Examine Other Beauties

Early on in “Romeo and Juliet” Benvolio gives Romeo the excellent advice to “examine other beauties.”  I’m of course aware that Benvolio is talking about meeting other girls as a remedy to obsessing over one rejection.  But I also think the principle can be generalized to great effect.  Rather than getting caught up in one set-back, or worse, wallowing in whatever the culture of fear has put on the menu for you today -- seek out something beautiful from some other domain. 

It also interests me that Romeo and Juliet was written during the period that Shakespeare wrote what some call his lyrical plays, which also included “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Richard II” and “Love Labour’s Lost.”

From Wikipedia:

These four plays are argued to represent a phase of Shakespeare's career when he was experimenting with rhyming iambic pentameter as an alternative form to standard blank verse; Richard II has more rhymed verse than any other history play (19.1%), Romeo and Juliet more than any other tragedy (16.6%) and Love's Labour's and Midsummer Night more than any other comedy (43.1% and 45.5% respectively).[112] All four tend to be dated to the period 1594–1595.

Having read these plays, I think Shakespeare was fascinated with how beauty could work on us, and what it’s limits were.  So I think that it’s possible, even likely that Benvolio’s advice came up because beauty was very much on Shakespeare’s mind as a philosophical concept.

So even if your mopey inner-teenager is telling you there is no way it can work, you might want to try to examine other beauties.