St Valentine

We've chosen some of the finest examples of what can happen when Cupid reaches for his quiver.

Diarmuid and Gráinne is a case in point, its tale of young lovers on the run from an ageing king being very similar indeed to that of Tristan and Iseult, or of Helen and Paris. Ultimately, though, we have it on very good opinion (ie Cathy’s) that whatever their souls were made out of, his and hers were the very same stuff, which – if we might judge classic romance according to Plato’s theory of twin souls sundered – suggests that Wuthering Heights is not only a love story but also the greatest tale of Platonic love ever told. The story of the turbulent relationship between Cathy Earnshaw and Heathcliff is one of obsession, hatred and revenge that might – just might, mind you – have eventually mellowed into the resigned mutual tolerance of marriage had Cathy and Heathcliff ever leaped the broom. No wonder Dido’s tragic love has been the subject of epic poems (Virgil), plays (Marlowe), operas (Purcell), novels (Geras), art (Turner) and mediaeval biography (Boccaccio). He’s a bona-fide Oscar-nominated Hollywood star now, of course, but Normal People was our first glimpse of Paul Mescal, whose portrayal of the moody Connell opposite Daisy Edgar-Jones’s Marianne caused a century-high spike in fainting-couch sales (Ed: check this with Harvey Norman), even if his louchely dangling medallion somehow failed to secure a Bafta nomination for most provocative prop. Take Kit Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, in which the lovers are doomed once the fate-tempting bard starts philosophising on the nature of love: “Where both deliberate, the love is slight: Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?” For a truly epic poem that ends in inevitable tragedy, however, we look to Bai Juyi’s Song of Everlasting Regret (or Sorrow), which details the love affair between the Chinese emperor Tang Xuanzong (685-762) and his favourite concubine, Yang Yuhuan, which was of such a red-hot passion that the emperor neglected his more prosaic duties – passing laws, suppressing dissidents, etc – and so failed to anticipate the rebellion that eventually forced him to abdicate his throne and Yang Yuhuan to hang herself by way of forced contrition. Dante harrowed hell for the love of his Beatrice, Don Quixote went about battling windmills for the glory of Dulcinea del Toboso, and Odysseus managed to (eventually) extricate himself from Calypso’s snares to find his way back to Ithaca and Penelope. It is with sadness it is written, and with sadness no doubt that it will be read, but it must be acknowledged that there are those reading these lines who have yet to watch Casablanca. Not a chap to be easily rebuffed, our Florentio: having fallen for Fermina as a moody teen, this dapper man about town weathers the many emotional storms that follow, which include the outbreaks of the foreshadowed plague and Fermina’s loving marriage to the Colombian national hero Dr Juvenal Urbino. “We started out like Romeo and Juliet,” a lovelorn Milhouse laments in The Simpsons as he pines for Samantha Stankey, “but it ended up in tragedy!” Well, quite. Rapturously in love, the musician Orpheus marries Eurydice only for her to be bitten by a viper and descend into Hades. “No reproach passed her lips,” Ovid reports as the damned Eurydice sinks into the depths eternal once more, from which we can safely assume that Ovid (a) wasn’t an eyewitness and (b) had very little experience of wives whose husbands can’t do the one bloody thing they’re asked to do.