On Mon, 13 Aug 2001 01:37:16 +0100, Douglas Clark <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
>Poetry is about making connections. THe transcendental connection
>is love. So romantic love is fundamentally sexual. Seems to be.
>You have to add some quality of language into the recipe.
>
>
>
>Douglas Clark, Bath, England mailto: [log in to unmask]
>Lynx: Poetry from Bath ..........
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc/lynx.html
Romantic love...and sexual reliance…I wonder whether one is ever loved
in the way one wishes to be loved and for what one is. I have the feeling
one is the projection of another person’s set criteria. One is found and
selected according to pre-existing regulations of the mind. One at the end
is never really seen for what one is. One might add that what one really is
never certain. Or maybe parents, if one is lucky, can see one as one is.
I am thinking of a way to reply to you, Douglas, with a question.
Shakespeare's treatment of Andrea Bandello's story of Romeo and Juliet of
Verona
has certainly established a strong oppositional link between the extremist
way Italians conceive love ( as a collective experience, in history and in
society , especially through theatre, and the equally extremist way
English people have developed their ardent conceptions of love and passions
in their best genre, the novel, as a typically more private ground. These
two ways do complete each other in Shakespeare’s tragedy. The sexual-
romantical private
constituents, I think, were somehow not predominant in Bandello’s story
which was based on
a kind sociologically didactical issue of one would regulate marriage in
society and in politic.
In fact Bandello's story of the two families was already quoted by Dante
Alighieri in the VI Cantos (verse 106) (Purgatorio) and subjected to the
political ethos. And Luigi Da Porto recalls the same plot in
1524 for a short story which lately was developed by Matteo Bandello into a
novel. The content of the novel, which in the Bandello’s version was still
very much informed of political significance for it aimed at being staged
at the Court of Isabella D’Este, was very shortly adopted by Arthur Brooke
in 1562, transferred on the English ground only three years before
Shakespeare rewrote it in his own style and from his own stunning
perspective of love and passion which incorporated the historical and
political issue but giving prevalence to the herotic.
When one reads Dante's verse or Matteo Bandello’s story one is amazed how
less focused on
the actual love and sexual attraction between the two young noble children
of Verona the topic is. In the tradition of Dante's political writing, the
disastrous love and sexual magnetism related about by
Bandello was still there mainly to stress the political.
For your surprise , this is how Arthur Brooke prefaced his poemetto about
Romeo and Juliet in 1562, turning the political into the sexual (a
sexuality to be loathed and castigated but neverthless given great
predominance). His introduction reads:
“And to this ende (good Reader) is this tragicall matter written, to
describe unto thee a coople of vnfortunate louers, thralling themselues to
vnhonest desire, neglecting the authoritie and advice of parents and
frendes, conferring their principall counsels with dronken gossyppes, and
superstitious friers (the naturally fitte instrumentes of vnchastitie)
attemptyng all aduentures of peryll, for thattaynyng of their wished lust,
vsing auriculer confession (the kay of whoredome, and treason) for
furtheraunce of theyr purpose, abusyng the honorable name of lawefull
mariage, the cloke the shame of stolne contractes, finallye, by all meanes
of vnhonest lyfe, hastyng to most unhappye deathe.”
Therefore, the lesson is : one should marry an Italian, but have a British
as a lustful lover.
|