A Natural History of Love (14 page)

A beautiful, chaste Veronese girl, whose very name is rhyme (Juliet Capulet) encounters a boy who embodies her robust sensuality. He is passion incarnate, someone in love with love. “Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs,” he at first tells his friend Benvolio, and then decides it isn’t gentle, but “too rough, / Too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.” On the rebound from a girl named Rosaline, and electric with need, Romeo is like lightning looking for a place to strike. He meets Juliet and the play’s thunderstorm of emotions begins.

The story hinges on the rivalry between two noble houses, and the forbidden love of their children, Romeo and Juliet. Chance, destiny, and good playwriting ordain that they shall meet and become “star-crossed lovers” with a sad, luminous fate. Typically adolescent, the lovers feel the same bliss, suffer the same torments, and tackle the same obstacles young lovers always have. One age-old note is that they must keep their love a secret from their parents, a theme beautifully expressed in the ancient Egyptian love poems. The erotic appeal of the forbidden stranger also is an old theme, whether he’s from the enemy’s camp or just “the wrong side of the tracks.” So is the notion of love as detachment, a force that pulls you away from your family, your past, your friends, even your neighborhood. Old, too, is the idea of love as a madness; and the fetishistic desire to be an article of clothing worn by the beloved (“O, that I were a glove upon that hand, / That I might touch that cheek!” Romeo cries), echoing, centuries later, the Egyptian love poet’s desire to “be her ring, the seal on her finger.”
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Shakespeare made important changes in his telling of the story. In his play, Juliet is thirteen years old; in the other versions she’s older. In his play, she and Romeo only know one another for four days in July; in other versions, the courtship lasts months. Even if we accept the gossip of his time—that Italian girls mature faster than English ones—why does he make the couple so young and their love instantaneous? Shakespeare was about thirty when he wrote the play, and as his exquisite sonnets declare, he knew love’s terrain. Indeed, in one sonnet he laments the mistake of introducing his male lover to his female lover. Apparently, they fell for each other and left Shakespeare high and dry, in double grief. I think he wished to demonstrate in
Romeo and Juliet
how reckless, labile, and ephemeral the emotion of love is, especially in young people, and especially if one compares it with the considered love of older people. Most of the heroines in his other plays are also very young.
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Throughout the plays, one finds the tenets of courtly love, but with two exceptions: love always leads to matrimony, and Shakespeare does not condone adultery. The lovers have to be young, of good social rank, well dressed, and of virtuous character. The man has to be courageous, the woman chaste and beautiful. Rarely are the lovers introduced. They fall in love at first sight, the beauty of the beloved’s face signaling everything they need to know. Danger usually lurks close by, but they are headstrong, powerless to resist love. The lovers are constantly obsessed with each other. They credit the object of their affection with godlike qualities, and go through religious rituals of worship and devotion. They exchange talismans—a ring, a scarf, or some meaningful trifle. A medieval lady gave her knight a piece of clothing or jewelry to protect him, a kind of love charm. Lovers still exchange such tokens today, and imbue them with similar power. During the Middle Ages, lovers were secretive, often so that the woman’s husband wouldn’t discover her infidelity. In Elizabethan times, lovers were still secretive, but then it was to keep the girl’s father from preventing their meetings. When Shakespeare’s lovers declare their love, they intend to marry. An ordeal keeps them temporarily apart, and during this lonely, dislocated time, they weep and sigh, become forgetful, lose their appetites, moan to their confidants, write elegant, heartfelt love letters, lie awake all night. The play ends with marriage and/or death. These are the only choices open to Shakespearean lovers, because they can only love one person, without whom life seems worthless. In Shakespeare’s plays, the characters all practice courtly love, but there is one important difference: instead of craving seduction, they crave marriage. Their families might be mad as hell, go to war over it, or send the girl off to a nunnery. But the lovers don’t need their parents’ legal permission to marry. When love conquers all, it isn’t through subterfuge or blackmail or because of pregnancy, but because the parents understand the sincerity of the couple’s love.

