Suppose a young man loves what is forbidden, for example another man’s wife or a Vestal Virgin? She won’t return his love in order to save the lover, will she?
PAMPHILUS: But this young man loves what it’s lawful and right, and reasonable and honorable, to love. . . .
First, Maria attempts to turn Pamphilus’s attention away from his poetic flights of fancy by encouraging him to take stock of his concrete, living self. To his insistence that his soul has fled his body and migrated to hers, she repeatedly calls attention to his own evident and lively embodiment and animation. To his claim that she is responsible for his suffering, she makes him confess that he loves willingly, reminding him of his free agency. (“Then since one is free not to love, whoever loves seems to be a self-murderer.”) When he then protests that the girl kills not “by being loved but by failing to return the love,” she cunningly asks: “Suppose a young man loves what is forbidden, for example, another man’s wife or a Vestal Virgin? She won’t return his love in order to save the lover, will she?” Pamphilus is compelled, for the first time, to acknowledge that love must bow before what is licit and honorable: “But this young man,” he barks, “loves what it’s lawful and right, and reasonable and honorable, to love.”
But he quickly backtracks: “and yet he [that is, Pamphilus the licit lover] is slain.” When (in passages not quoted here) he next adds to the crime of murder (that is, of not returning his love) the charge of poisoning or sorcery (that is, displaying her charms), Maria denies all responsibility, cleverly pointing out that the witchcraft must be in the eye of the beholder, since only he is smitten by her look. Summoning all his manly wit and ardor, Pamphilus proceeds to bring Maria before the high court of Venus. Borrowing from the tragedians of old, he wants her to recognize the monstrous erotic woes that might befall someone who rejects the love of a worthy suitor, such as himself. Warning her that Eros might punish her by fixing her own passionate attachment on a hideously ugly, bankrupt, and beastly man, and insisting that he as a lover should be rewarded for loving, he concludes with a dire warning and a plea: “Don’t provoke Nemesis; return your lover’s love.” We have reached a major turning point in the courtship.
PAMPHILUS: Then don’t provoke Nemesis: return your lover’s love.
MARIA: If that’s enough, I do return it.
PAMPHILUS: But I’d want this love to be lasting and to be mine alone. I’m courting a wife, not a mistress.
MARIA: I know that, but I must deliberate a long time over what can’t be revoked once it’s begun.
PAMPHILUS: I’ve thought it over a very long time.
MARIA: See that love, who’s not the best adviser, doesn’t trick you. For they say he’s blind.
PAMPHILUS: But one who proceeds with caution is keen-sighted. You don’t appear to me as you do because I love you; I love you because I’ve observed what you’re like.
MARIA: But you may not know me well enough. If you’d wear the shoe, you’d feel then where it pinched.
PAMPHILUS: I’ll have to take the chance; though I infer from many signs that the match will succeed.
MARIA: You’re a soothsayer too?
PAMPHILUS: I am.
MARIA: Then by what auguries do you infer this? Has the night owl flown?
PAMPHILUS: That flies for fools.
MARIA: Has a pair of doves flown from the right?
PAMPHILUS: Nothing of the sort. But the integrity of your parents has been known to me for years now. In the first place, good birth is far from a bad sign. Nor am I unaware of the wholesome instruction and godly examples by which you’ve been reared; and good education is better than good birth. That’s another sign. In addition, between my family – not an altogether contemptible one, I believe – and yours there has long been intimate friendship. In fact, you and I have known each other to our fingertips, as they say, since childhood, and our temperaments are pretty much the same. We’re nearly equal in age; our parents, in wealth, reputation, and rank. Finally – and this is the special mark of friendship, since excellence by itself is no guarantee of compatibility – your tastes seem to fit my temperament not at all badly. How mine agree with yours, I don’t know.
Obviously, darling, these omens assure me that we shall have a blessed, lasting, happy marriage, provided you don’t intend to sing a song of woe for our prospects.
MARIA: What song do you want?
PAMPHILUS: I’ll play “I am yours”; you chime in with “I am yours.”
MARIA: A short song, all right, but it has a long finale.†
PAMPHILUS: What matter how long, if only it be joyful?
Maria, who has all the while been waiting for just the right opening, sees it and moves in. When challenged to “return your lover’s love,” she responds coolly and almost offhandedly, “If that’s enough, I do return it.” Nothing more rankles a man bent on a genuine victory than too easy or casual a concession, and so it is with Pamphilus. “But I’d want this love to be lasting and to be mine alone,” he insists, and adds, in a first-time confession, “I’m courting a wife, not a mistress.” “I know that,” Maria replies, again offhandedly, pretending that she had assumed all along that marriage was uppermost in his mind. Maria has gotten his speech to move from the realm of love to the domain of marriage, seen as the home of enduring and exclusive attachment (“love . . . lasting and . . . mine alone”). She next turns Pamphilus into matrimony’s leading defender. By obliging him to make the case for marriage, through addressing her feigned reservations and genuine concerns, she deftly compels him to show whether and why he is a suitable husband.
She begins by insisting on the need for careful deliberation if one is interested in lasting marriage: “But I must deliberate a long time over what can’t be revoked once it’s begun.” Pamphilus, taking the bait, confidently steps forward to show his apparent superiority in thoughtfulness: “I’ve thought it over a very long time.” In response, Maria sets the hook: “See that love, who’s not the best adviser, doesn’t trick you.” In other words, prove it.
In a lovely ironic twist, Pamphilus, in order to satisfy his own desire for victory, must now explain to Maria why she ought willingly, indeed, ardently, to accept him as a husband. In doing so, he not only explains that his love of Maria is based on esteem and regard – “You don’t appear to me as you do because I love you; I love you because I’ve observed what you’re like” – but, more importantly, he defends, over and against Maria’s objections, the very things that Maria has all along deemed lawful and right, reasonable and honorable: exclusive love, marital permanence, children and family ties. Pamphilus is made to enumerate the signs that promise marital success: her good birth and good education, the friendship of their respective families, their own lifelong and intimate acquaintance, similar temperaments, equal age, and, especially, the likelihood of friendship based on compatible tastes. In suggesting that these attributes promise marital success, Pamphilus is – even today – hardly mistaken.
Maria, still suspecting that he is moved mainly by her looks, forces him to face the threats that disease and old age pose to her beauty – and that time itself poses to all love of the visibly beautiful:
MARIA: Maybe I’ll seem different to you when illness or old age has changed this beauty.
PAMPHILUS: Neither will I always be as handsome as I am now, my dear. But I don’t consider only this dwelling place, which is blooming and charming in every respect. I love the guest more.
MARIA: What guest?
PAMPHILUS: Your mind, whose beauty will forever increase with age.
MARIA: Truly you’re more than a Lynceus if you see through so much