compersion & limerence

I'm so mad that I'm having Romeo and Juliet feelings in the year of our lord 2019, but I'm having them, and here they are. One of the local theatre companies is putting on Romeo and Juliet, and I went with my subscription tickets. And uh, then thought it was so good that I immediately bought tickets to take my partner a couple days later (bonus: they have under 35 tickets for us).

R&J is always pitched as a romance and I think often staged as this really grand epic of True Love Thwarted, Be Nice, but their Romeo was SO, just—charming and flirtatious and young—clearly an idiot romantic teenager! He was in love with Rosaline 0.2 seconds ago! (Additionally, this is a generally agreed upon opinion -- like, in the theatre, both times, I heard multiple people saying this was the best Romeo they'd seen). Juliet just wants to get laid! She kissed a cute boy and she would very much like that cute boy to not make promises (which, omfg, the "don't swear to me" bit, fuck), but rather, to just come make out. Canonically speaking, they are just teens trying to bone, but somehow that aspect of their humanity had always been previously lost to me. And I've always had trouble with the impetuosity of everything, and the implication that Romeo's death is somehow more meaningful or romantic than staying alive to remember and memorialize loss. But then: their Romeo is so clearly descending into manic grief—Mercutio, Tybalt, Juliet—that it made characterization sense, rather than just a neat bow on a pat moralistic tale, for him to dramatically down that poison. And like— the whole "pilgrim's hands" kissing was phenomenal: again just kids doing a really charming job flirting. If a boy came up to me with that level of wordplay, I too would moon about on my balcony and drop my 1590s pants. He's so sly, and she picks up on it and is ever so properly coy right back—oh wow, Shakespeare wrote clever flirting, breaking news at 10—but it really felt clever in the moment. Oh no, I gave you my sin? Let me take it back again, we can't have that.

Perhaps of more general interest than just "this production you won't see was amazing!", I also had a really strong response to all of the discussion of names & names as divorced from selfhood. It echoes some similar thoughts I've been rolling around about identity and words. Not just in the "what's in a name," but both Romeo and Juliet continue to wrestle the identity vs. embodiment issue. Which like! Me too! Me too!

Juliet's loss of selfhood when she thinks Tybalt has killed Romeo; not herself, but still centered around herself somehow:

I am not I, if there be such an I;
Or those eyes shut, that make thee answer 'I.'
If he be slain, say 'I'; or if not, no:

A desperate Romeo trying to lose himself, or point out, rather, the gulf:

O, tell me, friar, tell me,
In what vile part of this anatomy
Doth my name lodge? tell me, that I may sack
The hateful mansion.

Like, sorry, excuse me, that is a DIRECT LINE to my feelings about transness and identity and queerness! My feelings are that I love those words, I love the queer homes they make me. I hate those words, because like, can I just live in my body and fuck who I want? I am so tired of feeling like I have to name myself in order to be visible or real, when those names don't actually live anywhere in my actual body. This is like, a much longer essay about embodiment and names and my definitely-not-breakup-flavored at all queer identity emotions, but I did not expect to get hit with those feelings from the 1590s. (Also, they put Romeo in a short sleeve patterned button down, which was such a direct @ of A Certain Transmasc Look, and I don't wear short sleeved pattern button downs but, like, I can get with that head canon.)

In any case, I care a lot about Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet now! A lot! I carry on the torch of a 400 year old fandom.

edit to say: it also made me have feelings about, like, remembering deaths vs remembering lives, or how people are remembered for how they were screwed in life rather than what they loved or succeeded in. A short list: Rosalind Franklin, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo [of whom, incidentally, the Boston MFA currently has an incredible exhibit on right now].