As the Middle Ages waned, villages grew like overspilling ponds, more large cities appeared, and it was difficult to keep track of everyone’s doings. Noblemen who wished to wage war or do business needed support from the swelling class of merchants, manufacturers, and bankers. Because socializing smoothed the way for business deals, the upper and middle classes rubbed shoulders with increasing frequency and sometimes intermarried. And so the bog of social life, where one fell into a class and stayed there, began to change into a landscape that clever folk could navigate. If one dressed correctly, and knew how to speak, he could maneuver among the classes. A man always had his reputation to protect and his position to maintain, through duels or display. Since honor was paramount, the crown of one’s status, requiring a fealty all its own, it became possible to invent an aura and an acceptable past. Appearances were everything.
Despite the social ambiguities of the time, artists and scholars were drawn to the ancients once again, especially to Plato, in whom they found truths clear-cut and eternal. Because their passion, though deeply religious in its intensity, was grounded in a secular vision of humanity, the focus of life shifted from the Church to human beings, who were pictured as life’s architects, wardens of the good and noble. We share that sentiment today and even if we don’t think angels walk the earth, we do believe in everyday acts of saintliness and heroism. Artworks revolved around symmetry and classical form, favoring the curious sleight of eye known as perspective, in which a flat, two-dimensional object creates the illusion of three-dimensional space. It’s often stated that perspective was invented in the Renaissance, but this isn’t true. Perspective was practiced long before—I saw it beautifully rendered in the 17,000-year-old cave paintings of animals at Lascaux—but it obsessed the people of the Renaissance, who perfected its chicaneries. All art is deceit: it cons the mind into imagining a world by showing it a kernel.* Perhaps because society was changing so quickly, they wished to know exactly where a person stood in relation to everyone else. Today we often talk about “keeping things in perspective,” an idea that also preoccupied Renaissance minds. Perspective brought the dimension of time to painting; one is gradually stitched to the horizon, a distant place but also a different moment. Elements report back to key figures, they have associations and kinships, and in that sense, the painting’s visual world throbs with a tribal reality.
People were painted naked and glorious like Greek gods and goddesses, and women’s bodies were celebrated as temples of beauty. As we have seen, by the Middle Ages the status of women had improved a little. The Virgin Mary as a latter-day version of Aphrodite had come to be the image Botticelli, Titian, and others preferred; they painted women whose robust flesh glowed with color, energy, and motion. Every cell resonated with life. They were sumptuously beautiful, and beauty was good, as Plato had said. Yet at precisely the same time, a loathing for women flourished that has been unequaled in any age. Some men—particularly theologians—felt that women were the root of evil in the world because they were more bestial than men, and therefore had to be stopped, punished, and killed. At no time in history were more women condemned as witches and tortured to death. Sixty thousand in Europe, and a few thousand more in New England. But twice that many were prosecuted without being burned. Two Dominican theologians, after much experience as the pope’s inquisitors, offered the following conclusions:
A woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep … a necessary evil, a natural temptation … an evil of nature, painted with fair colors … a liar by nature…. Since [women] are feebler both in mind and body, it is not surprising that they should come under the spell of witchcraft [more than men]…. A woman is more carnal than a man…. All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.
The twentieth century has tended to depict men as sexual carnivores, predatory by nature, out of control when their hormones blast, unable to resist acts of sex or violence. “Men are beasts,” women complain; males “think with their dicks,” men confess. For much of history, that sort of view described women; the depiction of them as vile, demonic creatures didn’t start in the Renaissance. This toxic version of woman, identified with Eve, a fallen woman who had lured a man to his doom, one whose very name sounds like the word evil, was always prevalent. Father Odon, the abbot of Cluny Abbey, wrote in 1100:
Indeed, if men were endowed, like the lynxes of Boetia, with the power of visual penetration and could see what there is beneath the skin, the mere sight of a woman would nauseate them: that feminine grace is only saburra, blood, humor, bile. Consider what is hidden in the nostrils, in the throat, in the belly: filth everywhere…. How can we desire to hold in our arms the bag of excrement itself?
