It's a very easy task to personally commiserate with Mercutio, of Verona's venerated house of Montague.

He's so often joking and smiling that when the time comes for sobriety nobody believes he speaks in earnest.

"Nay, 'tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church door, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve."

"Why did you come between us?  I was wounded under your arm."

Romeo: I dreamt a dream tonight.
Mercutio: And so did I.
Romeo: Well, what was yours?
Mercutio: That dreamers often lie.

"True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain
Begot by nothing but vain fantasty,
Which is as thin of substance as the air,
And more inconstant than the wind...."

Oddly enough, Mercutio is also the role I would choose out of all the casts available.  Not token sweet Juliet, the crazy old Nurse, or violently loyal Tybalt -- well, Tybalt may well be second -- but Mercutio, the bi-polar entertainer whose trademark is his downfall.

Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck, and then dreams he of cutting foreign throats, of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades, of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes, and being thus frighted swears a prayer or two and sleeps again.