Chapter Two - The Code of Love
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2023
Summary
When we turn to the lovers themselves, we enter a different universe. Self-conscious civilizedness, nippy verbal precisions, continual deference or self-assertion based on hierarchies of control—the whole Veronese social code—must yield to the love code, according to which society exists only as a form of spatial extension into which the beloved can be removed and thus lost. The first account we have of the new rules by which lovers live can be found in Benvolio's account of how Romeo has shunned all his friends in favor of solitary walks before dawn among the sycamores, and in Montague's response:
Many a morning hath he there been seen,
With tears augmenting the fresh morning's dew,
Adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs,
But all so soon as the all-cheering sun
Should in the farthest East begin to draw
The shady curtains from Aurora's bed,
Away from light steals home my heavy son,
And private in his chamber pens himself,
Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out,
And makes himself an artificial night. (1.1.131–40)
The lover locks himself inside himself, constitutes his private world, completely exclusive of nature and society alike: he even generates his own private weather, by exhaling clouds of sighs and weeping rivers of tears. Self-involved and melancholy, the lover is a pitiable thing indeed. This is the first tenet of the love code: that the lover dwells on his own planet, a state of emotional self-preoccupation remote from most of human life. Desire, always increasing since its outlets are blocked, carves out and occupies an enormous space inside the desirer, a whole cosmos of insufficiency, absence.
A second tenet becomes clear soon afterward, as Romeo confesses that his beloved ignores him:
She’ll not be hit
With Cupid's arrow. She hath Dian's wit;
And in strong proof of chastity well arm’d,
From Love's weak childish bow she lives uncharm’d.
(1.1.208–11)
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- Information
- Musicking ShakespeareA Conflict of Theatres, pp. 45 - 54Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007