4th May 2013 9:00
By Jessica King
Lesson Plan
Love Imagery
Light
‘A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,’ it is declared in the prologue. This cosmic imagery is linked with the personification of various forms of light to symbolise the bright, all-consuming nature of the love between Romeo and Juliet, and its transience.
Both lovers compare each other to forms of light. Romeo compares Juliet standing on the balcony to the rising sun. (I:II:2) ‘But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!’ He uses a light metaphor too to describe her features. (I:II:15) ‘Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, having some business, do entreat her eyes to twinkle in their sphere till they return.’
Juliet, in the scene following Mercutio’s death and Romeo’s slaying of Tybalt, deploys a morbid but beautifully phrased imperative while waiting for her lover (III:II:20) ‘Give me my Romeo: and, when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars.’ For her he burns so fiercely as to be like ‘day in night’ (III:II:17).
The inverse relationship between night and day becomes blurred, and darkness itself becomes a friendly force which acts to cloak their secret rendezvous – while never losing its prime purpose as a foil to their whiter-than-white love. Juliet (III:II:18) demonstrates this contrast: ‘For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night, Whiter than new snow on a raven’s back.’ At the same time, night itself becomes an anthropomorphic entity, described variously as a ‘sober-suited matron’, ‘all in black’, ‘black mantle’ and ‘long, black-brow’d night’.
Finally, to enhance narrative symmetry, the symbol of the raven is closely related to an earlier passage where Romeo, on first catching sight of Juliet, compared her to ‘a snowy dove trooping with crows.’ (I:V:52)
Another attribute of light is its split-second speed; it is gone almost before you can see it. There is an underlying awareness that their passion is blazing too bright to last for long. Juliet, often a mediating voice, warns at their first meeting (I:II:117) ‘I have no joy of this contract tonight: It is too rash, too unadvis’d, too sudden: Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be..’ And Friar Lawrence, with his role as the voice of calm reason, cautions Romeo (I:VI:9) ‘These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, Which, as they kiss consume’.
Compare this flowing, quicksilver river of feeling with the way Lady Capulet describes Juliet’s potential love for Paris. In a typical Renaissance woman’s view of marriage, she makes it sound like very hard work: it is like reading a difficult but rewarding book. Note she speaks in rhyming verse, indicating a very formal tone, as befits her position and the gravity of her subject.
(I:III:81) Lady Cap: ‘Read o’er the volume of young Paris’ face
And find delight writ there with beauty’s pen;
…And what obscur’d in this fair volume lies
Find written in the margin of his eyes.’
As well as evoking the patience of a fisherman trawling for his catch, Lady Cap implies that Juliet is going to have to forcibly prise open Paris’s heart, which is padlocked away: (I:III:91) ‘That book in many eyes doth share the glory, That in gold clasps locks in the golden story.’
Finally, there is an acknowledgement that Juliet must give a part of herself away: (I:II:93) ‘So shall you share all that he doth possess, By having him making yourself no less.’
The love that Romeo thinks he bears for Rosaline is different again, in that it comes across as somewhat self-involved. Common during the period was the idea of courtship or courtly love, a process synonymous with but largely abstracted from the lady or lord that was its object. Skilled wordplay was involved in the conquest and, if and when victorious, it was as much a victory for oneself as for one’s lover.
Catherine Bates, in The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge University Press), describes in the introduction how
‘the element of behaviour at court which ‘courting’ came to denote most insistently was rhetoric – the flattering, dissembling, deceitful, and tactical discursive strategies that existed between individuals who found themselves forced to graduate and adjust their behaviour in the tense and hierarchized milieu of the Renaissance court’.
The sense of strained and opposing noble, political forces evokes the Montague-Capulet conflict that is the background for Romeo and Juliet’s fledgling relationship.
Bates places these new semantic connotations squarely in the period the play was set and written. Before the Renaissance period, she asserts, the word courtship
‘had little to do with love or marriage and signified, rather, ‘being at court’. During the sixteenth century, ‘courtship’ (and the transitive verb ‘to court’) came to particularize… from the proliferation of subsidiary meanings that subsequently developed, the modern amorous sense of the words – ‘wooing’ and ‘to woo’ emerged to supersede the others and to become, in time, their chief designation.’
It seems the other characters in the play can sense that Romeo’s supposed love for Rosaline is not genuine. In fact, it is often described as a sickness, associated with imagery of decay. As in (I:I:199) Benvolio: ‘a madness most discreet, A choking gall, and a preserving sweet’. Or Lord Montague’s description of a rotting flower (I:I:154) ‘But to himself so secret and so close, So far from sounding and discovery, As is the bud bit with an envious worm, Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air, Or dedicate his beauty to the sun.’
Again (I:II:51) Benvolio tells Romeo he is suffering an illness: ‘Take thou some new infection to the eye, And the rank poison of the old will die.’
The random, fleeting nature of Romeo’s attachment is illustrated by the recurring image of Cupid. (I:II:214) Romeo: ‘Well, in that hit you miss: She’ll not be hit with Cupid’s arrow: she hath Dian’s wit.’ Diana being the huntress of Roman mythology who, on discovering an unsuspecting man spying on her bathing, turned him into a fawn who was hunted to death by his own hounds.
Mercutio tries to engage Romeo in some playful banter about his affliction (I:IV:17)
Merc: ‘You are a lover; borrow Cupid’s wings,
And soar with them above a common bound,’ to which Romeo responds glumly:
‘I am too sore enpierced with his shaft
To soar with his light feathers: and so bound
I cannot bound a pitch above dull woe:
Under love’s heavy burden so I sink.’
Romeo’s repetition of the word ‘sore/soar’ through two phrases whose meanings are counter-weighted ensures continuity of intonation. And the free interchange of these two homonyms between him and Mercutio illustrates their close friendship and ability to adopt and spark off each other’s ideas.
But Mercutio is, in his responses, better able to deal in abstractions, and change his line of the argument. He is a wordsmith to the hilt, and fully able to make fun of Romeo’s profound feelings.
(I:IV:22) ‘And, to sink in it, should you burden love;
Too great oppression for a tender thing.’
Then, changing tack,
(I:IV:27) ‘If love with you, be rough with love;
Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.’