[In the following essay, originally published in 1979, Lerner explores the connections between love and death in Romeo and Juliet.]

‘Oh she doth teach the torches to burn bright’: Romeo's first glimpse of Juliet transforms his world, and the line tells us, instantly, that it is a play about the transfiguring power of love.

If there ever was a play which had to be in poetry, it is this: for only through heightened language can the heightened quality of the love experience be conveyed. Falling in love can be seen both as extraordinary and as completely natural, as an experience that takes us out of the everyday onto a higher plane, and as one that takes us from sophistication and artificiality into true simple feeling. It is therefore necessary for the poetry of the lovers to be tugged in two directions: towards formality, which provides conventions that take us away from the ordinary, and towards simplicity, to express the need to drop conventions for genuineness. The dialectic between these gives the language its force: to surrender to either extreme would destroy it.

The extreme of formality is represented by the opening exchange of the lovers: their near-stycomythia composes a sonnet, full of word-play upon the love-religion parallel. The passage asks to be spoken in two different ways, and good actors will convey both: on the one hand it should move slowly, with a solemnity appropriate to the dance taking place and (even more) to the fact that this is the tremendous experience of their lives, for which only religious imagery is adequate; but on the other hand there is (certainly from Juliet, possibly from Romeo too) a playful handling of the religious analogy, almost a feeling that a girl must know how to look after herself by keeping the implications of the words at bay: ‘For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, / And palm to palm is holy palmer's kiss’ (I. v. 99). If the last line is spoken with the emphasis on ‘palm to palm’ (come now, not lips!) it is fencing; if on the last three words, then the fencing can dissolve in the bliss of what is happening to her.

The extreme of directness, on the other hand, is found at the end of the balcony scene, when Juliet calls Romeo back, asks him something trivial, and confesses ‘I have forgot why I did call thee back’. There are no metaphors, no heightened diction, simply the language of being tongue-tied: it could be Love Story or West Side Story, it could belong with our modern celebration of inarticulateness—and yet it couldn't, simply because of the interplay between this and the rich metaphoric language we have had. Such immediacy derives its literary power from the way it breaks free of a previous formality.

Between these two extremes we can see the dialectic of style actually taking place, for instance in the following:

R:
Lady, by yonder blessed moon I vow.
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops—
J:
O, swear not by the moon, th' inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.
R:
What shall I swear by?
J:
                                                                                          Do not swear at all
Or if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
Which is the God of my idolatry,
And I'll believe thee.
R:
                                                                      If my heart's dear love—
J:
Well, do not swear.

(II. ii. 107)

They are trying to break free of the convention that they desperately need. Romeo's two lines are lovely and totally predictable; Juliet interrupts to plead, let us not have these conventions, but she can only do so by describing the moon in equally conventional language. This leaves Romeo inarticulate. For a moment Juliet accepts this, then tries to make up her own convention; as soon as she hears what Romeo makes of it she realizes that she has dropped once more into a protestation that is removed from experience, and she reaffirms her rejection, even if it means silence. She has discovered that what she originally meant was not ‘swear not by the moon’ but a wider prohibition, telling him in general terms not to speak like that. Yet for lovers, striving to escape from ordinariness, there is no other way to speak.

I have tried to suggest by looking, however briefly, at the self-consciousness of the writing, how the special nature of the love experience is conveyed; but I could have set about it in a much more obvious way, by saying that Romeo and Juliet fall in love at first sight, that they compare love to religion, that they feel premonitions of disaster from the beginning. That would have told us nothing about the particularity of this play, but would have stressed what it has in common with others. Both of these matter: for masterpieces are both higly individual, and the most perfect examples of tradition.

And marriage? The main married couple is Juliet's parents; and thinking of Romeo, we ask with astonishment, was Capulet ever in love with his lady? Did he tell himself that she taught the torches to burn bright, did he climb orchard walls, and swear by the moon to her, and could we conceivably imagine him killing himself for love? We see Capulet in two moods, fussy and authoritarian. He fusses over the ball, making an old man's jokes (‘She that makes dainty, She, I'll swear, hath corns’), ordering the servants about (‘more light, you knaves! and turn the tables up’), a well-meaning, slightly tedious host. We see the same Capulet when he arranges the match with Paris, a little smug in his confidence that his daughter ‘will be ruled in all respects by me’—but why not, for she has never crossed him yet?—and more than a little fussy as he hesitates between Wednesday and Thursday for the wedding. Well-meaning, yes, but there are ominous touches even here: ‘mark you me’, ‘and there an end’. He is used to getting his way, and perhaps the later scene when he plays the heavy father is not wholly unexpected. It is a marvellous piece of comic writing, adjusting the blank verse to the speech rhythms as only Shakespeare can do.

How, how, how, how, chopped logic? What is this?
‘Proud—and I thank you’—and ‘I thank you not’—
And yet ‘not proud’? Mistress minion you,
Thank me no thankings, nor proud me no prouds,
But fettle your fine joints, gainst Thursday next
To go with Paris to Saint Peter's Church,
Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither.

(III.v. 149)

How utterly different this movement from ‘Earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she’ and yet (this is what we mean when we speak of Shakespeare's characterization) it is clearly the same man. Capulet is a wonderful creation, but he lives in a different world from the lovers. The feelings he displays are the pleasure of authority, the wry jokes of old age, and affection for his daughter. There is no sign of affection for his wife: the nearest is when he calls on her to share his grief—‘O heavens! O wife, look how our daughter bleeds’—and even there he is simply including her in a feeling that is paternal and familial, and he calls her, as he always does, simply ‘wife’. She has no identity and receives no feelings as an individual, and marriage has nothing to do with romance.

In proposing Romeo and Juliet as a play about the contrast between love and marriage I have ignored what some may feel is a fatal objection, the fact that Romeo and Juliet do actually marry. Now I do not believe this is an objection at all, for what does that marriage consist of? Not of domestic arrangements, children or even cohabitation, but of one marvellously beautiful alba. The song of the lover, compelled by dawn to leave his mistress, was a popular medieval genre, and examples range from the simple and fragmentary to the rich complexities of the Minnesinger—from, say, the simple assertion that the nightingale has ceased to sing and the watchman on the tower is calling the lovers to awaken, to Heinrich von Morungen's ‘Owe, sol aber mir iemer me’.

Oh will there never be a morning,
When he will simply stay
When as night passes we'll no longer
Need to sigh and say?
‘Alas, look, it is day:’
As he, when last he lay
With me would often say.
Then the day came.

We can never say much about the situation depicted in an alba, for lyric poetry after all is not about situations; but we can say with some certainty that the lovers are not married. The intensity comes from the certainty that they must part, and often there is just enough narrative to make it clear that their assignation was a furtive one. The parting of Romeo and Juliet in III. v. is a marvellous example of the transposition of lyric into dramatic. Almost every detail belongs to the tradition of the alba: the song of the nightingale and of the lark, the fading of the moon, the image of the envious streaks. Sometimes it is the man who longs to stay, sometimes the woman who longs to retain him: Shakespeare takes advantage of these alternatives to depict the wavering situation of pleading, danger, longing, resignation, decision; and the songs of the two birds, losing none of their lyrical beauty, acquire a dramatic function.

The 59 lines of this scene are the only lines that Romeo and Juliet exchange after they are married: an alba, followed by brief arrangements (‘I will omit no opportunity that may convey my greetings …’) and then by dark foreboding (‘O God, I have an ill-divining soul!’). With a marriage like that, who needs adultery?

To the enraptured lover, his mistress seems larger than life, his experience is of a bliss surpassing all other pleasures. Only great poetry can rise to the expressing of such feeling, and the greatest of poets is Shakespeare.

Tempests themeselves, high seas, and howling winds,
The gutter'd rocks, and congregated sands,
Traitors ensteep'd, to clog the guiltless keel,
As having sense of beauty, do omit
Their common natures, letting go safely by
The divine Desdemona.

(II. i. 68)

                                                                                                              O my soul's joy,
If after every tempest come such calmness,
May the winds blow, till they have wakened death,
And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas,
Olympus-high, and duck again as low
As hell's from heaven. If it were now to die,
'Twere now to be most happy, for I fear
My soul hath her content so absolute,
That not another comfort, like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.

(II. i. 184)

Both these speeches come from the scene of the arrival in Cyprus, which is the high moment of the action of Othello, and from which everything descends in rapid but complex development to the tragic end. The first, by Cassio, loyal lieutenant and devoted admirer, celebrates Desdemona by the traditional device of the pathetic fallacy: the elements have spared Desdemona because, ‘having sense of beauty’, they have not dared to destroy her. It is not the only conventional device that Cassio uses: Desdemona is ‘our great captain's captain’, in the military imagery so common in love poetry, she is ‘the riches of the ship’, and prays both for her safety and Othello's. The lines have some individual and Shakespearean life (‘gutter'd rocks’), but within a general framework of the traditional. A lesser dramatist would have given that speech to Othello himself; if it is only when we hear Othello's lines that we realize the ordinariness of Cassio's. It is not only that Othello's are more splendid poetically (there is nothing of Cassio's as marvellously mimetic as ‘And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas’, with its one labouring adjective among the monosyllables), or that they contain proleptic elements appropriate to the hero rather than the lieutenant, but above all that they contain an intensity of emotion to make us realize that Cassio's poetry was, after all, simply that of compliment.

Here then is the pinnacle of love, placed at much the same point of the action as the stycomythia-sonnet of Romeo and Juliet; four acts later, both pairs of lovers are dead. But although in both plays love's bliss ends in death there is an obvious and important difference, the difference expressed in a great deal of traditional, especially Bradleian, criticism by calling Romeo and Juliet a tragedy of fate, Othello, a tragedy of character. External circumstances determine Romeo's fate, Othello is responsible for his own. I do not want to reject this familiar view, but to point out a corollary of it, that Bradley himself gives no hint of. What does the ‘tragic flaw’ of Lear or Hamlet or Othello, tell us about them, and about fatherly affection, revenge or love? The answer, surely, will be alarming: love, we see from this play, is dangerous. If it is something within the hero that causes tragedy (and causes the death of Desdemona), we must ask ourselves if even within the high idealization of that poetry (‘O my soul's joy …’) there is the stuff of tragedy, even of murder.

If such love is dangerous, what does it threaten? It threatens, surely, stable social relationships. There is no more place for Othello's excesses, his idealization, his exotic charm, his ultimate foreignness, his striking of his wife, in the institutions of civilized Venice (and on one level, if not the deepest, Venice is the hero of this play) than there is place for the love of Lancelot and Guinevere in the institution of the Round Table—the difference being that in the one case the institutions survive the self-destruction of the individual, in the other case the civilization is destroyed. Such intensity of idealization, teetering if things go wrong to such intensity of retributiveness, seems quite incompatible with the complexities of interaction by which two people learn to know one another, each adjusting to the other's individuality. In short, it threatens marriage.

Shakespeare's other great love tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra, is the very opposite of Othello in both plot and poetry: its vast untidy structure, with its innumerable rapid changes of scene, its huge number of characters, its action stretching from Egypt to Rome in one direction and Parthia in another, and lasting for an indeterminate number of years, invites us out into the infinite reverberations of its wildly inventive poetry; whereas Othello is the most tightly constructed of all Shakespeare's tragedies, the one which almost observes the unities, uses virtually no prose, builds each scene carefully to interact with the others, echoes with the most complex Shakespearean irony, and whose poetry is intricate and inward-looking. So it is appropriate that in Antony and Cleopatra love is the rival to political and marital responsibility in a gigantic clash of loyalties, whereas in Othello marriage is destroyed from within.

It is necessary for Othello's marriage to be on the one hand something settled and solid, so that we may see the full extent of the destruction, and on the other hand something that never got going, so that we may see the appalling—and rapid—inevitability of the disaster. To achieve this paradox Shakespeare used the celebrated double time-scheme. We no longer believe that the sustaining of two incompatible time schemes in the play is a sign of Shakespeare's clumsiness, or even of the fact that he knew what he could get away with: it enhances the play, for both versions contribute something positive. By the short time-scheme (which is the more prominent) the action takes 48 hours, and the couple sleep together only once: a couple who sleep together only once is a common feature in stories of extra-marital love, and the repeated sharing of the bed is the most obvious, and one of the commonest ways of representing marriage—as we see from the longer time-scheme:

What sense had I of her stol'n hours of lust?
I saw't not, thought it not, it harm'd not me,
I slept the next night well, was free and merry;
I found not Cassio's kisses on her lips;

(III. iii. 344)

In Cinthio, Desdemona and the Moor are married for years. Shakespeare used that version in speeches like this one in order to convey the full horror of jealousy, contrasting it with this domestic familiarity; and in doing so he has, after all, made it a marriage. Here at least for a moment he is showing us intensity of passion in a marital setting

One brilliant detail removes the double time-scheme when it is no longer needed, in Act V. This is Desdemona's instruction to Emilia to lay on her bed her wedding sheets. No doubt this assumes the longer time-scheme (the phrasing is odd if she means the sheets she'd had last night, even if these had already been changed and were ready again), but at the same time it abolishes it. Once again it is to be the bed of lovers, of the virgin bride, not the familiar domestic couch. The fact that we can see the bed as both familiar and terrifyingly strange expresses the ambivalence of love, the content so absolute that it can commit murder, so that the perfect marriage is the most deeply threatened.

So far I have treated Romeo and Juliet as a tragedy, and the parallels drawn have been with other tragedies. But it was written between 1594 and 1596, and the vocabulary and versification give it the feel of the comedies Shakespeare was writing in the mid-1590s. For a full sense of the context of the play, we need to look at the comedy of love as well as its tragedy.

It is obvious how the comedy of love will begin and end. Boy and girl meet and fall in love in Act I; they marry in Act V; something has to fill up the intervening space. On one level, everything that happens in between must function as an obstacle, delaying their union.

Ay me: for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth,
But either it was different in blood …
Or else misgraffed in respect of years …
Or else it stood upon the choice of friends …
Or if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death or sickness did lay siege to it.

This is clearly a literary passage, meant to sound like a recital of the narrative forms of love. Hermia hasn't yet any experience, she is simply classifying (more graciously than the clumsy prose of this article) the ways a love story can unfold. Most of the obstacles she lists are external: war, death or sickness, and above all family: and the play built on these will be a story of adventures—how to overcome the obstacles, how to outwit the parents. A Midsummer Night's Dream itself reminds us of a simple and famous example of this, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, separated by a wall, destroyed by a lion. It hardly seems fair to these lovers to take their story from Shakespeare's parody, but the mechanicals did at any rate get the facts right. The Pyramus and Thisbe story is relevant to that of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which the lovers also escape into the woods, but relevant only as a point of departure: if they had met lions in the woods, if after many adventures they had reached the wealthy aunt, the play would have been a comedy of love's adventures. Instead, what they find in the wood are the obstacles that result from love itself, confusions of identity, rivalry and quarrels, resulting from the fact that choice of the beloved object is after all as arbitrary as being in the way when the juice of a flower is squeezed. When these complications are cleared up, the original obstacle is not overcome but simply removed, as Theseus now decides it's time for a happy ending and, for no reason whatever, overbears the will of Egeus so that the couples can all be knit in the Temple.

What Shakespeare has done to the plot is playfully to turn the adventures into a rehearsal of love's inherent difficulties. For adventures are not in the end very interesting in a love story, their relation to the love being merely accidental. What can Pyramus say, when he finds Thisbe dead?

I am cause of this felonie,
So it is reason that I die
As she is dead because of me.

That is what Pyramus says in Gower's version. But he is not the cause; or if he were (say for turning up late) it would be for a reason accidental to the love. It is when the obstacles are internalized that the details of the action, and the language of the lovers, constitute an exploration of the nature of love.

A blending of internal and external is provided by the familiar theme of the heroine in disguise. The cause for Shakespeare's heroines dressing up as pages is usually an adventure impinging on them from without (Viola's shipwreck, Rosalind's banishment) though it is also, on occasion, the fact that the man has gone off (Julia, Helena); but when the disguised girl meets her lover we have an opportunity for something far more interesting than adventure. In the case of Rosalind and Orlando, for instance, the disguise gives Rosalind two personae, and enables her to express two contrasting attitudes to love. The first essential for any actress playing Rosalind is to realize that two selves can only be mingled if they are, in the first place, separated; and to divide the whole of her part, in the scenes with Orlando, into those remarks she makes as Ganymede, and those in which Rosalind breaks out. Thus after teasing Orlando about horns, and after his reply, which ends ‘and my Rosalind is virtuous’, ‘Ganymede’ replies, ‘And I am your Rosalind.’ Celia's intervention—‘it pleases him to call you so’—is surely a hasty re-erecting of the barrier that Rosalind's impetuosity has knocked down, and makes it clear that ‘I am your Rosalind’ came of an impulsive need to tell the truth. The clear distinction between the two sets of remarks is much easier to sustain because of the Elizabethan convention of the impenetrability of disguise: simply because the audience is willing to omit questions of whether Orlando is likely to spot who she is, she can play her dangerous game of brinkmanship with superb theatrical effect, unhindered by naturalistic probability There is scope for different interpretations, of course, of which remarks are to be spoken in which persona.

