Love in Romeo and Juliet

There are at least four kinds of love in this play, and Shakespeare cares about all of them. There’s Romeo’s love for Rosaline in Act 1 — borrowed phrases, sighing in the dark, a love about being in love. There’s the love Romeo and Juliet share — fast, mutual, a stunned recognition that doesn’t sound like the love they’ve each rehearsed. There’s the Nurse’s love for Juliet, which is closer to motherhood than Lady Capulet’s. And there’s parental love — Capulet’s, possessive and proud, which becomes brutal the minute Juliet refuses what he’s offered her. The play sets these next to each other and lets you decide which is the real thing.

Romeo’s transformation is the cleanest argument the play makes. In Act 1 Scene 1 he’s quoting himself in clichés: “O brawling love, O loving hate.” His friends are amused. Friar Lawrence, when Romeo turns up the next day already in love with someone else, says it plainly: “Young men’s love then lies / Not truly in their hearts but in their eyes.” Then Romeo meets Juliet, and the language sharpens. The balcony scene is full of new metaphors because the old ones don’t fit. Love, in this play, is partly the discovery that the words you had aren’t the words you need.

Juliet, meanwhile, is faster. She’s the one who proposes marriage. She’s the one who refuses to play the courtship game (“What I have heard tonight / Is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden” — and then she keeps going). She’s the one who names the trouble: “My only love sprung from my only hate.” She loves Romeo enough to renounce her family name, which in Verona is renouncing a self. The play is unsentimental about how much it costs her.

And love, in this play, is dangerous. Mercutio mocks it because he sees what it does to people. Friar Lawrence warns Romeo that “these violent delights have violent ends.” The lovers themselves keep using death-images for love long before either of them is in danger of dying. By Act 5 the love that began as new metaphors ends with both lovers reaching for the same poison-and-knife metaphor and then actually using it. Shakespeare takes love seriously enough to show what it can do — even what it can do to people who didn’t deserve it.