Talk about hyperbole!

 

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: "My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite." - William Shakespeare, from Romeo and Juliet 

 

Talk about hyperbole!

It really is. Juliet has known Romeo for about one afternoon, and already she's speaking in infinities.

Shakespeare piles on the exaggeration deliberately:

• Her bounty (generosity, affection) is "boundless as the sea."

• Her love is "as deep" as the sea.

• Most extravagantly, the more she gives, the more she possesses: a kind of emotional perpetual-motion machine.

• Then he tops it off with "both are infinite."

In ordinary logic, if you give something away, you have less. In the mathematics of young love, giving creates more love. Shakespeare is not aiming for realism; he's capturing the feeling of first love, where emotions seem limitless and self-reinforcing.

One of the pleasures of Romeo and Juliet is that Shakespeare knows exactly how over-the-top these teenagers are. Modern readers sometimes miss the comedy. The play is a tragedy, but much of the early romance is intentionally excessive. Romeo has spent the previous scenes moaning melodramatically about Rosaline; now he and Juliet are talking as though the universe was invented for their relationship.

So yes: "Talk about hyperbole!" is a perfectly reasonable reaction. Juliet is not making a philosophical argument. She's a thirteen-year-old girl in the grip of what may be the most famous case of teenage infatuation in literature.

As a Thought of the Day, though, it survives because there's a kernel of truth hidden inside the exaggeration: affection, kindness, and love are among the few things that often do seem to increase when they're shared. Not infinitely, perhaps—but enough that the metaphor still resonates four centuries later.

He has to do that to explain the deaths later.

Exactly. And that makes the hyperbole more than just teenage gush.

Shakespeare has to establish love as something enormous enough to justify the enormous consequences that follow. If Romeo and Juliet merely liked each other quite a lot, the deaths of six people over a few days would seem absurdly disproportionate.

The language keeps escalating:

infatuation → absolute love → marriage → separation → desperation → suicide.

The lovers themselves essentially create the scale on which the tragedy operates. Their love is described as infinite, so the loss of it becomes, to them, unbearable and absolute.

And there's an interesting structural irony: Juliet's "the more I give to thee, / The more I have" turns out to be almost exactly backwards in the physical world of the play. The more they give themselves to each other, the more they lose—eventually everything.

That's Shakespeare doing something rather clever with hyperbole: he makes the exaggerated language come true emotionally, even though it isn't literally true.