Wednesday, June 11, 2025

"I Remember When I Loved Her"

Years ago, I wrote a post about "I Remember When I Loved Her," specifically that the archaic use of "strange" had precedent in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and that this connected to Rod Argent's comment about Shakespeare in Johansen's The Zombies: Hung up on a Dream (p. 30):  "The language spoke to me; it had an indefinable, spiritual quality."

I recently started re-reading The Merchant of Venice and found a passage in which "strange" is used in a sense closer to that in "I Remember When I Loved Her" than the one in Romeo and Juliet is.  In Act One, Scene One (roughly lines 66-68), Bassanio says to Salarino and Solanio, "Good signiors both, when shall we laugh?  Say, when?  You grow exceeding strange."