Men have both despised and adored women, found them saintly and base—the angel and the whore—but this duality was especially glaring during the Renaissance, when women’s bodies were depicted as flawless temples of beauty to be studied and worshiped, even as scores of so-called witches were reviled, tortured, and killed in public.
The woman-as-angel produced glorious works of art in what was essentially a latter-day fertility cult. One was surrounded by pictures of robust motherhood, usually in the form of a sweet-faced Madonna holding a plump, cherubic, good-natured Child. No doubt they were the ideals; nutrition for pregnant women or infants was little understood, and sickness claimed many lives. However, such a Madonna would have been a familiar image from daily life, since virtually every woman one met (except the elderly or barren) was pregnant or nursing. Wealthy women didn’t nurse their own babies; they hired wet nurses, which allowed them to become pregnant again faster, and it was their duty to produce as many children as possible. As Martin Luther said, “Even if they bear themselves weary, or bear themselves out … this is the purpose for which they exist.” High fertility was such an important feature in a future bride that a woman was sometimes encouraged to conceive before marriage, just to prove that she could before being linked to a man’s estate. Economically, daughters were a bother unless they could produce heirs. Therefore, dowries were important. A family had to bribe a man for taking on the burden of its daughter. Supply and demand dictated the going price. During the Renaissance, when there were plenty of marriageable women, dowries soared to such ridiculous heights that it was considered a monumental act of charity for someone to bestow a dowry on an orphan girl, who couldn’t marry without one. Single, unattached women, who were not recognizable as someone’s daughter, wife, widow, or sister, had no definition, thus no place in society. The literature often reveals poor young women working night and day to earn enough money for a dowry, without which they had no hope of marriage.
In such a milieu, a female child was simply a commodity, and marriage even more of a business contract. She had no say when it came to picking a husband. Loving parents tried to choose someone agreeable, but for most of them, their daughter, despite her handicaps, was an important form of wealth, actually a trading in futures, on which a family banked for social mobility, income, and heirs. Only an ungrateful or disloyal daughter objected. Pregnancy was a woman’s life and trade. Divorce was impossible. These were truths as fundamental as mountains. But she also knew that society, while not condoning infidelity, understood that hanky-panky could take place. With any luck, she would give birth to a healthy son, better yet two or three, and then she could fall in love and have affairs, provided they were discreet. Clergymen preached that husbands and wives should be the best of companions, real chums, people who loved each other and raised their children with care. And frequently they did—wills and other legal records are filled with the affectionate phrases that come from tender hearts. But more often marriage was an emotional desert, which partners crossed by nourishing themselves elsewhere.
ROMEO AND JULIET
Arranged marriages were a hand-me-down custom known to all, but at about this time, amazingly, a significant number of people began to object. Shakespeare’s plays are filled with collisions ove
r the right to choose whom to marry, and complaints by couples who’d prefer a love match. Shakespeare didn’t invent the best known of them, Romeo and Juliet, leading characters in a classic that had been told in sundry cultures and genres. In the second century A.D., Xenophon of Ephesus presented the story as Anthia and Abrocomas, but it may have been older than that. Over the years it fed many imaginations, and its hero and heroine changed names. In 1535, Luigi da Porto spun the tale as a slow-moving melodrama in a novel with an eighteen-year-old heroine named La Giuletta. The story was still being written in the latter half of the sixteenth century, in poetry and prose, and even the distinguished Spanish writer Lope de Vega wrote a drama called Capulets and Montagues. In telling the story yet again, Shakespeare was doing what Leonard Bernstein and collaborators did with West Side Story, putting a well-known, shopworn tale into contemporary dress, locale, and issues. They knew people would identify with the heartbreak of “Juliet and her Romeo,”*as it’s so often described, focusing on the romantic hopes of the girl. Referring to it in that way makes “Romeo” sound less like a man than a condition or trait possessed by Juliet.
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.”†
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.* 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?*
Romeo and Juliet is but o
ne 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.* 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.
A Natural History of Love Page 10
