'Star-Crossed Lovers' - The True Romantics

Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’ is often seen as the ultimate love story but I think it is really about something far less romantic and far more cynical than the tragedy of two young and star-crossed lovers. From the earliest scenes, Juliet makes references to death, and while that is often taken as a sexual euphemism, I think it can be taken literally as physical death. An overriding theme of the play is that this love cannot last. It must burn out quickly and passionately or Romeo and Juliet will become as unloving as their parents are. There is no romance between the older Montagues and Capulets – they merely tolerate each other. Shakespeare returns to the same theme in ‘Antony & Cleopatra’. These lovers are older but their romance emasculates Antony and makes him look feeble because, in Shakespeare’s mind, love seems to belong to the young.

Obviously, though loth to spoil so beautiful a story, with such beautiful language (and I love Shakespeare!!), Romeo and Juliet hardly love each other at all. I do believe in love at first sight, but it’s a strange thing that Romeo and Juliet meet
only a couple of times at a distance, marry quickly, spend one night together and then are separated (why didn’t Juliet run away with Romeo when he fled Verona?) so they hardly know each other at all. Both, though, are in love with the dream of love (after all, at the opening of the play, Romeo is mouching about in love with someone else) and since it is a dream that they love, not each other, they have to wake up...or die to keep their dream alive.


Alas, Shakespeare did not live to see 2 couples who really were star-crossed lovers, and who kept that romance and beauty alive through many tribulations, and ultimately died together. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek, and Tsar Nicholas II and Alix of Hesse, were true romantic heroes in my opinion. Not only did they have to overcome many hurdles in order to be together (Sophie, a lady-in-waiting, being deemed unworthy of an Archduke; Alix for so long unable to agree to convert to Orthodoxy and having to overcome opposition from her grandmother and future mother-in-law) but once married they had many more difficulties to overcome. These people loved one another, not the dream of being in love, and, as can been seen particularly in the later letters of Alix and Nicholas (during their separation during the war), they remained passionate about each other.

It almost seems fitting that they should die together; I cannot imagine either Alix or Nicholas outliving the other; nor can I imagine Franz Ferdinand without Sophie’s calming influence. So on Valentine’s day, I wish that Shakespeare had lived to write their stories and to show that love does not belong to the young; rather it deepens with age and can last until death....and beyond.

Grand Duchess Elizabeth & The Imperial Family

For a clearer and updated version of this, please visit Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NA2U3K5dI8



In case the words don't appear clearly, since the images are small....

The first verse is Alix, the Tsarina singing to Alexei, her haemophiliac son; the second verse, Alix sings to her hsuband, Tsar Nicholas, after his abdication:

Close your eyes and let me paint a picture,
A landscape of a season long ago:
Starlit skies, the trees aglow with winter,
St. Petersburg beneath a veil of snow.
From high cathedral spires the bells are ringing,
Chiming through the country near and far,
A thousand voices eloquently singing,
Echoing their prayer: "God bless the Tsar....God bless the Tsar...God Bless the Tsar..."

Close your eyes and let me soothe the sadness,
The paint that brings your gentle eyes to tears.
Love prevails in spite of all this madness -
The love that we have shared through all these years.
And though the battles rage and hope is dying,
Remember who you were and who you are,
With all your heart, you'll hear my spirit sighing,
In a fervent prayer, "God bless the Tsar...."

The Baketti painting of the Coronation of Nicholas II has always given me pause for thought. When it is shown on a larger scale, the light, streaming through the window, shines on someone who is clearly the Dowager Empress, Maria Feodorovna, rather than on the Empress Alexandra or even the Tsar. Alix seems to be sitting closer to Nicholas, in her rightful place but the light shines on the woman in the background.
If it is the Dowager Empress on whom the light is shining, what was the artist's message? Why did he paint it that way? Surely the light should have been shining on Nicholas and Alexandra, but it isn't. Was he harking back to another era...was it one more blow at the new Tsar and the new Tsarina. There is loads of detail in this painting - the woman at the back in black, for example. What was it about?

If Shakespeare knew the Romanovs...

Shakespeare's model of writing, grounded in Aristotle's formula - the tragic hero/protagonist who had to be noble and whose destiny was wrought by his own fatal flaw, and who met a tragic end, is something so timeless and inspiring.

When it comes to writing of the Romanovs, all the elements are already in place: the king, (or Tsar), the glory (Imperial Russia), the secret tragedy (Alexei's haemophilia), the fatal flaw, (Nicholas' trust in other people) and the ultimate tragedy (the massacre of a family - a massacre so tragic that it is far more powerful than the end of Hamlet, where everyone is slain) . The Romanov story fits Shakespeare's and Aristotle's pattern to such a degree that I often wish that Shakespeare were still here to write their true story with his depths of understanding of psychology and motivation, and his own brilliant command of language!

Oh, for another Shakespeare to write this story! Often I think that when Nicholas and Alexandra were in captivity, these words from King Lear might well have been something they could have shared:

"We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage...so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;
And take upon 's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies…"

And the death of the beautiful Tsarevich Alexei...wouldn't Shakespeare have written,
"Goodnight, sweet prince, and flight of angels guide thee to thy rest..."

Ah! For another Shakespeare to tell their tale!