally know what we meant." The witches are evil, to Shakespeare, and don't need a come-uppance.
  • Cyrano De Bergerac: Did Viscount de Valvert survived his Sword Fight with Cyrano at Act I Scene IV or not? The last we see about him was that his friends carried him after his defeat, and after a little mention by Roxane at Act II Scene IV, we never heard of him again.
  • The Taming of the Shrew starts out as a play-within-a-play; a lord and his servants trick a drunken peasant named Christopher Sly into thinking that he's the lord by dressing him up and waiting on him, telling him that he's been mad for years. They all sit down to watch a play about Katerina and Petruchio...and then they don't show up again. One ending has Sly waking up, convinced that he dreamed the whole thing and eager to try the trick of "taming a shrew" out on his own wife; however, many scholars think that it was added later and that Shakespeare never wrote it.
  • In King Lear, Shakespeare decides to Shoo Out the Clowns and have the Fool drop out of the plot after Act 3, even though he was a constant companion of Lear up to that point. Some stage productions interpret this as the Fool dying—perhaps influenced by the line "My poor fool is hanged" in the last scene, though most critics interpret that line as referring to Cordelia.
  • Similarly, Adam, beloved Old Retainer and sidekick of Orlando in As You Like It, disappears after they arrive in Arden. Since Adam is elderly and nearly starves to death on the journey, some productions imply that he died; scholars speculate that the actor who played him may have needed to double as someone important during the second half of the show. (Whatever Shakespeare's intention was, Adam doesn't die in the source material.)
  • Watching the original play version of Peter Pan, you might wonder, "What happened to that rich cake Hook was going to kill the Lost Boys with"? There are several answers to this question:
    • The probable technical answer, which is that Barrie went through many drafts of the play and certain details were lost or glossed over. Vital to the scheme's success is the fact that the boys have no mother to tell them not to eat such rich cake, so Barrie may have felt no need to explain its failure once Wendy had arrived.
    • A stage direction after Hook enters, discouraged that the boys have found a mother, suggests that he "has perhaps found the large rich damp cake untouched".
    • The novel expands this as one of the Noodle Incident adventures the children have in Neverland: "[The pirates] placed it in one cunning spot after another; but always Wendy snatched it from the hands of her children, so that in time it lost its succulence, and became as hard as a stone, and was used as a missile, and Hook fell over it in the dark."
    • In the musical, the boys find the cake at the end of the "Wendy House" scene. Wendy tells them not to eat it, and they go inside.
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