7 - Sophistication of the English Kiss

Summary

FROM GENRE TO MODE: SHAKESPEARE's VENUS AND ADONIS

Probably the most famous kiss in Shakespeare occurs in Act 1, Scene 5 of Romeo and Juliet. In fact there are two kisses in that memorable encounter, the first being the culmination of the celebrated sonnet in which the courting lovers converse in lines 92–105, while the second kiss provides for the greater climax, rounding off the four-line coda that directly follows.

The sonnet form (with its brief extension) is important. Early modern drama is full of kisses, and in this regard Shakespeare is not exceptional; but, as I have said before, few stage kisses betray close kinship with the lyrical basium. Where the basium tradition does make itself felt in dramatic texts, there is almost always some aspect of the lyrical. No surprise there, since to borrow from the basium is to toy with a known genre. Sometimes the lyrical language of kissing is used for purposes of characterization, often with more or less of a satirical effect, when the artificial and rhapsodic comes up against the mundane and prosaic (as we saw in Aphra Behn). But in many cases the interjection of identifiable elements from the kiss-poem repertoire into dramatic writing actually comes in the form of lyric.

The lyrical conversation between Romeo and Juliet is a remarkable example of lyric intrusion, for it is not a song, but an authentic part of the narrative dialogue, and yet ostentatiously adopts lyrical form. That it should do this in emphatic relation to the kiss betokens the association between kiss and lyric, and specifically the sonnet. This has at least as much to do with vernacular Petrarchism as with the Neo-Latin basium, for the language is courtly and not Catullan; but the lineage, as we know, is thoroughly muddled in reality—and what does it mean to ‘kiss by the book’, if not that the lyrical manner in which Romeo, who instigates the seductive sonnet, thinks about the business of kissing is abstracted from literature and literary convention? An ironic observation, which canny readers and audiences could as well apply to the dramatist.