Lovers Ink: The Bard's Thoughts on Love

 

 Shakespeare, for me--Rocks. 

He's given us some of the the most memorable lovers in history: Romeo & Juliet, Beatrice & Benedict (Much Ado About Nothing), Titania and Bottom (Midsummer Night's Dream) , Othello & Desdemona,  Rosalind and Orlando (Ask You Like It), to name a few.

And talk about tragic lovers, well, Romeo and Juliet are the essence of desperate, wild, irrational and eternal love---dying just to be together.

Since it's a cold dreary winter month, and Valentine's Day is looming on the horizon, with hearts everywhere in candy form, card form or just bright red colored heart lights, I thought it nice to see what the famous bard, Will Shakespeare himself, had to say about Love. After all, this blog is about Romancing History, and who better to make hearts swoon with his writing and prose than Will himself? 

Here are a few special tidbits of wisdom from our stalwart Poet of old:  

Is Love a tender Thing? It is too rough, 

    Too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like a thorn. 

                                                    Romeo in Romeo and Juliet.

         

                Love is merely a madness. 

                                       Rosalind in  As You Like It

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

     Admit impediments:  Love is not 

  Love

     That alters where it alteration finds, 

Or bends with the remover to remove. 

      O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken.   

                                     Sonnet 116

                 

                            Love is blind. 

                                       Speed, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 

Beatrice:  But for which of my good parts did you first suffer love for me? 

      Benedick:  Suffer Love!  A good epithet. I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will. 

                                                             Much Ado About Nothing 

                                   

The course of True Love never did run smooth.  

                      Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream

                   

  Things base and vile, holding no quantity, 

                              Love can transpose to form and dignity. 

                      Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, 

                              And therefore is winged Cupid painted Blind. 

                                     Helena in  A Midsummer Night's Dream

Doubt thou the stars are fire, 
        Doubt that the sun doth move, 
Doubt truth to be a liar, 
       But never doubt I love, 
              Polonius in Hamlet

 

Stay warm this month, let the fires of love & romance heat up your winter. 

Romance novels bring a little zest and spice to those cold winter nights. 

Lily Silver, Romance Author