Benvolio: The Peacemaker in a Play That Will Not Have Peace

Benvolio tries to stop every fight he encounters. He is separating Capulet and Montague servants when the play opens. He urges Romeo to forget Rosaline by finding other women to look at. He tries to defuse the confrontation with Tybalt in Act 3, Scene 1 and gives the most accurate eyewitness account of what happened to Prince Escalus.

He is decent, sensible, and essentially powerless. In a play where the feud wins every argument, his moderation achieves nothing. He disappears from the text after Act 3, Scene 1. Shakespeare simply stops writing him. Critics have noted that he has no role once the tragedy is set in motion: he is a character who belongs to the world before things went wrong.

His name in Italian means 'goodwill.' He is exactly that: sincere goodwill that the play's world cannot sustain.