Like many people in the United States, I got up before three this morning to watch the wedding of Prince William and - now - Princess Catherine. I live in the Central Time Zone, so for me the hour was even earlier than for people in, say, New York City. It was the preliminaries that led me to use "Life in Slow Motion" in the subtitle of this article. I was actually reading a book on the lost art of reading while those moments were broadcast that seemed to be of no particular interest, though I kept looking up at my TV's monitor frequently enough not to miss anything.
I am sure that many articles will be written (have already been written) about the Royal Wedding, but I still feel that I may say something here that could be worth your while to read just the same.
Weddings are lovely ceremonies. And this one went beyond the run-of-the-mill - even for those that cost a fortune and are big events everywhere people can afford them to be such. One interesting element for me in this case (and, I am sure, for others as well) was the Anglican Service (Mass) that was the framework of this Royal Wedding. I missed the "I thee endow" phrase, though (they used the word "share" instead), which has always been one of my favorite phrases in a traditional wedding.
The interesting thing that I want to zero in on comes from the sermon delivered by the Bishop of London. He said many things that were probably predictable and familiar to lots of people, but then he used a quote from Chaucer that made me sit up and take notice. He didn't specify the source, he just used the quote. Here it is (in Nevill Coghill's Modern English translation):
"Love will not be constrained by mastery; / When mastery comes, the god of love anon / Stretches his wings and farewell he is gone."
The passage comes from "The Franklin's Tale" of The Canterbury Tales. What's truly interesting about the quote is that it happens to come from the final tale of the so-called "Marriage Group," and it is the one that represents the perfect marriage according to Chaucer. The series of tales involved in this group begins with the Wife of Bath who puts the woman on top of a marriage between the husband and wife. The Clerk reacts by telling a tale of a woman who is overly obedient to a cruel husband who keeps testing her.
This is followed by a cynical version of marriage told by the Merchant where not only marriage but the so-called courtly love tradition both get to be ridiculed as basically nothing but lust and games people play to satisfy it. It's the Franklin to whom Chaucer gives the first 50-50 marriage in history (at least, in the Middle Ages, where marriages were not only arranged but where the husband was typically the lord and master, the absolute ruler of the roost). In "The Franklin's Tale" the wife does not need a lover (as in the courtly love tradition) because her husband is also her lover - and certainly NOT her master. There is, in fact, no mastery in this marriage, because Chaucer recognized the fact back at the end of the 14th century that love, true love, can only exist between equals.
And this is what made me sit up and take notice when the Bishop of London quoted the words from the "Franklin's Tale" about love and the necessity for the absence of "mastery" from it. Is it not the case that here we had a wedding between a prince - a member of the British royal family - and a commoner? During the marriage ceremony Kate Middleton has, of course, become Princess Catherine, so in rank the marriage made them equals in a legal sense, too. But the fact remains that their love has been - and will continue to be - love between equals. For it is only between equal that the god of love - to use that traditional formulation - keeps smiling on a couple. A few lines after the quote used by the Bishop of London, Chaucer spells out the necessity for this equality by the following words:
"Love is a thing as any spirit free; / Women by nature long for liberty / And not to be constrained or made a thrall, / And so do men, if I may speak for all."
I am sure that we all wish for Prince William and Princess Catherine happy ever aftering. All in all, it was a great event to watch, even if it took a long time with the preliminaries and the events that followed the ceremony itself. All in slow motion, if you will. But worth all the patience it required.
