Not a Valentine's Day Story: Romeo and Juliet and an Apologia for Liebestod

Among singles and many a steady couple, Valentine's Day is much derided as a holiday trumped up by candy and greeting card companies to sell mushy platitudes that were cliche a generation ago, tritely divorced from the realities of actual relationships. I tend to share this suspicion of corporate co-opting of Eros for narrow mercantile purposes. However, I've noticed that this is a similar verdict foisted upon one a literary work that I love, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare's play occupies a strange double-edged sword place in our culture: it is universally recognizable, while simultaneously misunderstood, if not unappreciated. The truth is Shakespeare's story and safe, dismissively sappy Hallmark card sentiments couldn't be more diametrically opposed.

Illustrations for Romeo and Juliet, by Salvador Dali

The Dated and the Delightful: Hitchcock's Spellbound

Timelessness is held aloft as a standard by which we recognize a masterpiece. Ben Jonson wrote of Shakespeare ,"He was not of an age, but for all time", and while Jonson's eulogy may be slightly tongue-in-cheek, the observation has turned out to be a dead-on appraisal. Conversely, when a piece of work is described as "dated", it's not complimentary. Being "of an age" translates into "not aging well", and this is not a good sign for a book, play, musical composition, or film. But I found myself wondering, what does make something age well? Is it possible to be dated yet still be successful aesthetically? For a test case, I've chosen one of my favorite films from  Alfred Hitchcock: Spellbound(1945).