Love's not love
When it is mingled with regards that stand
Aloof from the entire point.
Or of Imogen, blind to all but the path of light and air that divides her from Milford Haven:
I see before me, man; nor here, nor here,
Nor what ensues, but have a fog in them,
That I cannot look through.
Even Adriana, in the Comedy of Errors, expresses the unity of married love with an intensity which we expect neither from this bustling bourgeoise nor in this early play:
For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall
A drop of water in the breaking gulf
And take unmingled thence that drop again
Without addition or diminishing,
As take from me thyself and not me too; (II, ii. 127.)
an utterance which in its simple pathos anticipates the agonized cry of Othello the most thrilling expression in Shakespeare of the meaning of wedded unity:
But there, where I have garnered up my heart,
Where either I must live, or bear no life,
The fountain from the which my current runs,
Or else dries up: to be discarded thence!
The husband in these cases, it is true, neither forgives nor condones, and Shakespeare (unlike Heywood) gives no hint that he would have dissented from the traditional ethics on which Othello and Posthumus and Leontes acted, had their wives in fact been guilty. The wives, on the other hand, encounter the husband's unjust suspicions, or brutal slanders, without a thought of revenge or reprisal. Desdemona, Imogen, Hermione, alike beautifully fulfil the ideal of love presented in the great sonnet:
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.