A tender kiss

While checking an assertion I’d made in my last post, on Robin Hood, I stumbled across a presentation/workshop that Ben Crystal gave to the British Council on Shakespeare’s language and his pronunciation. The whole thing is worth watching, but early on there’s a stunning close reading of the scene in Romeo and Juliet where the two lovers meet for the first time, at the masked ball. As Crystal points out, Shakespeare suddenly breaks stride and has them, in their first conversation, exchange the lines of a sonnet.

ROMEO

[To JULIET] If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

ROMEO

Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET

Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO

O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET

Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.

ROMEO

Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.
Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.

JULIET

Then have my lips the sin that they have took.

ROMEO

Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged!
Give me my sin again.

JULIET

You kiss by the book.

Here’s his reading of it, helped by a couple of actors. It runs for around 10 minutes.

The image of Romeo and Juliet at the top of the post is from Franco Zeffirelli’s version, in 1968, starring Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey.