YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS: "You kiss by th'book"

Something interesting struck me as I meditated over the first encounter between Romeo and Juliet. As I read the scene again and again, i asked myself: 'what is a kiss?' Shakespeare answers the question with the famous scene.

ROMEO [To JULIET]: If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET :Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

ROMEO: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

ROMEO: Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.
Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged.

[he kisses her]

JULIET: Then have my lips the sin that they have took.

ROMEO :Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged!
Give me my sin again.

[they kiss again]

JULIET:You kiss by th'book.

What does this scene have to say about the nature of a kiss? What, according to shakespeare, is a kiss? To answer this, we first look at what each character of this dialogue relates the act of kissing to.

Romeo, from the start, gloryfies the act of kissing by relating it to worship, prayer or redemption when he says these lines:

"...my lips, two blushing pilgrims..."
"let lips do what hands do...they pray."
"...from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged"

Juliet, before the first kiss, passively agrees with Romeo's view: "Saints do not move, though grant for prayer's sake." However, after the kiss, she then says that "then have my lips the sin that they have took", indicating a new stance, which holds that a kiss is profane or sinful. Romeo agrees by asking for his sin in return, "give me my sin again," in an attempt to undefile his saintly Juliet--by kissing her again. Yet the strangest thing happens after this second kiss; Juliet responds to it, saying: "You kiss by th'book."

What did the kiss mean this time? Juliet seems to feel neither profaned nor glorified, she feels that she's been 'kissed by the book'--a perfectly legal thing, though not particularly linked to salvation or defilement. A kiss is neither prayer nor sin. A kiss, learned Romeo and Juliet, is just a kiss.

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