‘Romantic’ Love?

Abstract

Iris Murdoch once wrote that ‘the central concept of morality is “the individual” thought of as knowable by love’. But there are many forms of love, and they can realize the individual they ‘know’ in very different ways. We have already pondered occasions of some such forms. In this chapter I want to reflect on a passage from Shakespeare which might (tendentiously) be thought to register ‘romantic’ love. There is evidently something different here from what is disclosed in (say) the wife’s gesture towards her husband discussed in the previous chapter, or in any of the other examples so far explored. I am interested in that difference, but the conceptual resources useful for articulating what shows itself in this passage also have broader application, to what has already been discussed.