romeo-and-juliet

Out of her favour, where I am in love.

I began to recall my own experience when I was Mercutio__ age (late teens I decided, a year or two older than Romeo) as a pupil at a public school called Christ__ Hospital. This school is situated in the idyllic countryside of the Sussex Weald, just outside Horsham. I recalled the strange blend of raucousness and intellect amongst the cloisters, the fighting, the sport, and general sense of rebelliousness, of not wishing to seem conventional (this was the sixties); in the sixth form (we were called Grecians) the rarefied atmosphere, the assumption that of course we would go to Oxford or Cambridge; the adoption of an ascetic style, of Zen Buddhism, of baroque opera, the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, and Mahler; of Pound, Eliot and e. e. cummings. We perceived the world completely through art and culture. We were very young, very wise, and possessed of a kind of innocent cynicism. We wore yellow stockings, knee breeches, and an ankle length dark blue coat, with silver buttons. We had read Proust, we had read Evelyn Waugh, we knew what was what. There was a sense, fostered by us and by many teachers, that we were already up there with Lamb, Coleridge, and all the other great men who had been educated there. We certainly thought that we soared __bove a common bound_. I suppose it is a process of constant mythologizing that is attempted at any public school. Tom Brown__ Schooldays is a good example. Girls were objects of both romantic and purely sexual, fantasy; beautiful, distant, mysterious, unobtainable, and, quite simply, not there. The real vessel for emotional exchange, whether sexually expressed or not, were our own intense friendships with each other. The process of my perceptions of Mercutio intermingling with my emotional memory continued intermittently, up to and including rehearsals. I am now aware that that possibly I re-constructed my memory somewhat, mythologised it even, excising what was irrelevant, emphasising what was useful, to accord with how I was beginning to see the part, and what I wanted to express with it. What I was seeing in Mercutio was his grief and pain at impending separation from Romeo, so I suppose I sensitised myself to that period of my life when male bonding was at its strongest for me.

Hark,_ he said, his tone very dry. __hat stone through yonder window breaks?__ami yelled up at him, __t is the east, and Juliet is a jerk!

Shakespeare had it right all along: Love will kill you in the end.

Friar Laurence:O, mickle is the powerful grace that liesIn herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities: For nought to vile that on the earth doth live, But to the earth some special good doth give; nor aught so good, but, strain'd from that fair use, Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse: Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, And vice sometime's by action dignified.

Mother, I will look to like. If looking liking moves.

Alack, there lies more peril in thine eyeThan twenty of their swords: look thou but sweet,And I am proof against their enmity.

I have more care to staythan will to go.

Give me my Romeo. And when I shall die,Take him and cut him out in little stars,And he will make the face of heaven so fineThat all the world will be in love with nightAnd pay no worship to the garish sun.

And shake the yoke of inauspicious starsFrom this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!

That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet

The sweetest honey is loathsome in its own deliciousness. And in the taste destroys the appetite. Therefore, love moderately.

These violent delights have violent endsAnd in their triump die, like fire and powderWhich, as they kiss, consume

For what are star-crossed lovers but a soul for another soul meant.

The tragic hero usurps the function of the gods and attempts to remake the world.

There has to be some way this won__ end in tragedy. Why can__ Romeo and Juliet live happily ever after? It__ as if the universe won__ abide such a strong connection in such a disconnected world, as if our connection defies the natural order.

When the devout religion of mine eyeMaintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires,And these, who, often drowned, could never die,Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars!One fairer than my love? The all-seeing sunNe'er saw her match since first the world begun.

Don't waste your love on somebody, who doesn't value it.