Forbidden love through the ages: Romeo and Juliet, the scarlet letter and living in a prayer
Needless to say, the most famous forbidden love story in the Western canon is Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. However, whether you consider it the archetype of love’s self-sacrifice or an excellent example of adolescent hormonal idiocy is another story.
Broken down, the plot is pretty simple: boy meets girl, boy woos girl, boy and girl die in a messy triple murder / suicide. Romantics (and Twilight fans) will tell you that true love is the will to die for someone. Naysayers will argue that sleeping with an impressionable thirteen-year-old is creepy. It is a debate for the ages.
Although it is difficult to break with the romantic tradition established by Romeo and Juliet, let’s fast-forward a few years to puritanical New England. “Hot” is probably not the first word that comes to mind, especially considering that the Puritans came to the New World because Old England was too “improper.” On the other hand, this monotony is exactly the kind of weather that, no pun intended, makes a good fuss.
The novel we had in mind is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which is a much more complicated love story than the three-day hormonal festival in Shakespeare’s Verona. Everyone knows that Hester Prynne has done it, but what no one in Boston realizes is that the father of her child is none other than … oh my! – his beloved pastor.
Yet God mocks Pastor Dimmesdale by burning a painful scarlet A into his flesh as a gentle reminder that a confession is in order. Many of us will remember wishing that Hester and Dimmesdale had already escaped together, as they almost do, but instead, they obey the social mores of the time, live separate lives, admit their crime, and die alone. God: 1; Twilight fans: 0.
Fast forward a few more years to the New England of the ’80s, you’ll be glad you were born into the computer age and not the public flogging. Take Bon Jovi’s Livin ‘on a Prayer, a 20th-century approach to Hawthorne’s novel. This sand rock song is an epic blue-collar, low-income love story with an unplanned parenting subplot. It is not your typical rockout material.
What really gives the lyrics an impact is the fact that they are based on the stories of two of Bon Jovi’s high school classmates. All of this working on the docks, serving food to diners, and surviving all of a sudden becomes a lot more real when in fact, you know, it is. And frankly, even if Bon Jovi didn’t base the song on anyone in particular, the story is so common today that it might as well have.
While all that talk of hardship and interrupted dreams might be depressing, the hymn chorus reinforces the idea that love (and enough money to survive) conquers all. In that sense, the song is a hopeful (if not happy) medium between the two extremes established by Romeo, Juliet, Hester, and Dimmesdale. It seems like we’re halfway there, after all.