4. Relationship

Romance

Romance PDF

As Old As Civilization

Like death and meaning, love lies at the heart of Western literature and poetry. We see the role of love early on in the Ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh (where a courtesan lures the wild-man Enkidu into the city of Uruk, and where Ishtar's jealousy is catastrophic), in the Hebrew Bible (the bride and groom in The Song of Songs, Samson and Delilah, Jacob and Rachel, etc.) and in the Greek and Roman epics: in the Iliad the Trojan War starts because Paris runs away with the married Helen; in the Odyssey Odysseus is offered eternal love with a goddess yet makes an epic journey to get back to his mortal wife Penelope; in Aristophane's Lysistrata women withhold sex until men stop fighting; in Virgil's Aeneid Dido falls in love with Aeneas and throws herself on her own funeral pyre when he leaves her, etc.

Love is also central to late Medieval and early Modern literature, especially to the romances of the chivalric or courtly tradition (for example, the affair between Lancelot and Guinevere tears apart the Round Table).

🔹

‘Romance’

1. Romance or romantic today usually refers to love relationships involving strong emotions and often sex.

2. Romantic in a literary context refers to the period from the end of the 18th C. to around 1832. This Romantic period is characterized by heightened emotion and idealism — in contrast to the rationalism of the 18th C. (often referred to as The Age of Reason) and the alleged staidness of the Victorian Period (mid to late 19th C.). Major Romantic writers include Austen and the Bronte sisters, and major poets include Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth (first generation) and Keats, Shelley and Byron (second generation).

3. The Romance tradition and The Romance refer to a Medieval tradition involving knights, ladies, a stylized chivalric and courtly relation between the sexes, old Celtic magic, Aurthurian legend, etc.

The idea of spiritual — as opposed to physical — love is crucial to the Romance and courtly tradition, key elements of which are linked to Christianity, the chivalric code, Arthurian romance, troubadour poets from eleventh century Southern France, Eleanor of Aquitaine (12th C.), and Fourteenth Century Italian poets such as Petrarch and Dante.

One important aspect of the courtly tradition is the spiritual elevation of the woman, which reaches a peak in the writing of Alighieri Dante (1265-1321). Dante’s epic poem The Divine Comedy links Classical and Christian literary traditions in many ways, one of these being the way in which Virgil (the Classical poet) guides Dante (the Christian poet) down and out of Hell. Because Virgil isn't Christian he can't guide Dante to Heaven, and so Beatrice (who is Christian) is called down from Heaven to guide Dante up the Mountain of Purgatory and into Paradise. 

Beatrice becomes a model for the unattainable, heavenly woman who guides man from his sinful nature up to Heaven. Curiously, this most idealized of women, is also a real woman, Beatrice Portinari. At the age of nine Dante fell in love with her (she was eight at the time) and stayed in love with her all his life, even after she married. In this way, she might be seen as the typical Lady of the courtly tradition -- married, unattainable, desirable, to be respected and served.

Here’s a sonnet Dante wrote (in La Vita Nuova or The New Life, 1295) on the death of one of Beatrice's friends. In his preamble to the unnamed sonnet, Dante writes, "it pleased the Master of the Angels to call into His glory a damsel, young and of a gentle presence, who had been very lovely in the city I speak of: and I saw her body lying without its soul among many ladies, who held a pitiful weeping." For practical purposes, I have given the poem a title.

"Love's Grief"

Weep, Lovers, since Love’s very self does weep, / And since the cause for weeping is so great; / When now so many ladies, of such estate / In worth, show with their eyes a grief so deep: / For Death, the lout, has laid his leaden sleep / Upon a lady who was fair of late, / Defacing all our earth should celebrate, — / Yea all save virtue, which the soul does keep. / Now listen how much Love did honour her. / I myself saw him in his proper form / Bending above the motionless sweet dead, / And often gazing into Heaven; for there / The soul now sits which when her life was warm / Dwelt with the joyful beauty that is fled. / (From The New Life or La Vita Nuova, 1295, translation by Dante Gabriel Rossetti — modernized by RYC)

🔹

The Impossible Woman

The idea of woman as evil temptress is at once opposite and complementary to the notion of woman as heavenly saviour. Woman as temptress goes back to many sources, such as Eve or Delilah in the Bible or Circe in The Odyssey. Since men have dominated literature historically, it could well be that the ideas of woman as chaste and heavenly and woman as lascivious and evil are simply a double projection of male fantasy. The Eagles express this possibility succinctly in the song, “One of These Nights”: "I’m looking for the daughter of the Devil himself, / I’m looking for an angel in white. / I’m looking for a woman who’s a little of both; / I can see her, but she’s nowhere in sight."

