Love: is any of this real?

They meet on Sunday night, and by Thursday dawn they are both dead. People have argued for over four hundred years about whether four days of that counts as love. The play does set a test for it, and the test is not about how they feel.

Love gets a whole video to itself in this set, and the story of the four days sits in the Overview.

The claim to argue: the play refuses to settle whether the love is real, and hands you evidence for both sides. Before Juliet, Shakespeare stages a rehearsal. On Sunday morning Romeo is lovesick over Rosaline, a girl who never says a word in the play, and he talks like this: Why, then, O brawling love, O loving hate. Brawling love and loving hate are oxymorons, two opposite words pressed together. They sound clever, and they are borrowed from the love poetry of the time. He even tells you what this love is made of: Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs. Who is that speech really about: Rosaline, Romeo himself, or Juliet? Romeo himself. Rosaline never utters a line, so he is performing a feeling at someone who is not even there. Smoke is vapour, and he half knows it. The Rosaline speeches are a costume, and they matter because they let you hear the difference later.

The play also carries its own hecklers, people who see love differently. Mercutio's version is a joke about bodies: If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark. Hit the mark is an archery joke with a rude second meaning, and to Mercutio the poetry is nonsense. Beside him, the Friar warns that sudden love is risky, and Capulet treats marriage as a match to arrange.

Then the form changes. At the feast, Romeo's first words to Juliet open a sonnet, a fourteen-line love poem, that she finishes with him: If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this. A sonnet written by two people means neither of them is performing at the other. The scene has a video of its own, The ball: two things start at once. And the pictures turn outward. At her window that night he says: It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. The images are about her now, and no longer about his own sighs. Why does Juliet answering him in rhyme count as evidence the love is real? Because a performance needs a silent audience, and she refuses to be one. Two people building one poem are talking to each other, not at each other.

Juliet's love carries a price from the start. At her window she offers to give up her own family name: I'll no longer be a Capulet. Then the play tests it. On Monday the Nurse brings word that Romeo has killed her cousin Tybalt. After one burst of anger, Juliet checks herself: Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband? She defends the man who did it. Why does that one line weigh more than all his pictures of her? Because it survives a fact. The worst news possible has just arrived, and she still takes his side, so this is a decision rather than a mood. Their one morning together, Tuesday at dawn, is spent arguing about a bird: It was the nightingale, and not the lark. The nightingale sings at night and the lark at dawn, so she is arguing with the clock. And in the tomb on Thursday, with the watch at the door, she decides in two lines: O happy dagger, This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die.

So the play refuses to settle it, and gives you evidence for both sides on purpose. What it tests is whether a feeling survives contact with a fact. Romeo's love for Rosaline does not survive one look at somebody else. Juliet's survives being told her husband has killed her cousin.

If you already treat love and hate as one subject in this play, one examiner's report describes successful answers doing the same. Successful responses conceptualised the closeness between both love and hate and its impact on the play, often starting with reference to the prologue. The habit to borrow is to pair each love quotation with the hate beside it, starting from brawling love and loving hate. Now a question to plan: how far Shakespeare presents the love between Romeo and Juliet as real, rather than a fantasy. Three nudges. Start with Rosaline, because the play does. Compare the pictures before the feast with the pictures after it. And test each one against a hard fact, to see which survives. Give it a go before the reveal: plan two points for real and one against. One plan opens with the rehearsal: brawling love, loving hate, and smoke, a feeling with nothing behind it. Against that it sets the shared sonnet, and the pictures turning outward, from his sighs to her as the sun. Then it tests both loves. Romeo's for Rosaline melts at one look, while Juliet's survives Tybalt's death, and that point can be argued either way, which is what makes it an argument. One wrong turn is calling it infatuation from the four days alone. Speed is a fact about the clock, while survival is a fact about the people. Another is a paragraph that names the sonnet and stops. One examiner's report credits students who used the shared sonnet to explore portents of a more equal love whereby the tradition of the male sonneteer was shattered by the shared sonnet and Juliet having a more equal voice. The fix is to say what the shared form does, never only that it is there.

Love's lines next, each one missing the word that carries it. Romeo on Rosaline: love is a smoke made with the fume of what? Sighs. Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs. Try Juliet at dawn: it was the nightingale, and not the what? The lark. It was the nightingale, and not the lark, because the lark would mean morning. Now her last line: O happy dagger, this is thy what? Sheath. O happy dagger, This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die. Here's another: the Nurse says forget Romeo, marry Paris. Does her love survive a fact? No. Once Romeo is banished, the Nurse's kind of love moves to whoever is available, while Juliet's holds. Set beside Juliet, it shows you what the test measures.

Arguing either side of whether four days counts as love, with a quotation for each, means you're sure of this one, and it has earned a thumbs up from you. If you are not at that point, put the video aside for later and argue it out with a friend who takes the other side, since hearing the opposite case makes your evidence stick.

Next in the chapter: Parents, children and honour: everybody thinks they are protecting her.

For more, visit scholafly.com, or watch the next video.