estrogen & epithets

Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.
-A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The world must be peopled!
-Much Ado About Nothing

Is my affection for Shakespeare true love? Love at first sight? Nauseating “in love with love” love? I say all three.
I see an old couple sitting on a weathered bench on a porch, hand in hand, when I think of true love. The couple will go to bed at ten o’clock and wake up the next morning at eight, because that is what they have always done. There isn’t much conversation at the breakfast table, but affection can be seen in the way that the wife sets a plate of toast in front of the husband, and in the way that he refills her coffee cup to the halfway point, just the way she likes it. True love is comfortable. True love is what I feel for the plays that I have already read or seen or studied. I know that when I fall into them, there will be a clown to cheer me up, a woman tormented in love to save, and a hero that reforms in the end.
Love at first sight is the excitement of opening a play that I haven’t read before. The pages flutter quite like those clichéd butterflies in the stomach when one sees an attractive member of the opposite sex. The first lines can make or break the play, but more often than not it seems to me, one can’t know the true character of the play from the first date, as it were. The first attraction develops after each subsequent venture into the play, until the love at first site reaction is changed into the comfortable feeling of true love.
Finally, the “in love with love” love that I feel for Shakespeare is the feeling that I get when I read the plays out loud. There are times when I read them out loud to myself, for the pure pleasure of hearing the words spoken. There is a certain Narcissus-like quality to this. Narcissus was in love with his reflection, and I do not go so far as to say that I am in love with hearing myself read Shakespeare aloud, but reading out loud can feel like receiving a Valentine from myself.
Reading Shakespeare can be an awfully attractive thing to do. Really. If a man was inclined to woo himself a lady, Sonnet 18 would do it. It is a well used sonnet, a little tired, but the idea behind it of woman being more beautiful than the sun, and unable to be eclipsed by anything like clouds or winter is the definition of romantic.
Even passages that are not strictly about love can make the reader attractive. If you doubt it, men, find a copy of Othello, turn to Act I, scene iii, position yourself in front of a mirror, and read Iago’s speech at the end of the scene. Iago is the ultimate bad boy of Shakespeare, which, as evidenced in movies from the 1950s and the amount of tattooed and pierced men with dates, sounds with the ladies. Read it like you mean it, and try to tell me that it did not enhance your machismo.