"Compare her face with some that I shall shew, And I will make thee think thy swan a crow."
Romeo replies that there is none fairer than his love, and Benvolio retorts:
"Tut! You saw her fair, none else being by."
This bantering is most pointed if we assume that Rosaline was dark rather than fair.
In the second act Mercutio comes upon the scene, and, mocking Romeo's melancholy and passion, cries:
"I conjure thee, by Rosaline's bright eyes, By her high forehead and her scarlet lip...."
This description surprises me. Shakespeare rarely uses such physical portraiture of his personages, and Mercutio is a side of Shakespeare himself; a character all compact of wit and talkativeness, a character wholly invented by the poet.
A little later my suspicion is confirmed. In the fourth scene of the second act Mercutio talks to Benvolio about Romeo; they both wonder where he is, and Mercutio says:
"Ah, that same pale-hearted wench, that Rosaline, Torments him so that he will sure run mad."
And again, a moment later, Mercutio laughs at Romeo as already dead, "stabbed with a white wench's black eye." Now, here is confirmation of my suspicion. It is most unusual for Shakespeare to give the physical peculiarities of any of his characters; no one knows how Romeo looked, or Juliet or even Hamlet or Ophelia; and here he repeats the description.
The only other examples we have as yet found in Shakespeare of such physical portraiture is the sketching of Falstaff in "Henry IV." and the snapshot of Master Slender in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," as a "little wee face, with a little yellow beard,--a cane-coloured beard." Both these photographs, as we noticed at the time, were very significant, and Slender's extraordinarily significant by reason of its striking and peculiar realism. Though an insignificant character, Slender is photographed for us by Shakespeare's contempt and hatred, just as this Rosaline is photographed by his passionate love, photographed again and again.
Shakespeare's usual way of describing the physical appearance of a man or woman, when he allowed himself to do it at all, which was seldom, was what one might call the ideal or conventional way. A good example is to be found in Hamlet's description of his father; he is speaking to his mother: