The Troubadour Podcast
"It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind." William Wordsworth The Troubadour Podcast invites you into a world where art is conversation and conversation is art. The conversations on this show will be with some living people and some dead writers of our past. I aim to make both equally entertaining and educational.In 1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads, which Wordsworth called an experiment to discover how far the language of everyday conversation is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure. With this publication, he set in motion the formal movement called "Romanticism." 220 years later the experiment is continued on this podcast. This podcast seeks to reach those of us who wish to improve our inner world, increase our stores of happiness, and yet not succumb to the mystical or the subjective.Here, in this place of the imagination, you will find many conversation with those humans creating things that interest the human mind.
The Troubadour Podcast
Exploring the Timeless Allure of Love Through Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet
Unlock the mysteries of love's timeless allure as we promise to guide you through the enchanting world of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet." Discover how this literary classic not only captures the essence of romantic infatuation but also serves as a mirror, reflecting our own experiences and beliefs about love. Delve into the profound influence that Shakespeare's masterpiece continues to wield on our modern-day notions of romance and relationships.
Join me on a literary journey spanning from ancient epics to 12th-century troubadours, all the way to the hallowed sonnets of Petrarch and the intimate dialogues between Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers. Along the way, we'll challenge preconceived notions of love and marriage, pondering whether these institutions are timeless truths or societal constructs that have evolved through the ages. Prepare to be inspired as we draw connections between historical perspectives on love and the frameworks we use to navigate our personal relationships today.
Concluding our exploration with a vibrant discussion of love language and the magic of live theater, we examine how the words of "Romeo and Juliet" gain new life on the stage. The episode reveals that Shakespeare's insights are not exclusive to scholars or the literary elite but resonate with anyone open to engaging with the text. Tune in to enrich your understanding of love's complex tapestry, and let Shakespeare's immortal words become a companion in your quest for happiness and understanding.
I'm going to make a crazy claim that everyone should read Romeo and Juliet if you want to live a fulfilled, happy life. In this video, I will help you to understand why you should read and experience and see Shakespeare focusing on Romeo and Juliet. But I will take one presumption for granted here, and that is that you yeah, you want passionate romantic love in your life. However, you want to understand that, and we'll talk about that as we go. How you understand romantic, passionate love and what it means to you is the point of this video. Now, if it seems crazy to you that everyone should read Romeo and Juliet a 400-year-old play, over 400 years I'm trying to make an even bolder statement that, in order to understand yourself and the world that you inhabit, the people around you, you need to read this play. Read it, study it, inhabit it, understand it, even if you disagree with it.
Speaker 1:Now I'm 38 years old and I'm single, and I've not always been single. There's been times in my life when I wasn't single, and I'm sure you haven't been single, depending on your age. If you walk around the world and you look at people and you talk to people and you see what's out there, you'll notice, not just in terms of partners. You'll notice about the types of advice that's given to people, and there's lots of confusing advice about love. But what you do notice, whatever you believe, is that there is a lot of advice about this whole love thing, or maybe they call it just relationships. Maybe forget about the love, just look for a practical partner that you can merge your accounts, your financial accounts, with, and that's what we're all looking for, right, or is it? What are we looking at? What is all this love stuff really about? Before we get into more of the details of this, of why everyone should read Romeo and Juliet, I want to give you some just kind of really quick, that I'm not going to dig into, but other important reasons why you should be reading Shakespeare, in particular, focusing on this play, romeo and Juliet.
Speaker 1:Reading great literature, including Romeo and Juliet, is the best way to train your consciousness, your consciousness with knowledge, with language. That's what consciousness means the medium by which you interact with the world around you and your internal world, your internal world, your monologue, your psychology, all the things going on in your head, the thoughts in your head and the outer world, the observations you make, the external things you think about with the people in your lives the thoughts about women, about men, about relationships, about job, about career, about what is happiness, what is love, all these types of things. These are all done with language consciousness and you need to train it. Now we live in a wonderful time. I'm recording this at the beginning of May 2024. And we live in a wonderful time where we now have large language models, llms, where we can see. Whether you're in computers, science or not, you can see that inputting certain things into this large language model will get you better or worse results, and we've always known this about computers. But you could see it even more directly with LLMs, large language models. Well, the largest language model in the world is your own consciousness. So you want to train your consciousness, just like you want to train LLMs. And you could train better or worse LLMs, so you could train better or worse mind. Mms, mmms I don't know, I'm just making that up. Mms, you know your consciousness, but that's what the human consciousness is. The human consciousness requires the right kind of inputs if you want to have the best kind of outputs. Shakespeare is the right input and this has been acknowledged for 400 years.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's dig into this Romeo and Juliet thing and let's dig into why you should read Romeo and Juliet. This will not be a full analysis of Romeo and Juliet or any Shakespeare play. This is a video about convincing you of the worth of taking the time to investigate and experience Romeo and Juliet, the play by Shakespeare, and there's many ways to do this. I'll talk about that. This is not a full analysis, but I will get into some analysis. This is I'm trying to motivate you to make this worthwhile and a part of your life. That's what we're talking about here. Now, if you want to have more full analysis, I hope you'll go to troubadourmagcom troubadourmagcom and you can become a member. You can join the Literary Canon Club. You could support my work. There's a lot of things you could do so I can be able to have the time and effort to put into these kinds of creative endeavors to teach you about Shakespeare and other great literary art. Read Romeo and Juliet.
Speaker 1:What's the value to you as an individual person, especially if you don't already love literature? If you're not interested in this, is there any real juice you can squeeze from it to live a better, happier, more fulfilled, practical life where you'll get more out of life and enjoyment. Here are a couple of questions to consider. What is love? How do you define it for yourself? Is it just like you look at someone and you say, oh, I feel something in my stomach, that's love. Or maybe you just had something bad for breakfast or something. Maybe you're just an upset stomach. What is this love thing? It's butterflies. What's butterflies? Oh, you feel a little sweaty when you see someone you love or see someone you're attracted to. Is that attraction? Is that physical lust? Is that just your genes trying to get you to mate with this person so you can have babies? Or it's really nothing about you and your individual desires? So the question is what is love to you? That's an important question. Here's another question, and we're going to be kind of addressing these as we go through this video Is romantic, passionate love real?
Speaker 1:Or is it just a fun game that motivates humans to deal with marriage for the propagation of society? So what's the purpose of love? So what is love? What do you think love is and what's its purpose? What purpose does it serve for you? Here's another question why is love and marriage linked at all?
Speaker 1:Many societies to this day throughout the world do not really link love and marriage. There's still countries in the world where parents will actually still arrange marriages. So is that the way to go? What's the answer here? What is the right way to do this? Maybe that's the way to do it. Maybe love can happen, or some kind of affection that married couples call love. But that's different than how it's purported in the West, where the expectation is that we will have deep, romantic, passionate love before marriage. This is in our movies, this is in our songs, this is in everything that we see around us in the West.
Speaker 1:Is it's encouraging us to find someone that we're passionately in love with and then get married to that person? Not to find someone who's suitably matched, economically right, someone who can help your economic prospects, who can help you make more money, who can help you build an empire. No, no, no. What we tell people to do dominantly although this advice is changing, by the way, the advice is changing. There's a lot of mixed advice today, but what we still dominantly kind of inspire people to do is to find passionate love, someone that you really connect with. What does that mean for you? Okay, but find passionate love, whatever that means to you, and then marry that person. It doesn't matter if it's in the upper echelons of society, the lower echelons of society, your same echelon of society, whatever that's what we tell people. Where does that come from? It's not in history before the Renaissance, before you have. If you look at ancient Greek times, if you look at medieval times, that's not the norm. It's a very new concept. Even in Shakespeare's time it's a new concept that hasn't even quite caught on. It takes still several hundred years before that's a real dominant thing in our culture.
Speaker 1:Here's another question about love. Is love at first sight a real thing? We don't talk about that as much anymore, but some of us may still think about this a little bit. You know, you see someone. You don't know anything about them. You're like I was just walking down the street yesterday and I saw this beautiful woman. I was like, oh wow, do I love that woman? Like was, and I saw this beautiful woman. I was like, oh wow, do I love that woman? Was she just a nice figure? Where does that come from? Do we really think love at first sight is a real thing, or is it just lust? Or is it possible to have love at first sight? Is that a real possibility? What do you think? I think some people really still, whether they will admit it or not, they still really believe that love at first sight is a real possibility. Here's another thing I'm going to talk about. What's the deal with linking love and death? I want you just to think about that for a little bit. If you're not familiar with what I'm talking about, it might make sense or will make sense later.
Speaker 1:So these are some questions to be asking yourself about love when you approach this story, which is the epitome of love. It's an epitome of love story. This is Romeo and Juliet. When you think about, you know, think about Taylor Swift did a song on this you know you're my Romeo and I'm your Juliet and that song, we know that Romeo and Juliet is love. That's what love is. Is those two people in our minds, whether we have known this model or not. So this is the number one reason why you should read and go watch plays of, and watch movies of, and experience over and over and over again this story of Romeo and Juliet is. This is the number one reason, so that you can see for yourself the ultimate model of love, and the reason you want to see this ultimate model of love, encapsulated like that, is so that you can contemplate for yourself this concept, this idea that is so important to us in the West, and you can make a decision if you agree with that or not. But you should make those decisions with all the facts, all the ideas, the best understanding that you can get to.
Speaker 1:So let's look at the first question what is love? What is love itself? One way to look at it is it's what Romeo feels for Juliet and I'm going to give you some quotes later on in this video. But if you read the play and experience it, it's that their connection, their first kiss, their first sight have I loved till now. As Romeo says, the first second he sees Juliet, she teaches the torches to burn brighter. His language changes. This is love. It's the transformative process of seeing another person that does something to you. Now, what is that thing? I don't know. We'll have to think about it and talk about it, but it's there in the play.
Speaker 1:In the play, this view of love, the Romeo-Juliet pure, idealized, passionate yearning for the other person, willing to risk life and limb to be with that person, that form of love is opposed by all the other figures in the play. Take Romeo's friend Mercutio. Mercutio, who's a braggart. He likes to be lewd and crude and he's a little bit playful, he's funny witty. He is a disbeliever in what we can call the religion of love. So Romeo and Juliet are in this religion of love. It's like a religion, and we'll show you that a little bit later but it's a religion for them. I mean, it's the same way that a pilgrim in medieval times will take all the money that they can to make a pilgrimage to Mecca or to some holy shrine to see something once before they die. That's what love is to Romeo and Juliet and I think to some degree it's what it is to us to this day, whether we understand it or not. But that has affected us.
Speaker 1:Mercutio is opposed to that. He thinks love is really just about sex, and he has some of the most lewd remarks in all of Shakespeare and some really fun ones that I'm not going to say. I hope you'll go read it and you might need a little bit of help in reading it. There's lots of different books that will give you some examples of what this is, one that I like, the Norton Shakespeare that gives you tons of notes. So there's no excuse not to have an understanding of this. There's lots of YouTube videos. I'll be creating videos. We live in a resource-rich world when it comes to experiencing this story. I'm trying to give you some motivation to do this for yourself. That's Mercutio. He is a disbeliever. He's a disdainer. He believes in the religion of love. He believes that love is just about sex. It's just about trying to get off, literally. I mean, that's what he thinks it's all about. And he believes that Romeo, even though he's talking about this Juliet, or he's interested in this new lady, it's really just like the other woman that Romeo was interested in at the beginning. So at the beginning of the play, romeo is in love with Rosalind. Is he, or does he just want to have some fun?
Speaker 1:Another character is Juliet's nurse. She's an important character. Juliet's nurse believes that all life is basically about weaning the birth cycle, marriage and death. That's essentially what she's all about. So she does not see love the romantic, idealized version of passionate love that Romeo and Juliet are clearly experiencing that it means something real and personal to Juliet. The nurse does not believe that, and so when you see the kind of advice and the things that the nurse gives to Juliet, this is part of what's going on, but she does not believe in this. So she is another foil. She sees that. Well, no, juliet's just having. You know, she's a young teenager, she's just having a fling. Whatever she's interested in this, we need to get her into something real so she could have an actual baby and propagate the society, which is what she's supposed to do and that's what the nurse is. So the nurse doesn't believe in this idealized, romanticized version of love.
Speaker 1:Juliet's parents they believe that marriage is for the increase of their and Juliet's status. So they're merchants in Verona and they are looking to become more in the higher level class by having Juliet marry Count Paris. So they're basically just merchants, which doesn't have that kind of upper class status at that time, which was important, of course. So they wanted to marry her into this. They were plenty wealthy. They weren't doing it for the money, but that would be another reason to do it. To marry somebody is to get a dowry of money to increase your status money-wise. They have plenty of money. They're looking to get status in society. So all of these different versions are opposed to the Romeo and Juliet center of this play, which is their love. Which is their love.
Speaker 1:And in the famous balcony scene we have Romeo who says the famous line, which you may have even heard somewhere but soft, what light through yonder window breaks. It is the east and Juliet is the sun, s-u-n. Sun. For Romeo, the moment he sees her on that balcony, which he has hopped over a wall and he's gone into the Capulet's household, which if he's caught he's very likely to be killed he goes there and he sees Juliet and he embodies her as the sun which is the center of the universe. So Juliet becomes the center of his universe. Now we may think, oh, this is just flowery language. Okay, it is flowery language. But if it is flowery language, but if you've ever been in love, you know that your language does actually change. Not only does your language change, but it does often feel like this person has become the center of your universe. And that's exactly what Romeo is saying. He's saying that she is the center of his universe.
Speaker 1:Now, now there's questions we need to ask about this and we'll ask them a little bit later. And one of the notions to consider is is this just a quaint 16th century? By the way, the play is written in 1595. Is this just a quaint, late 16th century renaissance conception for folk people to make them feel a little better or give them something to think about and oh, that was very pretty and then walk home and live their dreary lives. It's just for them, but it's not for us, it's not practical, there's nothing for us.
Speaker 1:Well, let me tell you a story that just happened to me. Now, this type of thing I hear all the time, but this literally just happened to me a week ago of recording this and I want you to know. So I was at a coffee shop actually writing some of the notes that I would be for this video and another video on Romeo and Juliet that I want to create, and I was in a coffee shop it's a little room and this is in Austin, texas and there was these college girls to my right in a table and they were talking a little loud. I was not trying to eavesdrop, I promise, but I overheard what they were saying and you know what they were talking about. They were talking about the romance novels that they were reading and they were talking about all the love stuff and what they want from this love stuff. And they want love and they want to see that guy who looks at them and he's transformed by looking at them, like that guy who looks at them and he's transformed by the looking at them. That's how they were talking.
Speaker 1:These girls in 2024, these teenage college student girls in 2024, were talking about the model of love that Romeo and Juliet set, or put as the pinnacle 400 years earlier, which did not exist in 1100 AD or 1000 AD. This is a new thing and, again, it wasn't even the standard right away. It took a while for this to happen, but this is the world we're living in now. Now I want to keep giving you this idea. So this important idea that we're living in a post-Shakespearean world isn't just about Shakespeare has given us a few words that we use, which he has. That's not it. It's not just that he helped shape the language that we use today. That's part of it, but that's not the main thing. The main thing is that we're living in a post-Shakespearean world, that we live in this world, that he has been the arc pinnacle of the religion of love, not in Romeo and Juliet and elsewhere. That is still part of who we are today. Let me give you yet another example.
Speaker 1:So when I was 11 years old, I went to a movie and I had an experience that was kind of life-changing for me. And it was life-changing because even as an 11-year-old boy I'm an only child I've been very curious about girls. I'm sure many of you are. Whether you're straight or not doesn't matter. I think there's just a curiosity about the opposite sex. As a straight guy, even as an 11-year-old, I was definitely curious about the opposite sex. I remember walking out of this mega movie at this time and having a new understanding of women. It didn't occur to me at the time, I didn't understand it at the time, but it's always been like a thing that I think back to, about. You know, as I grew up and started interacting with more girls and more women, I started thinking about this as, like this is an important point to consider of what's the difference between boys and girls. So I went to this movie with my mother. My father, by the way, would not go because he said, I quote oh, I already know how that ends. So he's like he doesn't want to go because he knows how it ends.
Speaker 1:I'm watching this film and I remember at the time when I was 11, thinking this is a cool disaster flick, this is a fun, disaster adventure movie. I didn't put it in those words, but I thought of it as like oh, disaster adventure movie. I didn't put it in those words, but I thought of it as like, oh, this is fun, this is great, oh, this is cool. You know, action is exciting, exhilarating. What struck me was what happened after the film. I was in the lobby and I saw pouring out of the theater woman after woman after woman and girls so girls of all ages and women, their mothers, their sisters, whatever, sobbing, absolutely sobbing, and I didn't shed a tear. I was like what's going on, what is happening, what did I miss? And I thought, even at the time, I remember thinking, sure, that was a kind of sad ending, but I mean, come on, this is a bit much. We've seen sad movies before.
Speaker 1:Well, let's look at the plot of this film. Maybe we can get some answers as to what's the difference between girls and boys by looking at the plot a little bit, and maybe it will help me understand and help you understand, why I, as an 11-year-old boy, saw things differently than girls did and women do. We have a story about a young woman who is promised, a young teenage woman who is promised to marry a man of a higher station, of a higher wealth status than she is, a man who loves her but who she does not love. Then we have a poor boy from the other side of the tracks, a lower class of society, who wins a ticket into her world, into their upper class world, at a card game, at a chance card game. So we have fate here, we have chance. He ends up in their world.
Speaker 1:He ends up spotting this woman and falling in love with her at first sight. When the two, the young woman and the young man, meet for the first time, they quickly fall in love. The woman's parents, fiancé and others try to keep these two apart, but they are magnetically drawn to each other. Soon their love escalates, leading to the consummation of their love. They make love Immediately. Immediately post-coitus, a disaster occurs and they fight to remain together as their entire universe collapses and crumbles around them Literally in this movie crumbles around them. In the end, the boy sacrifices himself to save his lover.
Speaker 1:Now pause here and tell me if you can know this story, write it down in the comments. If you know the movie I'm talking about. This is the highest grossing romance film in film history and it's one of the highest grossing films, adjusted for inflation, in history. You might have guessed it at this point. This is Titanic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as Jack and Rose. Caprio and Kate Winslet as Jack and Rose.
Speaker 1:Now, as an 11-year-old boy, I just saw a cool, awesome disaster film that included a hot, naked chick. That's what I saw, but the women and girls I watched out of there saw something very different. This is actually a story of Titanic about ill-fated lovers who meet and fall in love, while societal traditions and expectations work to keep them apart, and it all inevitably falls into disaster and death. It is Romeo and Juliet set on a shipwreck, rather than the fates and the gods intervening, which is what we get at the prologue of Romeo and Juliet. We have an ill-fated voyage on a historical ship, so we know that the prologue, the beginning, the opening of Titanic is we're going into the history of the ship, so it's a historical ship that we know, even if somehow you didn't know the Titanic had sunk. When you go to watch this movie, they make it clear by the beginning 15 minutes is them diving into the sunken ship. So it's like 15 minutes is them diving into the sungan ship. So it's very clear that this is ending in disaster, right. So it's historical powers that will destroy their love.
Speaker 1:Rather than two warring houses, we have a boy, which is what you get in Romeo and Juliet two, the Capulets and the Montagues. We have a boy, jack, from the wrong side of the tracks. He's poor and a wanderer. And then we have a well-to-do woman trying to elevate her status, or her mother's trying to elevate her status in society and her wealth. This is happening in 1912. These two people, jack and Rose, are separated not by the rivalry between two families of equal status, but rivalry between two classes poor, the lower class and the upper class. But it amounts to the same thing. In Romeo and Juliet, juliet's parents, the Capulets, wish to see Juliet marry a count and thus elevate their status and station in Verona. Rose's mother in Titanic wants to see Rose marry a very wealthy man so as to raise their station in life. Jack, an artist who paints naked women, is transformed into a selfless man who saves Rose.
Speaker 1:Romeo and Juliet is a Lothario, a playboy at the beginning, whose love for women seems superficial and fleeting. Everyone's shocked when he talks to them about Juliet. When he talks about his love for Juliet, romeo goes to the friar and tells him of his love and they want to get married, and he says, oh, lovers fleeting, you're a fleeting lover. But Romeo says, oh, have I loved till now? So has he really loved? When he first sees Juliet, and again just as the beginning of Shakespeare's play, we hear a prologue about a pair of star-crossed lovers who take their life, which is quoted in the beginning. So in Titanic we see a prologue about a group of treasure hunters searching for the heart of the sea, which is basically mythical in the Titanic, when they uncover the story of these ill-fated lovers, which is at the heart of the Heart of the Sea.
Speaker 1:To repeat, this is one of the reasons you should read William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. It is the model of true, passionate, romantic love that has enraptured the Western mind for over 400 years. Titanic is still considered the greatest romance story, a story that is basically Romeo and Juliet set on a shipwreck. Now I want to make clear it is not that you have no choice in your conception of love in relation to this, but it is that if you're raised or into part of the Western culture at all, even if you disagree with this conception of love. You are disagreeing with it in relation to it. So it's possible for you to diverge from this, to have polyamory to be about practical matters. It doesn't matter. Yeah, all those things are definitely possible, but you diverge from it. Does that make sense what I'm saying? You're still forming your conception of love, romance, marriage in relation to Shakespeare, whether you understand him or not, which is why you should understand the core of it, to understand for yourself your own conception of what is love.
Speaker 1:Is romantic love possible and necessary and important or not? You are shaped by him, whether you acknowledge him or not, and the better you understand Shakespeare, the better you understand yourself, those around you. You know I mentioned those young college girls. Hey, if you're a straight guy and you're not thinking about this stuff, I think you're not thinking about the kind of language and things necessary to actually attract a young lady. Because they are thinking about this. Now people may say, well, maybe by the time they're 40, if they're still single, they're going to be thinking something different. Yeah, that's possible. Maybe love will die by that point. Maybe the idea of romantic love, they'll give that up, maybe. But that's a question you have to think about. Is that good? Should they give it up or not? Now, this model is not present in one high-grossing movie.
Speaker 1:The importance of this idea of love is prevalent in the fact that pretty much every single movie, even if it doesn't really make sense an action movie, a mystery movie requires a love story. It has to have some kind of what do we have to love? We have to give them a reason. They're doing a show called the Office, right? It's one of my favorite TV shows. When you listen to the interviews. What's the heart of that romance? It's of that show that gets you to deal with all the crazy, frenetic, stupid things that Michael and other characters do Dwight do on that show. What is it that it's the heart of that show? It's the Jim and Pam romance. That's what keeps you going, is to see, although they're not supposed to be together, she's engaged to somebody else and there's all these roadblocks in the way, but they have this deep, passionate love and it finally connects right. That's what keeps you going and that's the heart of the story.
Speaker 1:That requirement is not a requirement you get in art and literature pre this time, pre the Shakespearean, medieval or Renaissance era. This is a new thing in the world and in the West, and it happens in the West, not in everywhere. Okay, now let's look at this question of why is love and marriage linked the way it is today, which again I want to stress, it has not always been linked that way, but we live in an era, as I said at the beginning, that takes as gospel this idea that love and marriage are linked. And in fact, if you talk or listen to people on the political right or even the political left, they seem to be warring against this to some degree. People on the political, conservative Christian right seem to be saying something along the lines of you know, it's the right thing to do to get married, you should do that. If they're Christian and they're honest, they'll say because God says so.
Speaker 1:But that might give you some reasons like society, it's important for society. We need to anchor everything around the family which starts with the man and a woman. That's their conception of it and that's the depth of their conceptions. You should do it because you should do it and essentially it's because it's better quote unquote in their views for society. It's better for, and they'll give you practical reasons, like it'll be better for your practical, you know, economic status that if you have that stability, you'll be able to raise yourself as though economics is the only thing that matters in life, especially when we're living in the wealthiest, easiest time to make money in the history of the planet.
Speaker 1:And this is the model that they can give to you. It's like well, you'll be able to make money. It's like I'm 38 and I'm single. I make plenty of money. So what are you talking about? There's a lot of people like that.
Speaker 1:This is not true, that you need that for making money. How much money do you need to make? Like, what are you talking about? You want me to make 10 times what I make? Why? So I can have that? Like it doesn't make sense. So what's their real motivation here? I think what they're really saying is they're motivated by duty. So this all comes down to this. It's your duty to God and to the propagation of the species to have babies, and also to the propagation in their minds of certain cultural values in passing on to your kids. So they put family values at the archetype, but not romantic passion. Romantic passion they don't care about Now on the left. I should have put that over here On the left, what I hear and put in the comments if you disagree with me.
Speaker 1:I hear them basically saying do whatever you want, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you want to be LGBTQ plus matter. It doesn't matter if you want to be LGBTQ plus whatever, it doesn't matter if you want to be polyamory, it doesn't matter if you don't want to be, if you don't believe in love, none of that matters. Just do whatever you want. I'm sorry, but that's a non-answer. It's not helpful. You can't say, oh, just do whatever you want. What do I decide that? What kind of tools do I need to even build? What's right or wrong and how to do that? And I'm not going to sit here and tell you which one of these is right or wrong. I don't think either side has either thing correct. But my point is you need to build these tools for yourself, which is why you should read Shakespeare Now.
Speaker 1:If we search back into history, even in the West, we will not see the notion of love that we've been talking about, this highly idealized romantic vision of love. In ancient Greco-Roman literature, we see love depicted as a metaphysical force inherent in reality, as in Ovid's Metamorphoses, where the whole book is just a series of vignettes of the way that a man will maybe chase, or a god will chase and conquer women, how this changes the shape of society. But it's not this romantic. Oh thou art the most beautiful, the son of my life. It's none of that stuff, it's just I'm going to get you, it's lust, it's power, that's what it's all about. Love is often depicted as an agent of chaos or madness, and that's how it's often think of. If you follow love, you're probably mad and it's mostly about eroticism or sex of one shape or another. Now there is Plato's Symposium, which is an interesting discussion, where he does discuss love and he does purport that love should be a high ideal of falling in love with another's beauty and goodness. But I don't think that this notion really seems to catch on, not anytime soon. It takes a while.
Speaker 1:I think Homer in Iliad and Odyssey depicts love mostly as it's not that talked about or considered. As far as I can see in my readings of Iliad and Odyssey you do have. Achilles is tempered by love, a certain kind of love, and that's the love of father. That's a big thing that tempers his rage. After his friend is killed, odysseus yearns more to return. The motivation for Odysseus returning home to Ithaca is, yes, he has a beautiful wife, or not necessarily considered or talked about as beautiful, necessarily, but she's the ideal wife in a certain way. But really it's her connection with his hearth and home. It's the hearth and home that's as important as the woman herself, and I don't see much about the individual passion he might feel for that particular woman other than the fact that she's very good at tricking these suitors into not marrying any of them. So there's a lot in ancient Greek about familiar or lustful love, not the idealized love. Even in their gods, venus or Aphrodite is a goddess, not really of the idealized romance we're talking about in Romeo and Juliet, but of erotic desire. Her son, eros, or Cupid, can strike you with a passion that makes you lose your mind in desire for another person. Hundreds of years later, thousands of years later, the great Beowulf text, which is, in the Dark Ages, one of the few texts that we have, uses the term love basically just in relation to Lord Father Land.
Speaker 1:Now, in the 12th century, something odd happened in the West, in the south of France, these poets began singing songs of love. That was quite peculiar historically. These poems were aimed at women that the poets could not actually be with. They couldn't get with these women. They were often married women in particular, and these poets seemed to praise the women for their beauty, their stature, what they made the poet feel, but there was no actualization, there was no making love in the sense of physicalization, and you know what I'm talking about. There's not that in these poems.
Speaker 1:Now, one of the most famous stories of these, of this type, of this kind of genre, is the Tristan and Isolde story, where a young Tristan, a young lord, tells his king, his prince, his lord, about a beautiful woman he met on his Tristan's adventures. The lord demands that Tristan bring this woman back for the lord, the king, to marry. And on the journey back, tristan and Isolde accidentally drink a love potion which magically makes them fall madly in love with one another. She, isolde, marries the king, but Tristan and Isolde meet in private. When the Lord finds out about this, he banishes Tristan, who then wanders around for a while and remarries, but he remarries a woman he doesn't love. Then, on his deathbed, isolde returns and he dies Now and that's it. And so there's a linking between love and death. Marriage is not something where love is possible, that marriage is done for practical reasons, but that we still want this dramatic love.
Speaker 1:This was a very popular romance and a very popular story for a long time. Most interesting was this notion that idealized love was almost superior to real, actualized love, that there's a sense where the fact that they couldn't be together and all the obstacles that got in the way was a beautiful, wonderful thing. The inability to be together was part of the story. Now, about 100 years or so after the story first became popular, as far as we know, an Italian poet by the name of Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch, began publishing sonnets and he formalized this sonnet thing and we'll talk about sonnets in a moment and these sonnets of love to a woman named Laura. So all these sonnets there's I think, 366 of these sonnets he wrote that we have, I believe, and he wrote them pretty much. 320 of them or so are about Laura, this one woman. This was likely a real person that he did not have. We have Petrarch's journals, or some of them.
Speaker 1:Now the Laura of the poems was an idealized version of the real Laura, which he never slept with or was actually with. She was married to someone else. So just as an example, whereas Laura's hair surely in real life Laura's hair would have had split ends, would have been occasionally messy, problematic, I'm sure sometimes when she did it up it looked great. But a lot of times your hair isn't perfect. Don't talk to me about hair. So that's the Laura in real life, but the Laura of Petrarch's sonnets, his poems, always had golden tresses, pushed gently by an envious wind. It's this idealization, this modeling of her, this perfect being, despite the fact that in reality, of course, she's not always like that.
Speaker 1:Petrarch is the poet-scholar who rediscovered Cicero's letters, cicero the Roman statesman, the ancient Roman statesman, and in them saw a whole new worldview, in this ancient Roman worldview, and Petrarch is a key figure in the Renaissance. This is the rebirth of classical Greco-Roman ideas and values and the sonnet is a big part of that. The sonnet that he did, that he created, and the way that they looked at things, which was about this woman, although it was idealized, versus just the Christian way of just thinking about only God and Jesus and contemplating that in the heavens. He's now contemplating life birds, beauty, hair, those things, birds, beauty, hair, those things. Now this sonnet form of poetry became a craze in Europe by Shakespeare's time, in the late 1500s. It was a mania. Now. This was the way that the gentry and royalty wooed one another. You would be judged by your ability to praise a woman for her beauty and loveliness and goodness, and no one was better at this than William Shakespeare by the early 17th century. He had established very firmly the religion of love, and one should consider the religion of love in relation to the religion of Christianity, as these kind of grew together to some degree, or they came together, but that's going to be a discussion for another video.
Speaker 1:At the center of Romeo and Juliet is a love language, unlike anything spoken on stage then or since. Again, romeo, a Lothario, a playboy, is smitten by Juliet. How do we know? It is more than his previous lust for Rosalind, the language of their interaction. Okay, now we're going to get into a sonnet reading. Now I'm going to read the sonnet and I'm going to explain it to you.
Speaker 1:The sonnet is the first of a couple sonnets in Romeo and Juliet, but I want you to consider and remember something that I've told you before about the sonnet craze. This was the way you wooed somebody. This is the idea of love. I mean. The equivalent today, I guess, would be sharing music about love with someone you're interested in. You send them a song that you love, or maybe you even sing them badly a song you love. This is the kind of idea going on is you're trying to woo this person with the way they did it back then. If you were a gentry of this time is you would woo it, I think.
Speaker 1:Another equivalent this is a side note another equivalent today is the way that young especially if you look at educated people and not just young people, but people in their 30s talk about their psychological needs and desires in their early parts of the relationship. That's the same thing as the sonnet thing, and we may look at this as like. This is just normal behavior to like oh yeah, here are my love languages, here's the things that I like, and talking about your psychology, essentially in the early stages of this relationship, right when you're starting to date, and that's part of the behavior of dating these days. It's a little bit odd if you think about it. If you really step aside, you start to think about it. You're talking about your psychology to someone you just met. Okay, well, that's what they did back then, though, is they didn't have psychology. This is a pre-Freud era, so what did they have? They had sonnets, they had poetry, they had language. Now, I like the language part. I don't mind the psychology either, but I think it gives you something to think about. I'm not going to tell you my way of wooing women, but you could probably guess that it has something to do with language. So let's talk about this love language between Romeo and Juliet.
Speaker 1:The thing that makes this interesting is that sonnets are generally read on a page right, or you might write it in a letter and send it to a lady or something. Now in here we have the sonnet coming to life, because you have to. When you're reading Shakespeare and you're looking at this. Here's a tip of reading Shakespeare you need to picture the scene, which is why you should go to a play, watch a movie, so you could see these out. When you see something that strikes you, go to YouTube and you could see every single one of these lines has been done before and you need to kind of set up this whole scenario and understand it, because this understand what's going on to the best of your ability and this is a lifetime practice. But when you do this, you get a sense of the coming to life of these words that Shakespeare's trying to do on his stage. So, remember, you have sonnets which are just kind of flat on a page and there's still the craze you give it to a woman, maybe with a flower, and she reads it. It's like, oh, it's beautiful, but now Shakespeare's going to put it into the mouths of Romeo and Juliet.
Speaker 1:So this sonnet is the first time Romeo and Juliet speak to one another. So, unlike other characters who might speak in normal prose, normal for Shakespearean language, or they might speak in a kind of versified language where there's a rhythm to the way that they speak, here we're getting a formal sonnet as their first formal meeting between the two and we'll talk about what the son that they speak. Here we're getting a formal sonnet as their first formal meeting between the two and we'll talk about what the sonnet's about. So I'm going to read the sonnet and I'll tell you who's saying what as we go, and then we'll talk about the. We'll kind of quickly analyze what's going on, and this will. I'm trying to. Even though this is a video about motivating you, I also want to give you a little bit of tips and understanding. So before we read this sonnet, it's helpful to know that they're at a masquerade ball.
Speaker 1:This is at the Capulet's house. Romeo and his friend Mercutio have kind of barged in with their masks. They're not supposed to be there. They're Montagues, they're the enemy. And then Romeo sees this beautiful woman and he says she doth make the torches burn brighter. And then Juliet eventually sees him, and then they meet, and then they say this sonnet to each other and how you portray this on stage we'll talk about in a second, is very important, but let's look at these lines.
Speaker 1:So Romeo starts and he says Again if you don't understand what's going on, I'll tell you in a minute. Juliet says Good, pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much. Which mannerly devotion shows in this? For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, and palm to palm is holy palmer's kiss. Romeo responds have not saints saint lips and holy palmers too, juliet? I pilgrim lips that they must use in prayer, romeo. Oh then, dear saint, let lips do. What hands do? What do hands do? They pray? Grant thou, grant you lest faith turn to despair. Lest faith turn to despair, juliet. Saints, do not move though. Grant for prayer's sake, romeo. Then move not while my prayers affect. I take the kiss. Okay.
Speaker 1:A sonnet has a setup in the first couple lines where it's kind of asking a question, and in this case Romeo is saying a question. And in this case Romeo is saying if I profane, if I do wrong, if I am outside of the bounds of a religion with my unworthy hand my hand is dirty it's not worthy of the holiness of Christianity. If you think about Christian terms right, the holy shrine so think about a shrine where you can't go near the shrine. There's like roped off borders. A shrine is special, it's sacred, you're not supposed to go there. But then he's saying if I profane, if I do this, it's conditional.
Speaker 1:The holy shrine, the gentle sin this is my sin is this. And he's going to tell you what his sin is. What is his sin? It's my lips. There are two blushing pilgrims Again. So this is all set, this love is all set in a holy Christian religious context of shrine and his lips wanting to touch, kiss the shrine. My two blushing pilgrims did already stand to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. So I'm going to smooth away my sin, my roughness, the things that are wrong with me, with a smooth kiss.
Speaker 1:Okay, now Juliet is going to respond, and her response is important, of course, but this is all part of one sonnet that goes together. She says to him good, pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much. Don't call your hand so rough and evil and bad. Which mannerly devotion shows in this For saints? So now she's a saint, he's the pilgrim. Right, saint pilgrim Woman is saint, he's the pilgrim, she's the devoted thing. Right in this scenario.
Speaker 1:For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch.
Speaker 1:So pilgrims can touch with their hands and palm to palm in a very holy, sacred, little light. Touch is holy palmer's kiss. So you know again they're talking about this and I have to say I mean this is so good, Look at what your mouth does. Palm to palm, pilgrim, like, there's so many Ps in this. It's a kiss baby. This is how great this language is. The deeper you dig into this stuff, it all meshes and there's a sound and meaning that unite together and comes that we just don't see today anymore.
Speaker 1:And then Romeo responds have not saint lips and holy palmers too? And then Romeo responds have not saint lips and holy palmers too? So he's saying if you're a saint and you're this shrine, you have lips and holy palmers. Right, they go together. And she says I pilgrim lips that they must use in prayer, right? She's like all right, I'm going to calm down, right. And then Romeo says oh then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do. Wow, that's a line, man, I mean. Come on. And they say they pray. Well, again, we have this connecting thing. So we have the touching of these two people. Saint pilgrim, saint pilgrim, saint pilgrim, have to touch with their hands. Grant you, lest faith turn to despair. And she said oh, saints, do not move though, grant for prayer's sake. And Romeo then says then move not, while my prayers affect, I take and they kiss.
Speaker 1:Now there's a lot that could be said about the characterization of these two people. So Romeo has met his match, juliet has met her match. They are equal. This is all symbolized in this moment and it all makes sense, and they connect, and this is the high ideal of love, with the barest minimum of physicalization. This idealized love sits at the core of Romeo and Juliet which, remember, is a tragedy All around there. Perfect, beautiful love, are people, societies, families, governments, interests, all set out to kill this love and these lovers?
Speaker 1:When lovers speak after finding one another in real life, when you find someone that you truly love, your language changes. Just admit it to yourself. Today we don't speak in heightened sonnets such as this, of course, which is really too bad in my view, but we do speak in a different voice, a lover's voice. Our words change. We say things to our lover that we would never say to the outside world and would likely be quite embarrassed if people heard us say these things that we say to our lover in the sheets or something pillow talk. How often have you heard the trope of a woman saying of some burly, mean, rugged, gruff, tough man, warrior? Oh, he's a sweetie really. No, he's not a sweetie really. He's a sweetie to you, lady.
Speaker 1:So one of the important questions in the play is can this love persist? Can this perfect love persist amidst the societal expectations and hindrances? So back to our reason for reading and experiencing Romeo and Juliet. It is the ultimate portrayal of love in literature and art, and I will say that your reaction to Romeo's love as just as one example, as well as Juliet's love, as well as the nurse's view, and all these things, says a lot about you. Now, I don't mean to be mean to people, but it does say something about you what you think about this.
Speaker 1:Do you think Romeo is silly and just trying to sleep with another woman, or has he truly been transformed by love? Can love at first sight really happen, as we said? Do you believe that or not? Or can it persist after the union? Does it die? This is another real notion in real life that we struggle with as humans. We struggle with the idea that, you know, I have this. When I was young, I had this romantic love. I was passionate, but then we, you know, we finally got together. We were sleeping together, we even dated for a while, we lived together and all that died and just became this practical merging of banking accounts. Well, I'm going to put it out there that maybe there's a reason why among married couples, adultery is so high because we want passion. And if you can't figure out how to persist in the passion, maybe marriage isn't the right thing for you, or you don't understand marriage and love and what you or your partner wants, which is why you should read Romeo and Juliet.
Speaker 1:Now, shakespeare has answers to these. He thinks that either lovers die or love itself must die. And the prince says at the end of the play go hence to talk of these sad things. This is again an important thing. Shakespeare's speaking to you and trying to get you to go and talk about these things, to think about these sad things. There's a reason for this. The main reason again I want to repeat this that you should read Romeo and Juliet is to see and hear and understand the best depiction of the religion of love which has enraptured the Western mind for over 400 years.
Speaker 1:And I wish to leave you with one other reason to read Romeo and Juliet, or actually a couple little side reasons. It will give you a lifetime of entertainment, it will elevate your life. It is the core of a good education. It will provide meaning to your life and to your love life, and it will give you something to contemplate. In other words, it is sublime, elevated, heightened intellectual, spiritual value to you as a human. Your life will be elevated. Without this, you're in the muck. With this, you're in the heavens. It's your choice.
Speaker 1:Shakespeare's plays are meant to be seen and heard, not read. The reason to read them is to assist in your hearing of them. So let me repeat you should read this play. Listen to my courses, go, listen to other YouTube videos. Buy Norton, buy Folgers, get the notes. Understand this this is not a one-time endeavor. It's a lifetime endeavor and once you read it and have a little bit of understanding of it, once you can watch plays over and over again and get infinitely different things from them over and over again.
Speaker 1:The sonnet that I read from you with Romeo and Juliet can be done in infinite different ways and there might be some that you like, some that you don't. The better you have of your own understanding of what you like about it. And, oh, I like that performance in the 1969 version of Romeo and Juliet that won an Academy Award. I like that. But I don't like this one that I just saw at this local theater. I do like this one. That one at the local theater really touched me and I loved it, and that's part of the joy of live theater also is that it's live and it's two people right in front of you speaking to you with their own voice and experiencing something. It's very different than movies or anything else.
Speaker 1:This is not a product for the elite. It's specifically to anyone with an engaging and active mind, anybody. I don't care what you are, you don't have to go to Harvard or you don't have to go to school at all, just have an active mind and want to know you can do it. There are plenty of resources to help you get more out of Shakespeare and, as you progress, you will have a lifetime ally in your search for meaning in your life and in your enjoyment and happiness of this short time that we have on earth. While science and technology may allow us and help us to live longer which is a good thing Shakespeare helps us to make life worth living Living. Orchestra PLAYS.
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