JULIET Spread thy close curtain, love-performing Night,
That runaways’ eyes may wink, and Romeo
Leap to these arms, untalked of and unseen:
Lovers can see to do their amorous rites
By their own beauties, or if love be blind
It best agrees with night. (3.2.5-10)
And now the focus changes, from the fleeting cosmic scale of those vividly imagined, sparky, globe-trotting horses, to something much more intimate, and much less visual. Night’s curtain is close – this isn’t a cloudy drapery trailing across the sky, like some baroque apotheosis, but something tangible and domestic – like bed hangings. My suspicion – and the OED strongly suggests – is that curtain at this time does not primarily mean window curtain, but rather any hanging which conceals – a door, a wall – and in particular a bed. The world at night has shrunk to a bed, safely, darkly curtained. (Hello, is that John Donne? Were you listening to this bit?) Who are the runaways? probably the horses; wink here does not mean wink in the modern sense (and even less, thank goodness, nudge nudge wink wink) but rather close in sleep. Anyone who might be able to see the lovers – those imaginary horses, or those who are, like Romeo, on the run, a circumstance still unknown to Juliet – will close their eyes, unable to see in the darkness, and sleep. I hadn’t thought before now that Romeo leaping to these arms (these arms, these very arms, these and no others, a note of delighted disbelief) might suggest that she’s on the balcony… but imagining that leap is also joyous and vital and full of the urgent energy of those sky-treading horses. Untalked of and unseen reins it back: the desire for secrecy is of course because of the feud, but also because this is a new and precious thing, and therefore private, delicate, properly intimate. Night is love-performing because it enables the lovers’ amorous rites (which are also the rites of marriage, its essential consummation, here given a properly sacramental quality), but the phrasing also suggests that night itself performs love, is animate, enabling, protective, even aroused. I’m agnostic about giving Night a capital-N – editors vary – it is of course undetectable in performance (if not in rehearsal) – although I perhaps just prefer the simplicity, and ambiguity (personification or not?) of the lower-case. Whatever, in this deep darkness, lovers need no light: although the conceit of beauty (and love) itself being light enough is a lovely one, what is implicit here is touch; touch is why lovers need no light to see by. A leap in the dark; reaching out, again, to touch; love’s light in darkness.
