Slightly nerve-wracking evening yesterday when I delivered one of my Shakespeare talks to some of my fellow members at my theater group. The problem was that there were one or three or more present who had probably forgotten more about Shakespeare than I actually know! But they were kind and treated me gently. My talk is entitled Shakespeare in Love: the Young, the Middle-Aged & the 'Don't Ask'! and my main conclusion, based on the love affairs in three of his plays (R&J, Much Ado and A&C), was that Will rated friendship above passionate love, or, to put it another way, liking usually lasts longer than loving.
Romeo and Juliet is a superb, classical, Renaissance love-story written almost entirely in verse and with such a cruel and tragic ending that it scars the memory. But, once out of the theatre, you don't have to be entirely cynical to guess that had the youngsters made their escape the chances are that they would not have continued in marital bliss forever. Similarly, those two 'golden oldies', Antony and Cleopatra, sunk in a mutual swamp of luxury and sensuousness, certainly have an almost ferocious bond between them but somehow, in someway, I slightly recoil from it - perhaps it offends my very English nature. I never saw the film Cleopatra but surely it was a Hollywood stroke of genius to cast Taylor and Burton as the two lovers and judging from various extracts I read of Burton's recently published diaries, they lived their roles! One of my pals last night insisted that theirs was a true love and cited the magnificent poetry in which they talk to and of each other. To me, that confirms my belief that Will was indicating that such overblown language was a cover for a less than concrete coupling. Even so, under pressure from my audience last night I was forced to admit that they both died for each other.
To me, the greatest love story he wrote was that between Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado. Middle-aged (by Elizabethan standards), old friends, or perhaps old adversaries from their earlier days, who enjoy their mutual wit and beneath the banter a growing and increasingly deep regard develops between them based, I think, as much on friendship as the sort of high-blown 'lurve' of the two juniors and the two seniors mentioned above.
