In what is perhaps the most famous love scene in world drama, the balcony-scene in Romeo and Juliet, Romeo throws his words out into the distance that separates him from Juliet, and the ‘poetic’, imaginative quality of that language – ‘It is the east, and Juliet is the sun’ – acknowledges the reality of that distance between them even as it seeks to overcome it. Like Juliet, we may pause to consider how much trust we should place in such flights of imagination. For as Theseus remarks in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the lover may be classed with the lunatic and the poet, all of them prone to see much more than is really there. Yet the fairies are more real than Theseus suspects; and the radiance that Romeo sees in Juliet may, perhaps, belong to some plane of being higher than is known to the everyday world.
If one strand of Renaissance thought sees love as madness, another regards it as spiritual vision, an intimation of the divine. Either way, however, love, as a power of the imagination, is liable to find itself at odds with the reality-principle – whether this manifests itself as the indifference of the person loved, as in Twelfth Night, or as the pragmatic efficiency of Rome in Antony and Cleopatra. At its most general level, this becomes the tension between poetry and drama, a tension which poetic drama is perfectly placed to explore: lovers may speak like poets, but as figures in a play they must also perform actions (or fail to). The value of the love between Cleopatra and Antony is largely played out in the tension between how things sound (in poetry) and how they look (on stage), while in Twelfth Night it is appearances which mislead, and the truth of love-language is challenged by the passing of time and the potential for inconstancy which it brings. Heterosexual love is high-risk, too, in seeking to bridge the wide difference between women and men: the distance in space between Juliet on her balcony and Romeo below is as nothing compared to the cultural gulf that separates Titania and Bottom, and the comic incongruity of their encounter speaks of the desperate daring of all love that looks for reciprocity and return. Yet love, helped by poetic magic, can overcome such difference – for a while. ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments’, says the poet in sonnet 116, but Shakespeare often seems to admit reality itself as impediment to love, and yet, despite or perhaps because of that, to seek to affirm love’s power.
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