"O, when she's angry, she is keen and shrewd!
She was a vixen when she went to school:
And though she be but little she is fierce."
When we read _Romeo and Juliet,_ after the _Dream,_ we seem not to have
left that poetical environment, to which Mercutio expressly recalls
us, with his fantastic embroidery around Queen Mab, above all, when
we consider the style, the rhyming and the general physiognomy of
the little story. All have inclined to suave and gentle speech and
metaphor, when speaking of _Romeo and Juliet._ For Schlegel it was
scented with "the perfumes of springtide, the song of the nightingales,
the freshness of a newly budded rose." Hegel too found himself face
to face with that rose: "sweet rose in the valley of the world, torn
asunder by the rude tempest and the hurricane." Coleridge too speaks
of that sense of spring: "The spring with its odours, its flowers and
its fleetingness." All have looked upon it as the poem of youthful
love and have remarked that the play reaches its acme in the two love
scenes in the garden at night, and in the departure after the nuptial
night, in which some have seen the renovation of the traditional forms
of love poetry, "the epithalamium," "the dawn." This play is not only
closely connected with the _Dream,_ but also with the other comedies of
love; Romeo passes there with like rapidity, indeed suddenness to the
personages of those comedies from love of Rosalind to love of Juliet.
At the first sight of Juliet he is conquered and believes that he then
loves for the first time:
"Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!
For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night."
Saintly Friar Laurence, a mixture of astonishment, of being scandalised
and of good nature, sometimes almost plays there the part of Puck. When
he learns that Romeo no longer loves Rosalind, about whom he had been
so crazy; he says:
"So soon forsaken! Young men's love there lies
Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.
Jesu Maria!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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