Shakespeare's Plays About Love

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra are, obviously, both plays about love. But there are many striking differences. Romeo and Juliet's protagonists are extremely young (Juliet is "not fourteen" and Romeo cannot be much older), while Antony and Cleopatra's lovers are unmistakably middle-aged. Romeo and Juliet bubbles with joie de vivre and romantic wonder; Antony and Cleopatra is riddled with cynicism and world-weariness. Given only this information, we might well guess that Romeo and Juliet confirms a youthful belief in everlasting romantic passion, while Antony and Cleopatra exposes the frailty and impermanence of love. But, ironically, just the opposite is the case. Love in Romeo and Juliet is fragile, vulnerable, and ultimately doomed; in Antony and Cleopatra it is enduring, inexorable, and ultimately transcendent.

The earlier play, Romeo and Juliet, owes its continuing popularity to the fact that it is about the universal experience of young love. The play makes the reasonable assumption that its audience has experienced adolescent attraction at one time or another. It also implicitly assumes that we have put such attraction behind us. Shakespeare himself was in his early thirties when he wrote this play: young enough to be infatuated by his own powers with language, and old enough to look back upon young love with more than a trace of nostalgia.

Hence, the tone of the play is sympathetic but slightly superior. Shakespeare gives us a wink a

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Antony and Cleopatra. It is, like Romeo and Juliet, a play about the universal experience of erotic passion. But its universality is anything but easy and accessible. The principle reason is that Antony and Cleopatra are hardly what we would expect from romantic protagonists. Antony is a man of great power and prestige, but also an irresponsible, vacillating bungler completely at the prey of his lust. He is unfaithful to two different wives. He loses two battles during the course of the play, and flees from the second in an unequivocally cowardly manner. He even botches his own suicide. Cleopatra is an exotic queen, but a "wanton" one with a checkered history. And we must not forget that, in Elizabethan eyes, Cleopatra's "tawny front" was hardly an ideal of physical beauty. Like the celebrated "Dark Lady" of Sonnet CXXX, we are intended to be surprised that so much is made of her attractiveness. Shakespeare's audiences liked their heroines fair, like Juliet. Too make matters still less romantic, this couple is well along in years. A modern audience will recognize them as manifesting that trendy malaise of mid-life crisis. It is hard to follow them along through their ill-fated adventures without wondering why they

Category: Literature - S