ORLANDO:
Then love me, Rosalind
ROSALIND:
Yes, faith will I, Fridays and Saturdays and all
ORLANDO:
And wilt thou have me?
RASALIND:
Ay, and twenty such

(IV.i. 104)

The last remark is obviously by Ganymede, but what about the previous one? I have seen a Rosalind say ‘Fridays and Saturdays and all’ in the teasing voice of Ganymede, and another say it in uncontrolled surrender, on the brink of betrayal, and each was superb: there is even scope for variety if it is taken as a Ganymede remark, on whether the whole sentence is playful or whether she pulls herself up after saying ‘Yes faith will I’ as Rosalind. But although the details of application are variable, there can be no doubt that a clear-cut alternation is essential.

This alternation of personae corresponds to two contrasting attitudes to love, the lover's and the cynic's. Rosalind believes men are trustworthy and love will last. Ganymede doesn't. Ganymede's cynicism is explicit. Rosalind's trust bursts out through her loss of control. And so the retelling of those beloved stories of faithful lovers takes on a unique flavour.

Troilus had his brains dash'd out with a Grecian club, yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have liv'd many a fair year though Hero had turn'd nun; if it had not been for a hot midsummer night, for (good youth) he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and being taken with cramp, was drown'd, and the foolish chroniclers of that age, found it was Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies, men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not fer love.

(IV.i. 88)

Why is that last sentence among the most moving in all the literature of love? Because everything in the situation has shown us that Rosalind doesn't ‘really’ believe it. She is hopelessly in love herself, and her scepticism and commonsense are a kind of antibody, engendered by the passion in her veins. She is all Ganymede now, in the sense that she's not betraying herself, but I would like to see an actress say it smiling, as if that was her happiest moment.

Disguise was a standard device of Elizabethan love comedy but no one else used it with the consummate skill of Shakespeare. Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster, for instance, shows at least as good a theatrical sense as As You Like It (to which it is indebted), but with none of the same psychological exploration. In Philaster, two sympathetic women both love the same man; and we are not told that the hero's page is really the heroine in disguise until she is unmasked. This is a better recipe for suspense and excitement, but we have only to think of what would be lost from the scenes between Julia and Proteus, Rosalind and Orlando. Viola and Orsino, if we did not know who the pretty youth was, to realize the difference between true drama and theatrical competence.

Adventure is not essential to the comedy of love. Why should not the intricacies and obstacles of courtship make their own pattern? There is after all a good analogy for this, that of dancing. The couple perform elaborate movements as an expression of their ambivalent relationship, involving attraction and repulsion, delay and consummation: the most beautiful movements are often those involving most opposition, yet all their driving force comes from the impulse towards union.

We owe the love comedy based on the courtship dance to John Lyly. Almost all his plays show several pairs of lovers involved with one another through rivalry; they end happily through magic or impossible magnanimity; and they have little action, consisting largely of the recital in patterned prose of the dilemmas of love:

Unfortunate Apelles, and therefore unfortunate because Apelles! Hast thou by drawing her beauty, brought to pass that thou canst scarce draw thine own breath? And by so much the more has thou increased thy care, by how much the more thou hast shewed thy cunning: … O Campaspe, Campaspe, art must yield to nature, resaon to appetite, wisdom to affection.

The speech is three pages long, and never for one moment does art yield to nature, or the careful antitheses to the impulses of appetite. Lyly was a schoolmaster, and wrote his plays for children: to hear a trained boy picking his way through these rhetorical figures would make it clear what an elegant game they are, a delighting in verbal skill, not a rendering of experience. Few famous writers can be less congenial to the twentieth century than Lyly. Our love poetry tends rather to the coital grunt and the gasp than to these polished recitations. Are Campaspe (1584) and Endimion (1591), then, mere historical curiosities or is there some way of bringing their intricate patterns to life? For Shakespeare there was; the method of parody. Shakespeare's early comedies, and especially Love's Labour's Lost (1595) are closely related to Lyly; and so is Romeo and Juliet. In both these plays there is actual dancing, as well as the dance of words; in both there is euphuistic verbal intricacy:

‘Is love a tender thing? It is too rough,
Too rude, too boisterous and it pricks like thorn.’
‘If love be rough with you, be rough with love,
Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.’

(R. & J. I. iv. 25)

The relation of such a ‘set of wit well-played’ to Lyly is twofold: the verbal skill of the original is both bettered and rejected. To say that Shakespeare is parodying Lyly is true, if we remember that the good parodist needs the same skill as his victim—and in this case has more. The way to bring artificial verse to life is to insert reminders of the actualities of experience which it ignores: as Mercutio's bawdy wit mentions aspects of love that would hardly have been in place in the mouths of those clever schoolboys or perhaps it would be truer to say that it incorporates the jokes that the school boys made offstage. The verbal dance of Love's Labour's Lost is superb, and makes Lyly look an amateur; yet it is full of suggestions that we should not take it too seriously and at the end, in the moment of marvellous simplicity when Marcade brings the news of the Princess's father's death, all dancing ends, and any wooing that takes place now needs to be direct: ‘Honest plain words best pierce the ear of grief.’ Yet Berowne has said this before, and not found it easy to carry out (‘Sans sans, I pray you’), and his honest plain words now include ‘Behold the window of my heart, mine eye’, and even a request that takes us back to courtly love, ‘Impose some service on me for my love.’

The rejection of eloquence under the power of true emotion is a recurrent theme in Shakespearean comedy: yet the artistry that is rejected is also retained, sometimes with marvellous subtlety. Romeo's calf-love for Rosaline is completely euphuistic, full of references to Cupid the marksman, and not unsuitable for Lyly's boys (perhaps the references to chastity are a little explicit, but by the time Mercutio has made fun of them they are made to seem innocence itself). Only after meeting Juliet is he capable of the directness of: ‘I shall forget, to have thee still stand there, / Remembering how I love thy company’ (II. ii. 172). Yet though Romeo learns simplicity when he falls in love, he does not lose his eloquence, and his highest poetry (like that of Viola) comes from the interplay of simplicity and wit, immediacy and formality.

Here then are some of the possible variants of the comedy of wooing. What they all have in common is the overcoming of obstacles, and what all the interesting ones have in common is the acting out of a pattern of coming together and staying apart, of emotional surrender and sceptical detachment, that corresponds to the emotional experience of preparing for sexual union.

In medieval romance, love exists outside marriage and is adulterous, with tragic consequences for the lovers, and perhaps for the society. In Shakespearean tragedy we may have the same pattern, or love may enter marriage, but only to destroy it. In Racine, unlawful love is doomed, and may destroy the lawful in the process. These are tragic patterns, and with love comedy we are in another world, but we are still never shown the successful incorporation of love into marriage. The comedy ends in a wedding: the dance concludes, and the couple live happily ever after. We do not look beyond the ritual ending to see how time will keep the promises. One of the fathers, Prospero, actually points this out: ‘So glad of this as they I cannot be, / Who are surprised with all.’ The tired sympathy of middle age has its place at the wedding too—or, in the case of The Tempest, is so prominent that even the wedding is pushed beyond the edge of the play.

The supreme refusal of the world is death; and the supreme rejection of the bond of reason and one's fellow men would clearly be the coupling of love and death, the Liebestod. Everyone knows how common it is for lovers in literature to die together. When we ask ourselves what the nature of the connexion is between love and death, several kinds of answer are possible.

There could be a narrative answer, a psychological answer and a lyrical answer. The narrative answer would tell us whether the lovers die together, or separately, and whether or not they sleep together before-hand. That in turn would imply an answer to the psychological question, do they want to die, and do they see it as a surrogate for sexual experience? The lyrical answer will enact the same conceptions at the level of local verbal effects instead of plot.

In early literature the narrative answer is almost always that they do sleep together. Death is not presented as a surrogate for sexual experience, but rather as its fitting sequel. Neither Antony nor Othello, Romeo nor Tristan, die virgin. The change comes with Racine, then with Wagner, who changed the story so that Isolde slept neither with Tristan nor with Mark. It is hard to be sure if this change makes the Liebestod more respectable or more pornographic.

