Romeo & Juliet :: Adam & Eve

Reflections & inversions, love & marriage in Paradise Lost and Romeo and Juliet

I’ve been listening to / reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost and it’s been a surprising pleasure. It’s well suited for audio — its verse was first dictated in 1658 by a blind John Milton in the form of revelation:

"Sing, Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed."

So listening to it may be the most faithful way to experience it. One also quickly ‘gains an ear’ for the language. Milton’s Satan is born directly of Othello’s Iago, as Harold Bloom writes extensively about. But perhaps more surprising is the reflection of Adam & Eve in Romeo & Juliet.

(The British seem underrated as Christian prophets. They have their very own blind seer poet. And not long before giving the world its greatest poet. The British remain underrated overall!)

R&J are the literary children of A&E, their story twisted and inverted, viewed from this (Fallen) side of the mortal coil. Where A&E are born conjoined lovers, Eve fashioned from Adam, R&J are star-cross’d but apart, born enemies of feuding Veronese families. Both stories sprout from paternal disobedience. Both begin in innocence — of youth or of Paradise. Both tragedies hinge on love: Adam knowingly chooses to rebel against God by joining Eve in her fate, and R&J’s rebellion also intensifies their bond and seals their tragedy. Both couples become unified in death. And with both their deaths, the potential for redemption becomes possible, peace assailing the Houses of Verona and the promise of covenant living outside Paradise.

A&E and R&J live in mirrored worlds. Adam is made in God’s image and Eve in his, just as R&J are born of twin houses, both alike in dignity. “My only love sprung from my only hate!” says Juliet as she realises her mysterious lover is a Montague. Love and hate are intertwined, opposites staring into one another. Their stories are inverted, mirror-opposites. For A&E mortality begins with the fateful apple, but ends with poison for R&J. And just as Adam follows Eve in divine rebellion, so Juliet drinks poison first, followed by Romeo.

Romeo follows Juliet into her orchard (Garden of Eden), risking death:

The orchard walls are high and hard to climb,
And the place death, considering who thou art.

Just as Adam chooses death for Eve, considering himself intertwined irrevocably with her fate:

However I with thee have fixed my lot,
Certain to undergo like doom: If death
Consort with thee, death is to me as life;
So forcible within my heart I feel
The bond of Nature draw me to my own;
My own in thee, for what thou art is mine;
Our state cannot be severed; we are one,
One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.

Consider how Romeo and Adam regard the ineffable beauty of their beloveds. This is how Romeo first sees Juliet:

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
As a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear—
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows,
As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows.
The measure done, I'll watch her place of stand,
And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand.
Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!
For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.

And here Adam recounts his first impression of Eve to the angel Raphael:

Under his forming hands a creature grew,
Manlike, but different sex; so lovely fair,
That what seemed fair in all the world, seemed now
Mean, or in her summed up, in her contained
And in her looks, which from that time infused
Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before,
And into all things from her air inspired
The spirit of love and amorous delight.

To each man their beloveds are elevated above all else, their beauty all consuming. Nothing else compares, they each represent the pinnacles of Creation. Their appearance renders all else obsolete, irrelevant, miniscule.

Before eating of the apple A&E are lovers of high romance, addressing each other in the elevated language of Platonic (if formal) spouses. Adam: “Best image of myself, and dearer half...” Eve: “My fairest, my espoused, my latest found...”. See also this gorgeous grin-jerking scene where Eve departs as the Angel speaks, for she prefers to hear it later from her husband:

Yet went she not, as not with such discourse
Delighted, or not capable her ear
Of what was high: such pleasure she reserved,
Adam relating, she sole auditress;
Her husband the relater she preferred
Before the Angel, and of him to ask
Chose rather; he, she knew, would intermix
Grateful digressions, and solve high dispute
With conjugal caresses: from his lip
Not words alone pleased her. O! when meet now
Such pairs, in love and mutual honour joined?

That is not the sentiment of a star-struck lover, but the deep love of husband and wife (and isn’t the term auditress just wonderful?).

After their taste of knowledge, they descend into baser lusts. They behave like — can we say? — teenage lovers. Like R&J, perhaps?

Carnal desire inflaming; he on Eve
Began to cast lascivious eyes; she him
As wantonly repaid; in lust they burn:
Till Adam thus ’gan Eve to dalliance move.

For never did thy beauty, since the day
I saw thee first and wedded thee, adorned
With all perfections, so inflame my sense
With ardour to enjoy thee, fairer now
Than ever; bounty of this virtuous tree!

Harold Bloom wrote in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human:

Romeo and Juliet is unmatched, in Shakespeare and in the world's literature, as a vision of an uncompromising mutual love that perishes of its own idealism and intensity.

