Friday, February 11, 2011

Love Letter from Shakespeare


“You’re a writer. Why don’t you do a Valentine’s Day piece about how to write a love letter?” my wife suggested to me the other day.

“Oh, is Valentine’s Day coming up?”

I could see why she had thought of me for the job. Actually, I am not much for composing letters of any kind. What may have been the last one I wrote went like this:

"Dear Aunt Sylvia, thank you for the baseball mitt you gave me for my birthday. Fifth grade is fun. Love David"

Now technically this could be called a “love letter” since the word “love” does appear in it. But it didn’t seem quite the right model for an expression of feelings on Valentine’s Day. Some spark of romance was still missing.

“If music be the food of love,” I murmured to myself as I turned on the radio to help me concentrate. The collected works of a certain famous playwright happened to be on my desk, and in the midst of deep thoughts about how to begin a love letter, it occurred to me that “if music be the food of love” wasn’t half-bad. But if music be the food of love, then what? Then “you will always be in my top 40”?

No, that didn’t sound quite right either. Still, maybe if I tweaked it a bit, I might have something.

"If music be the food of love, then it shouldn’t matter that I forgot to pick up the pizza for dinner."

Now we were getting somewhere.

All of a sudden I knew what advice to give about writing a love letter. Borrow from Shakespeare, but add enough words of your own so as not to arouse suspicion. Sure, I dimly recollected that Shakespeare had said something about being neither a borrower nor a lender. But then again hadn’t he also borrowed most of his plots from other writers?

Figuring he’d understand, I sat down to work. I was going to write a love letter from Shakespeare that was also from me.

"Hark! What thing through yonder window breaks? Is it a bird, is it a plane, is it – what ho! Arise my love and kill the moon."

Clearly, he had as much to gain from our collaboration as I did."

“Why are you reading Romeo and Juliet?” my wife asked when she came home to find me still at it.

“It’s the one with all the romantic lines in it. At least in comparison to the other plays. I mean ‘my kingdom for a horse’? ‘First let’s kill all the lawyers’? You can’t send those to someone – not unless you’re trying to break up with them.”

It dawned on my wife what I was doing.

“Isn’t there something in Shakespeare about looking into your heart and writing?” she hinted.

“’To thine own self be true.’ Great sentiment. But as a Valentine’s Day message, it almost sounds suspicious. Like you’re saying, ‘At least I hope you’re being true to yourself because you’re incapable of being true to anyone else.’”

We both pondered my project for a moment. Papers were strewn everywhere on the top of the desk. Stuck to its rim were several post-its with lines of iambic pentameter on them. Peeking out from behind a coffee mug was a plastic figurine of the Bard that we had brought back as a souvenir from England.

“Next time just thank me for the kids,” she finally said.

No comments:

Post a Comment