Shakespeare for the Smitten

What is Romance?

I really enjoyed the discussion we had in class on Wednesday about romance. The discussion about "love at first sight" particularly caused me to think. We were discussing how romance, in reference to a literature genre, particularly Shakespeare's plays, means something one fantasizes about, rather than romance in terms of romantic love. We talked about how anything exotic or with which we don't have a lot of experience or understanding can seem magical, and we tend to idealize, or romanticize, about those places or things. We talked about how books seem magical, and the dealings and language of any discipline which we do not understand can seem magical. In light of The Tempest, the characters with limited understanding of the island romanticize about it; Gonzalo dreams of a utopia, Stephano assumes it is exotic, and they begin to feel that almost anything is possible on the island. But hang with me--I have a point in recapping this discussion--its not just to give background to anyone who may not have been present in class. The discussion then turned to Miranda and Ferdinand, and how they romanticize each other, which lead to a discussion of love at first sight. This seems like the ultimate expression of romanticizing--off of very limited information, concocting an entire image of someone. Surely this is how the two terms were originally linked.

Romanticizing...

That got me thinking. Really, every perception that we have of people is only that--a perception. When we first meet someone, we immediately create an image of them in our minds. Hopefully its not a judgmental

or harsh image, but based off

of many different things, we form

some idea of what that person is like. The more we interact with them, the more refined our image becomes. Every additional data point we gather from interaction provides some feedback about the image we have of them. Some of those data points may fit with the image we have created. When they do, our image of them is reinforced. When the data points do not fit, we either ignore them (consider those data outliers) and gloss over them and stick with our original image of the person, or we change the image. I made a handy flowchart for your visual enjoyment (and as an attempt to use my engineering tools to analyze Shakespeare creatively). The more interactions we have with someone (if we allow the image to change with additional data) the more accurate our image of them becomes. That's called getting to know someone. But all we ever really have of someone is an image.

We like to think that people who hardly ever have data points that don't match our image we know very well, but all we really know is an image, and we believe that image matches reality. In romantic love, it works exactly the same. When you like someone, you romanticize or imagine an image of this person that is appealing to you. When you like someone, what you really like is the image you have of them. When you date, you are gathering data points. If you are infatuated with someone, you may ignore data points that don't match the image you have. "Love at first sight" is falling in love with the immediately concocted image of the person, because you can't possibly have enough data points to construct a realistic image of the person. Maybe that immediately concocted image is exactly right on, but most likely it's not. As you get to know them, you can either fall in love with your new image of them or fall out of love. But in any case, whether your feelings are for a person whom you just met or are for someone you feel that you know quite well, your feelings are really for an image that you have romanticized. That is what happened to Miranda and Ferdinand. This is a universal phenomenon to which all people can relate, which is why there are countless books and movies written exploring this very theme. Shakespeare, in the context of exploring all types of romanticizing in his romantic play The Tempest explores this very type of romanticizing in the relationship between this couple.