Better Than Shakespeare
Love and death are unlikely bedfellows in modern story-telling. We like our love stories a little more clean-cut and sugary. A never-ending stream of rom-coms are slapped with the recently added category on Netflix as we settle down for another predictable night. But it hasn’t always been this way. Shakespeare’s enduring offering, Romeo & Juliette, shows us that some of the most profound pictures of love are not exempt from the turmoil of death.
My only love sprung from my only hate,
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Prodigious birth of love is it to me
That I must love a loathed enemy.
To the modern mind it seems so cliche—“But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun”—we roll our eyes and recall every poorly produced high school musical trope. Yet, should we peel away the cheese, Shakespeare had a better grasp of love and reality than our Hallmark shaped minds may first perceive.
There is a profundity to love that can’t be encapsulated within 90 minutes of cheap laughs dolled out by a ruggedly handsome 20’somthing, or a boyishly handsome 40’something. It doesn’t matter if the budget allows for an A-list actress, or one that used to be, most attempts at portraying the depth and brilliance of love aim at the ocean but end up hitting the paddle pool. While ever love and sexuality are conflated for the sake of entertainment, our understanding and celebration of either will be diminished. But Shakespeare knew better, and so did his audiences.
I fear too early, for my mind misgives;
Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars,
Shall bitterly begin.
The course of love doesn’t easily flow from flirting glances to marriage vows and happily-ever-afters. Even as there are flowery meadows in alpine heights, there are deep ravines and rugged outcrops. Yet even so, love has made a way.
With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls,
For stony limits cannot hold love out.
Shakespeare’s tale of feuding families and forbidden love lays out a twisted pathway of youthful passions and tragedy, yet it tells us something more. It tells us that, though love and death are unlikely bedfellows in modern story-telling, there is no greater story of love than one that holds love and death in firm embrace. In the gospel we have this story of a better love. A love that flows from eternity to eternity, that has o’erperched these walls, that has broken through stony limits sealed by soldier’s guard.
“This is how we have come to know love: He laid down his life for us.” (1 John 3:16)
With more enduring power than Shakespeare, God tells a better story of love that finds its climax on a hill outside Jerusalem a little over 2000 years ago. Love and death are woven together in a narrative of tragedy that ultimately leads to triumph. Thorns that pierced, but then placed as a crown, reveal a God who demonstrates the fullest expression of love—“He laid down his life for us.”