Virginia Woolf notes in A Room of One's Own (1929) that in the past women were represented by men, yet were seldom in a position economically and spatially (they require a room — besides the kitchen — of their own to write in) to give a full or rounded account of themselves. As a result,

[a] very queer, composite being thus emerges [in earlier literature]. Imaginatively [the woman] is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

Two more recent takes on gender roles in Cupid’s game of love can be found in the Portishead’s lyric, “Glory Box” and in Meredith Brook’s “Bitch”:

I'm so tired of playing / Playing with this bow and arrow / Gonna give my heart away / Leave it to the other girls to play / For I've been a temptress too long / Just give me a reason to love you / Give me a reason to be a woman / I just wanna be a woman / From this time, unchained / We're all looking at a different picture / Through this new frame of mind / A thousand flowers could bloom / Move over, and give us some room

I hate the world today / You're so good to me / I know but I can't change / Tried to tell you / But you look at me like maybe / I'm an angel underneath / Innocent and sweet // Yesterday I cried / You must have been relieved / To see the softer side / I can understand how you'd be so confused / I don't envy you / I'm a little bit of everything / All rolled into one

In literature there’s a great deal of range in the way women are treated by their male lovers. Back in the 17th Century John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” idealizes lovers in an extreme way: the poet must go on a journey yet he tells his love that their two spirits “endure not yet / A breach, but an expansion, / Like gold to airy thinness beat.” The opposite extreme can also be seen in the 17th Century in Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress,” where the physical beauty or sexuality of the woman seems the poet’s main motive, and he is not beneath using a combination of logic, exaggeration, and threat to get what he wants. In this sense he is very much like Tirso de Molina's original figure of Don Juan, who is a ruthless womanizer. Robert Browning’s 19th Century poem “My Last Duchess” takes this a step further, where the man’s ego crushes any prospective love, and the woman almost literally becomes a sex object.  

In “My Mistress' Eyes,” Shakespeare comes between the extremes of woman as celestial being and woman as sex object, and arrives at a realistic perspective when he says that his “mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” and yet he loves her dearly. He adds, “I never saw a goddess go: / My mistress, when she walks, walks on the ground.” A similar tension between woman as ideal and woman as reality comes into Spenser’s sonnet “One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand.”  Pay particular attention to the dialogue, in which the woman is the one who argues against the poet putting her on a pedestal. While the poet does allow her a quatrain, he ends the poem with his own sestet in which he at once silences the woman and idealizes her, putting himself clearly centre-stage:

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
‘Vain man,’ said she, ‘that dost in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise.’
‘Not so,’ (quod I); ‘let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.’

Cervantes' character Don Quixote and Byron’s version of Don Juan both work against the idea of chivalric love, yet in different ways: Don Quixote thinks of himself as a knight in shining armor, yet he’s in fact a senile old man who can't tell the difference between a damsel in distress and a prostitute; Byron changes the character of Don Juan so that he loves women instead of abusing them. There’s no question of him being sent to Hell since, unlike Molina’s Don Juan, he isn’t an evil seducer and murderer.

In the following timeline I list some of the works which portray women in a way that’s at odds with the courtly or chivalric tradition of putting them on pedestals and treating them as if they were either angels or demons.                     

In striking a blow against idealized love, Cervantes borrows from the picaresque tradition, in which the main character is a picaro, that is, a two-dimensional rogue who travels from adventure to adventure. Don Quixote is strongly influenced by this tradition, which started in 16th Century Spain. Like the picaro, Don Quixote goes from one adventure to the next, and yet he develops psychologically in a rounded way that we don’t see in the picaresque. This psychological development signals a type of realism, and is central to the idea of the realistic novel as it develops in 18th Century England.  

🔹

“Love at First Sight”

In the following excerpts from Romeo and Juliet (1597) the two Verona youths see each other for the first time at a party. Juliet (a Capulet) and Romeo (a Montague) fall in love without knowing that they belong to families that are at war with each other. The following three excerpts are from Act 1, scene 5. I've added the rhyme scheme for the second excerpt to emphasize how poetic form (here a sonnet) can be integrated into dramatic structure. I’ve also included a song from the Zeffirelli film version.

Romeo [sees Juliet across the room]: 
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear —
Beauty too rich for use, for Earth too dear.
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows
As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows.
The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand
And, touching hers, make blessèd my rude hand.
Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight,
For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.

❧

"What is a Youth?" (in Zeffirelli’s R & J; Nino Rota; lyrics, Eugene Walter)

What is a youth? Impetuous fire / What is a maid? Ice and desire / The world wags on / A rose will bloom, it then will fade / So does a youth, so does the fairest maid / Comes a time when one sweet smile / Has a season for a while / Then love's in love with me / Some they think only to marry / Others will tease and tarry / Mine is the very best parry / Cupid, he rules us all / Caper the cape, but sing me the song / Death will come soon to hush us along / Sweeter than honey and bitter as gall / Love is a task and it never will pall / Sweeter than honey and bitter as gall / Cupid, he rules us all

❧

Romeo [taking Juliet’s hand]: 
If I profane with my unworthiest hand                a
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:                       b
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand         a
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.         b
Juliet: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,   c
Which mannerly* devotion shows in this;       proper     b
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,            c
And palm to palm is holy palmers’* kiss.     pilgrim's      b  
Romeo: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?         d
Juliet: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.     e
Romeo: O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do.      d
They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.             e
Juliet: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.  f
Romeo: Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take.      f
Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged.           g
Juliet: Then have my lips the sin that they have took?    h
Romeo: Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged!   g
Give me my sin again. [He kisses her.]
Juliet                                    You kiss by th’ book.         h

❧

Juliet: My only love sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Prodigious birth of love it is to me
That I must love a loathèd enemy.