Isolde's aria over the body of Tristan is the most famous Liebestod of all, though as it happens Wagner himself called it the Verklarung (transfiguration), reserving the term Liebestod (which he invented) for the Prelude, Unable at first to believe in his death, she insists that he is alive, and insists that the bystanders believe her (‘Seht ihr, Freunde. Seht ihr's nicht?’). As she continues, the sense in which Tristan is alive becomes less and less personal, and her union with him more and more a pantheistic union with the elements:

Are they waves
Of fragrance flowing?
Odours coming
Odours going?
Should I gulp them
Till I'm seated
By the swell
Intoxicated?
Should I breathe
And melt in air,
With the odours
Disappear?

She could be saying ‘He is made one with Nature’, but not in the measured pentameters in which Shelly mingles philosophic concepts with the sob of Nature's universal music; rather in something like a pure sobbing, a pure emotion of the surrendering of individuality. This is conveyed not only by the obvious incantatory effect of the short lines, but the synaesthesia, the bewildered loss of clarity that actually seems to take place in the self-questionings (soll ich athmen, soll ich leuschen), and the unattached words that float verbless (ertrinken—versinken—unbewusst—hochste Lust; at the end of the aria (and the opera). Both verbal and musical echoes connect this with the sexual ecstasy of Act II, which constantly plays with the idea of courting, defeating, indulging in death. Sexual love and death both involve the dissolution of personality and Wagner is showing their identity.

It is easy to see why this is the classic example of Liebestod. In every sense, death is seen as the surrogate for love—in the narrative sense, in the psychological (the lovers constantly reject day and long for night), and the linking of death and union in the imagery is reinforced by the music: indeed, the music is primary (as befits Wagner's later theoretical position on the Gesamtkunstwerk), and there is something inherently inadequate in discussing the text of Tristan and Isolde. But though inadequate it need not be misleading.

If Liebestod is like this, we shall not find before Wagner—one is tempted to say ‘before Freud,’ since the idea of the lovers wanting death instead of consummation seems to presuppose unconscious wishing; and Wagner (writing in the very year of Freud's birth) had sniffed out what he needed of psychoanalytic theory. Gottfried Tristan calls on death when his love is at its happiest: when Brangane tells him about the potion, and that it will be the death of them both, he answers: ‘Whether it be life or death, it has poisoned one most sweetly! I had no idea what the other will be like, but this death suits me well.’ Is he speaking light-heartedly, or in delighted earnestness? If the former, it is dramatic irony; if the latter, it suggests that death has a sexual meaning. These are the two traditional forms of Liebestod, and both are important. A clear example of the first is Othello's invocation of death at the high moment of love: ‘If it were now to die, / 'Twere now to be most happy.’ Dramatic irony can be easy, even crude; or it can be subtle and moving. If we are not to feel that a simple point is being made at Othello's expense, then there must be a sense in which he is asking to die, even though the wish has not entered consciousness.

The other possible interpretation of Gottfried's passage—that Tristan is punning on ‘die’—seems to be characteristically Elizabethan. The sexual meaning of ‘die’ is certainly found in Elizabethan poetry: it is frequent in Donne, and there are at least two incontrovertible examples in Shakespeare. I do not find it easy to decide whether it is used in Romeo and Juliet—what looks like the most likely instance comes from the Friar! Romeo's dying ‘Thus with a kiss I die’ would be weakened if taken as word-play, for the clash between dying and sex, visually present to us on the stage, is best rendered verbally as a clash between ‘kiss’ and ‘die’ in which each keeps its own meaning. Whether this pun was based on popular usage or purely a literary device (I suspect it was the latter, since there is no evidence for a colloquial sexual meaning) it merely implies the possibility of linking the two ideas. It does not suggest—word-play never can—what exactly the relationship is between death and orgasm.

