Love In Shakespeare

by W. Nicholas Knight, MHC Council Chair

Everyone knows there is love in Shakespeare and one can find a great deal about love in his fourteen-line sonnets. By 1598 he is known to have written a hundred and fifty-four of them. Many people know number 18, “Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s Day?” by heart. Do you?

But before the Elizabethan sonnet craze of 1593-1596, and possibly as early as 1588, Shakespeare introduced his first sonnets in his Love’s Labours Lost (Act IV), spoken by lords who comically swore to give up women:

Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye,
‘Gainst whom the world cannot hold argument,
Persuade my heart to this false perjury?
Vows for thee broke deserve not punishment.
A woman I forswore; but I will prove,
Though being a goddess, I forswore not thee:
My vow was earthly, thou a heavenly love;
Thy grace being gain’d cures all disgrace in me.
Vows are but breath, and breath a vapour is:
Then thou, fair sun, on which my earth dost shine,
Exhalest this vapour–vow; in thee it is:
If broken then, it is no fault of mine:
If by me broke, what fool is not so wise
To lose an oath to win a paradise?

While this is a bit awkward compared with what would follow, it demonstrates a sonnet’s ABABCDCDEFEFGG rhyme scheme that would be delivered on stage as if it were just another spur-of-the-moment thought. He shows off this poetic structure during the sonnet fad at the very opening of Romeo and Juliet in 1593 with the Prologue: “Two households, both alike in dignity, / In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,...” and later in a chorus “Now Romeo is beloved and loves again,…” But topping all of this is a brilliant sonnet that Shakespeare divides between Romeo and Juliet as they move from their first meeting to their first kiss!

ROMEO: If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrim’s hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss.

ROMEO: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET: Saints do not move, though grant for prayer’s sake.

ROMEO: Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.

Shakespeare’s mastery culminates in the eternal love poem

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

On Valentine’s Day, or any day for that matter, I pray you give a word of thanks that someone of Shakespeare’s genius spoke English. True, his English requires a bit of footnoting for modern readers, though nothing like the help readers need with the English of Chaucer’s time. Some century in the future, this marvelous marriage of language, sentiment, and insight will require translators, and only a happy few will understand the depth of riches we grew up with and often overlooked.

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