One suspects that had R&J survived this intensity and lived and outgrown their teenage love, they’d have been condemned to the same marital bickering that engulfed A&E, whose sin condemned all subsequent marriages to “vain contest” with “no end”:

Thus they in mutual accusation spent
The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning;
And of their vain contest appeared no end.

In Milton’s Adam, man is already emasculated, portending his domestication by woman and the plough. He is self-pitying and blaming woman (and very slyly God, who made woman for him). He was “not deceived, But fondly overcome with female charm”:

This Woman, whom thou madest to be my help,
And gavest me as thy perfect gift, so good,
So fit, so acceptable, so divine,
That from her hand I could suspect no ill,
And what she did, whatever in itself,
Her doing seemed to justify the deed;
She gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

But God has none of it. A man has agency or he is not a man:

Was she thy God, that her thou didst obey
Before his voice? or was she made thy guide,
Superiour, or but equal, that to her
Thou didst resign thy manhood, and the place
Wherein God set thee above her made of thee,
And for thee, whose perfection far excelled
Hers in all real dignity? Adorned
She was indeed, and lovely, to attract
Thy love, not thy subjection; and her gifts
Were such, as under government well seemed;
Unseemly to bear rule; which was thy part
And person, hadst thou known thyself aright.

When it comes to agency, Juliet and Eve have their share of it. Female agency might not exist in The Sopranos, but Eve has more of it than Adam (as God mocks him for it), and Juliet is thoughtful and surprisingly strong willed as she contemplates forsaking her family altogether:

Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

Eve is also painfully, comically real. You can’t help but laugh as she decides to give the apple to Adam because she'd rather he die than live with another after her now mortal life:

But what if God have seen,
And death ensue? then I shall be no more!
And Adam, wedded to another Eve,
Shall live with her enjoying, I extinct;
A death to think! Confirmed then I resolve,
Adam shall share with me in bliss or woe:
So dear I love him, that with him all deaths
I could endure, without him live no life.

And then when he finally succumbs to her charms, she has what every woman wants — a man who will literally suffer “divine displeasure for her sake, or death”:

So saying, she embraced him, and for joy
Tenderly wept; much won, that he his love
Had so ennobled, as of choice to incur
Divine displeasure for her sake, or death.

One might also also argue that the Macbeths are an evil twin of A&E. As the best marriage in Shakespeare (before their demonic doom), they are a natural descendent of the first couple. But some of the references are more explicit: in Paradise Lost Adam is “not of woman born” as is MacDuff, who kills Macbeth, for as the witches prophesised, “none of woman born/ Shall harm Macbeth”. Lady Macbeth, like Eve, also eggs her husband on to sudden death. And one could spin a tale of their mutual demise and loss of innocence, and subsequent guilt.

But perhaps we are overreaching. Perhaps seeing the First Man and First Woman in each man and woman is the whole Biblical point.

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One last thing, reserved for the bottomless dregs beneath the subscribe button, in the very bowels of hell.

Paradise Lost is so shockingly vivid I'm surprised there isn't a gorgeous animation of it. I can see the Tchaikovsky reel in my head as I read it, a cousin of The Nutcracker (I grew up watching this one) or Swan Lake. I'd be tempted to have a go with GenAI…

I haven’t done that, but in this cursed place, you can enjoy some Paradise Lost AI slop I played around with:

Gabriel challenges Satan

"Gabriel, at home
The scourge of rebels, and his arm now strong
To punish or repulse, advanced his spear
Against the spurious foe; and thus began:
'Author of evil, unknown till thy revolt,
Unnamed in Heaven, now plenteous, as thou seest
These acts of hateful strife, hateful to all,
Though heaviest by just measure on thyself
And thy adherents. How hast thou disturbed
Heaven's blessed peace, and into Nature brought
Misery, uncreated till the crime
Of thy rebellion! how hast thou instilled
Thy malice into thousands, once upright
And faithful, now proved false!'"

Gabriel Draws His Sword

"He spake; and such a frown
Each cast at th’ other, as when two black clouds
With Heaven’s artillery fraught, come rattling on
Over the Caspian, then stand front to front
Hovering a space, till winds the signal blow
To join their dark encounter in mid-air:
So frowned the mighty combatants, that Hell
Grew darker at their frown; so matched they stood;
For never but once more was either like
To meet so great a foe

Satan Hurled to Hell

Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to arms.
Nine times the space that measures day and night
To mortal men, he with his horrid crew
Lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf,
Confounded though immortal. But his doom
Reserved him to more wrath; for now the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting pain
Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes,
That witnessed huge affliction and dismay
Mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate.