Comparing the Different Types of Love Evident in Romeo
and Juliet
"True love is like ghosts,'claims François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, 'Which
everyone talks about but few have seen'. What is true love? Is it idealistic
love or physical love, mature love or paternal love. Well kiddies, it is all that
are listed here for each has its own place in the Shakespearean play Romeo
and Juliet.
Physical love, which Mercutio believes in, is well explained in his Queen Mab
story. Queen Mab, an English folk tale fairy was said to bring the dreams to
men and her child is the midwife to men's fantasies. Mercutio wants just the
physical part of love, that is, sex. This is evident in his queen mab story:
"O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is a fairie's midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Over men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her waggon spokes made of long spinners legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers;
Her traces of the smallest spiders web;
Her collars of the moonshine's watery beams;
Her whip of cricket's bone; the lash of film;
Her waggoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid:
Her chariot is an empty hazle-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel, or old grub,
Time out o' the fairies' coachmakers.
Mass-produced colour photolithography on paper for...
Romeo and Juliet with Friar Laurence
Romeo and Juliet, Act I-Scene_3. Lady Capulet and ...And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers brainsand then they dream of love;
O'er the courtier's knees...."(ActI Scene iiii lines 62-73)
Mercutio tells this story because that is the way he feels about love; which is
All that he is in it for is...