My Hubris Is Endless But Alas So Is The Depth Of This Narrative - Blog Posts

NOOOOO! DAMN IT, BILLY-BARD! I love Shakespeare so much, but this one play just will not stop haunting me. I'll never reach the ends of it. It's like a puddle that goes down far enough to have angler fish.

I have been exposed to this more than any other of The Bard's work, and never once by choice. I have been forced to read this play cover to cover four times in school, including for one exhausperated highschool teacher who got the lot of us engaged by giving extra credit to whoever found the most dick jokes. I've seen it performed by every kind of troop from school kids to the actual globe theater. I once got roped into playing a bit part in a performance art street production because I happen to be walking by, and I NEVER CAUGHT THIS?!?

I tip my hat to you, thank you for showing me yet another facet to the peerless jewel I am repeatedly clubbed over the head with whether I like it or not.

It's a perfect sonnet.

14 lines. 3 stanzas in ABAB rhyme, and a rhyming couplet at the end.

It starts off with each of them speaking a whole stanza. Romeo offering up a self depreciating metaphor (a pilgrim at a holy shrine, sinful for wanting to place a kiss on her hand), and Juliet returning it (it's not a sin for a pilgrim to touch the hands of a saint. Pilgrims and the saints hands can touch. )

Then they share a quatraine, keeping the rhyme and rhythm steady, the flirting turning even more overt. (Saints and pilgrims both have lips, yeah? Well, sure, for prayer. Well if a pilgrims hand can touch a saints hand, then their lips...)

Then they each speak half a couplet (the saints dont make the first move, but if its a prayer....well, here I am, praying....), and share their first kiss.

It's flirty and silly and a little irreverent, and they become more and more in sync as they speak.

This is a heightened, fantastical, almost reality bending moment. This is a moment where two lonely teenagers, one who is having her future decided without her and the other fresh from an unrequited rejection, feel the world shift around them.

And the foreshadowing sits at the end of stanza 3. This is an act of faith, but if it cannot be, it will turn to despair.

And I just. The craft of it. The poetry of it. How the form and the rhythm mirror the metaphor and mirror the emotion of it.