As
Romeo and Juliet
unfolds, the main characters make it clear that there are many forms of love. T.J.B. Spencer sums this up in his commentary to the Penguin edition:

There is Juliet’s—both before and after she has fallen in love; Romeo’s—both while he thinks he is in love with Rosaline, and after his passion has been truly aroused by Juliet; Mercutio’s—his brilliant intelligence seems to make ridiculous an all-absorbing and exclusive passion based upon sex; Friar Laurence’s—for him love is an accompaniment of life, reprehensible if violent or unsanctified by religion; Father Capulet’s—for him it is something to be decided by a prudent father for his heiress-daughrer; Lady Capulet’s—for her it is a matter of worldly wisdom (she herself is not yet thirty and has a husband who gave up dancing thirty years ago); and the Nurse’s—for her, love is something natural and sometimes lasting, connected with pleasure and pregnancy, part of the round of interests in a woman’s life.

The teenagers of
Romeo and Juliet
are hotheads, or hot loins, who decide that they are mortally in love and must marry immediately, though they haven’t exchanged a hundred words. “Give me my Romeo,” Juliet demands, with an innocence blunt and trusting. But even she fears the speed at which they’re moving:

It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say it lightens.

The use of lightning and gunpowder images throughout the play keeps reminding us how combustible the situation is, how incandescent their love, and how life itself burns like a brief, gorgeous spark in the night. Their moonlit balcony scene, full of tenderness and yearning, with some of the most beautiful phrasing ever written, shows them sighing for love under the moon and stars, vibrantly alive in a world of glitter and shadow. After such intimacy under the covers of night, their secret marriage is certain. Then comes the impossibility of living without one another. After many obstacles, a set of dire confusions leads the lovers to commit suicide. Ironically, the horror of their deaths serves to reconcile the feuding families. Thus love is portrayed as an emissary force that can travel between foes and conduct its own arbitration. On the most basic level, this is biologically true, however one expresses it, as
competing organisms join forces for mutual benefit
, or
love can make bedfellows of enemies
. Why does the world seem unlivable without the loved one? Why does a teenager abandon hope of ever loving or being loved again in the entirety of his or her life?
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Romeo and Juliet
is but one Renaissance example of a radical idea spreading through the bourgeoisie—that romance might be combined with marriage. The play appealed on many levels to many classes, in part because family life had begun to change. There were fewer battles to wage, business kept men close to home, husband and wife spent more time together, and they understandably wanted it to be an agreeable union. The bourgeoisie wanted to indulge in the delights of courtly love, but without feeling sinful. By 1570, Roger Ascham was complaining:

Not only young gentlemen, but even very young girls dare without all fear though not without open shame, where they list and how they list marry themselves in spite of father, mother, God, good order, and all.

Court life evolved an opulence and grandeur unknown even in myths and legends. Courtiers, both male and female, had special outfits for different times of day, ornate accessories, and clothing that did not conceal the body, but clung in just the right places to accentuate gender.
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Royalty staged theatrical extravaganzas for thousands of guests, which lasted for days on end. Just as in the Middle Ages the knights had rules of courtesy to follow, in the Renaissance courtiers strove for certain ideals. Ladies were not merely worshiped from afar, they were to be witty, polite, well read, conversant in politics and current events, in short, entertaining companions. Unmarried men and women were allowed to spend a lot of time together, and a lover was not obliged to prove himself through anything as antique as quests. Because love meant being preoccupied with good and beauty, it was championed as a fine and noble enterprise. Men and women were encouraged to meet often, get to know one another, talk about romance as much as they liked, desire the body, but not rush to intercourse. To that extent courtship was still medieval—a chaste period filled with the torment of waiting as long as possible before consummating one’s desire. Waiting can be dull, so artful flirtation became fashionable. All the rigmarole of knights, quests, and the service cult of courtly love were considered passé. Every law has its scofflaws, and not everyone played by the rules. Men still adored their ladies, whom they professed to love, but they slept with mistresses and whores. A perpetual tug-of-war raged over virginity. Maidens connived to keep from being seduced; and men connived to seduce them. Among the marrieds, virtue was up for grabs.

BRIDLED HEARTS

In the eighteenth century’s reverse tantrum of polish and decorum, neoclassicism reigned, and religion gave way to a faith in reason, science, and logic. If nature and human nature were orderly parts of a clockwork universe run by a dispassionate God, then it behooved human beings—lesser gods—to display equal restraint. Hiding one’s true feelings was expected of all, masked balls became the rage, masked hearts the style, and elegantly stilted turns of phrase helped to keep everyone stylishly remote. Etiquette required a seesaw of elegancies, protocols, and endless verbal handshakes. Lovers were bound by these generalized rules of demeanor and deportment. The codes of courtesy included foppish bows, the taking of snuff, and a lady’s use of her fan as semaphore. Ornate, mannered, it was all a form of social dressage. A woman could receive socially while in bed or bath, because she and her visitors alike were expected to hide their feelings.

While self-control was the byword, cruelty was sometimes the practice. People felt comfortable picnicking at public executions, of which there were a great many. Society was fascinated by the legend of Don Juan Tenorio, a fourteenth-century Spanish aristocrat who cut a figure as a cold, sadistic, and artful ruiner of women’s reputations. Love affairs were enjoyed as a blood sport by many who thrilled to the complex battle of wills. The game was a seduction as capricious as it was feigned, in which one’s partner was first utterly vanquished, then swiftly, heartlessly dismissed. Among the gifted generals in these campaigns, the sleekest, both male and female, wore invisible hearts as medals. Most rational gentlemen regarded women as large children, advising their sons, as the Earl of Chesterfield did, that

a man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours them, and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly, forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters, though he often makes them believe that he does both.

It was in such an atmosphere that Casanova became a dashing figure, one who lived a picaresque life of seduction, gambling, and adventure. Because he was a serious outlaw of love, remarkable for his conquests, an extreme but familiar psychological type, he gave his name to an attitude, thereby wedding him to the future. This victory would have pleased him greatly, because he was a mistreated child who spent his life seeking love, approval, and respectability.

Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice in 1725, the son of two stage performers. Actresses usually doubled as prostitutes, actors as pimps, and his parents often left him with his maternal grandmother while they traveled around Europe, plying their trades. As a gutter child, he felt shame about his mother’s whoring, but her constant abandonment of him hurt even more. It was as if her motherly love were written in invisible ink. Because he suffered from frequent nosebleeds, his grandmother sent him to Padua, hoping the fresher air might restore his health. “So they got rid of me,” he wrote in his memoirs fifty years later, still hurt and angry. In time, he received many forms of education (including being awakened sexually by an older woman who had helped to raise him), and finally graduated from the University of Padua with a doctor-of-law degree and his first real experience of romance.

After that, the world was his oyster. Indeed, he often ate raw oysters off a woman’s breasts, which gave him a special thrill. Oysters may be said to resemble female genitalia, and it excited him to taste all the briny nooks and crannies. Risk hardened his desire, he loved a saucy intrigue, and so he persuaded women into making love with him in all sorts of unlikely places—inside a speeding carriage; with a jealous husband hovering in a nearby room; through prison bars; at a public drawing-and-quartering; sometimes while being observed by a third party; sometimes as part of a ménage à trois. His youth, good looks, and quick wit made him appealing to men and women alike, and the evidence suggests that he was bisexual, although most of his lovers were women. They tended to be older ones, about whose age he lied in his memoirs, tactfully making them out to be much younger. His gift, as a biographer writes, “was in keeping his wits and his erection when all about him were losing theirs.” Understandably, he contracted venereal diseases eleven times, often took the cure, used a half lemon as a rather ingenious diaphragm, and sometimes wore a rudimentary condom made of sheep’s intestine. There was a side of him that was pure rake and scoundrel. No wall was too high, no window too narrow, no husband too near, to prevent his making love to a woman he fancied, “because she was beautiful, because I loved her, and because her charms meant nothing unless they had the power to drown all reason.”