GRGR(3): Jessica and Roger, Mind-to-mind

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

rj wrote:

>  Isn't it just a tad elitist to go around saying that this or that manifestation
> of 'love' is
> inferior to the next, judging instances according to our own totally
> subjective definitions of what love "is".

>
>

A tad something or other, I don't know if it's elitist. It's what I ask students
to do when they read Romeo and Juliet. Is Romeo in love with Rosaline or is it the
heat? Is he in love with Juliet or is he in love with his idea of love? Is Juliet
in love with Romeo or out of love with Paris? What of the Friars and the Nurse?
What of Mercutio's Queen Mab? How is our conception of Love different from each of
these characters? Different from Elizabethan's? Does Juliet's father really love
her, tough love her? Everyone in R&J has a take on love and war. What is
Shakespeare's view? AH there's the rub, the objectivity of Shakespeare--even his
first person sonnets do not reveal the man behind the masks holding the mirror up
to all.  And when I draw I diagram with Love at the center and student responses
all around, they are always different. Some things change from year to year, some
things remain. Students nowadays, talk of unconditional love and not free love.

Mercutio.                True, I talk of dreams.
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain phantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air
And more inconstant than the wind, who woos
E'en now the frozen bosom of the North,
And being anger'd puffs away from thence,
Turning his face to the dew dropping South.
                 R&J I,iv,101-108

> Terrance-I'm melting, I'm melting...