🔹

Zefferelli (1968)

Luhrmann (1996)

🔹

Love & Grief / Amor & Dolor

You Are (free translation—RC): You are what I love most in this world;  / my deepest thought is also of you, / if only you tell me what it is / that keeps me here. ❧ ❧ Eres (Café Tacuba): Eres, lo que mas quiero en este mundo eso eres / mi pensamiento mas profundo también eres, / tan solo dime lo que es / que aquí me tienes.

You are what I think of when I wake up, / what I miss in my day if you don’t come, / the only precious thing in my mind now. ❧ ❧ Eres, cuando despierto lo primero eso eres, lo que a mi día le hace falta si no vienes, / lo único preciosa que en mi mente habita hoy.

What more can I say to you; / perhaps I can lie to you for no reason, / but what I feel now / is that without you I’m dead, so you are… / … what I love most in this world you are. ❧ ❧ Que mas puedo decirte, / tal vez puedo mentirte sin razón, / pero lo que hoy siento, / es que sin ti estoy muerto pues eres.... / ...lo que mas quiero en este mundo eso eres.

You are the time I share, it's you, / what people promise when they love, / my salvation, my hope, and my faith. / I want to care for you and love you as my girlfriend, I am / he who would support you day after day, / he who would give his life for you. ❧ ❧ Eres, el tiempo que comparto eso eres, / lo que la gente promete cuando se quiere, / mi salvación, mi esperanza y mi fe. / Soy, el que quererte quiere como novia soy, / el que te llevaría el sustento día a día día, día, / el que por ti daría la vida ese soy.

Here I am at your side, / and I wait, sitting here, till the end; / you haven’t imagined / what I’ve hoped for you, so you are … / … what I love in this world … / Each minute I think of you … / What / I care about most in this world is you… ❧ ❧ Aquí estoy a tu lado, / y espero aquí sentado hasta el final, / no te has imaginado, / lo que por ti he esperado pues eres... / ....lo que yo amo en este mundo eso eres... / Cada minuto en lo que pienso eso eres... / Lo que mas cuido en este mundo eso eres....                   

Yours (trans. RYC — video version with English and Spanish lyrics but not the opening credits) / I'm the fire that burns your skin / I'm the water that kills your thirst / Of the castle, the tower am I / The sword that guards the treasure ❧ ❧ Tuyo / (Rodrigo Amarante, 2015): Soy el fuego que arde tu piel / Soy el agua que mata tu sed / El castillo, la torre yo soy / La espada que guarda el caudal 

You, the air that I breathe / And the light of the moon in the sea / The throat that I yearn to moisten / That I fear to drown with love ❧ ❧ Tú, el aire que respiro yo / Y la luz de la luna en el mar / La garganta que ansío mojar / Que temo ahogar de amor

And which desires are you going to give me, oh / You say, my treasure it's enough to look at it / And it will be yours, and it will be yours ❧ ❧  Y cuáles deseos me vas a dar, oh / Dices tu, mi tesoro basta con mirarlo / Y tuyo será, y tuyo será    

They Come to See Me (trans. RYC): I have the heat of the blood that boils / The sweat of my lost fear breaks out / I have the cool that says nothing / I am that breeze that grows stronger ❧ ❧ Vienen a Verme (iLe - Ileana Mercedes Cabra Joglar): Tengo el calor de la sangre que hierve / Brota el sudor del miedo que se pierde / Tengo la calma que no dice nada / Soy esa brisa que se hace más fuerte

CHORUS: Although the clouds drift away / And my skin remains dry / I’m going to succeed one day / To unravel my return ❧ ❧  Aunque las nubes se alejen / Y mi piel siga en sequía / Voy a llegar algún día / A destejer mi regreso

I have the earth that tends my path / I have the limbs of a tree without greenery / I am the one who protects the weary night / I have silhouettes that come to see me ❧ ❧  Tengo la tierra que cuida el camino / Tengo las ramas de un árbol sin verde / Soy quien protege la noche cansada / Tengo siluetas que vienen a verme 

I don't need eyes to find you / I hope that my scar never closes up / All that slips away flows back into me / All I dreamed of I've already lived ❧ ❧  No necesito ojos para encontrarte / Quiero que nunca cierre la cicatriz / Todo lo que se escurre se derrama en mí / Todo lo que soñaba ya lo viví

🔹

Next: 5: Theme

Back to Top

Undergrad English Contents