The Wagnerian idea of death as a surrogate for sex is not explicitly present in Romeo and Juliet or Othello; but in their exploration of the complex connexions between the two they come very close to it. The lovers die together, in one case on their marriage bed, in the other in a tomb in which they lie together in a posture that could be a visual pun on the two metaphoric meanings of ‘sleeping together’. And though death has not replaced sex, it is notable that both marriages contain only a single act of intercourse, as if sex were only a symbol and once is enough: the second sexual act is the joint death. And on the lyrical level both plays, and above all Romeo and Juliet, couple death and sex in their most moving imagery:

Shall I believe
That insubstantial death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in state to be his paramour,

(V. iii. 102)

Personification is such a standard poetic device with the unoriginal, that it is striking to find it as a sign of such powerful originality. It enables Romeo to see death as a rival and thus to connect death and sex more explicitly than he could otherwise have done: and the resulting triangle, plus the physical repulsiveness of the usual representations of death, enable him to express disgust along with his love, so that the speech contains our ambivalent response to the connexion—that to die is to achieve perfect love, and that to die is a horrible substitute for love. Our knowledge that Juliet is not dead weakens the tension (her beauty is not a sign that death is supreme love, and the abhorred monster has not slept with her) but not much, since we can simply regard Romeo's point as proleptic (even the ‘first night audience’ has a shrewd suspicion that Juliet is going to die).

Shakespeare's third great play of love is different from these two, and for at least four of its five acts is not a play of Liebestod at all. The love of Antony and Cleopatra is defiantly associated with life, all the more defiantly for their being no longer young. Even in his first statement of the bliss of love and defiance of the world, when it would have been so easy to say, This is the moment to die, Antony does not: ‘Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the ranged Empire fall: here is my space …” (I. i. 33). These are images of destruction, but of a destruction that will take place around them, leaving them unharmed. The image for their love is ‘the nobleness of life.’ They do not see themselves as dying: they ‘stand up peerless’. And so although Antony dies in Cleopatra's arms, this is not seen as a consummation:

I am dying Egypt, dying; only
I here importune death awhile, until
Of many thousand kisses, the poor last
I lay upon thy lips.

(IV, XV, 18)

If this was really Liebestod, that would be their finest kiss, not the poor last: death, which has to be importuned, is here getting in the way of their love. The point is even clearer when Cleopatra speaks:

And welcome, welcome. Die where thou hast lived,
Quicken with kissing: had my lips that power,
Thus would I wear them out.

(IV. xv. 38)

Could any protest be more intense? Every word suggests life, and the desperation that sobs in the last sentence expresses her helplessness because death is coming. Out of this intensity comes her lament—that greatest lament in poetry—when Antony does die, introduced by a line of marvellous simplicity, the wail of a betrayed child who had trusted Antony could not do that to her: ‘Noblest of men, woo't die.’

When Cleopatra dies we have something different. Now love and death are associated, and perhaps there is no more profound lyrical expression of the Liebestod than her marvellous image: ‘The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch, / Which hurts, and is desired:’ (V. ii. 295) just as there is no more perfect expression of death as a sexual swoon than ‘As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle / O Antony!’ (V. ii. 311). What has happened in the meantime is of course that Antony has died. The true Liebestod, we realize, is that of the lover who dies second. Only she (it is usually she) can really see dying in terms of joining the other.

And yet even this is not like the death of Isolde: for that, we need a new factor, that did not exist in the consciousness of 1607. We can call it pantheism, if we are clear that it is not the stiff intellectual pantheism of Spinoza and his followers, but an emotional experience that flows out of the Romantic movement. Isolde sees herself disappearing into impersonality: what she is going to do is summed up by the word verhauchen, to melt into a breath. Cleopatra's death involves no loss of identity. ‘I am again for Cyndus to meet Mark Antony’: she is setting out on a very specific experience, full of proper names:

                                                                                Methinks I hear
Antony call, I see him rouse himself
To praise my noble act.

(V. ii. 283)

Such a remark is unimaginable from Wagner's Isolde. She is in a state of ecstasy, but Cleopatra is not; and this awareness of particular experience that Cleopatra retains gives even to this poetry of dying an impression of vitality. Did ever dead lovers intend to be as much alive as these two? ‘Where souls do couch on flowers, we'll hand in hand. / And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze:’ (IV. xiv. 51). It is the other souls who will couch on flowers, while the lovers walk by; and their ‘sprightly port’ makes it clear they will be keeping their individuality.

In Shakespearean tragedy, then, whatever longing there is for the ecstasy of annihilation, is concealed: On the surface, death is resisted, or invoked only in irony. The post-Romantic, even the post-Freudian, world is there, but unconsciously.